Racism, Classism and Catcalling (or, #Feminism Is for Rich White Lesbians)

Posted on | October 30, 2014 | 82 Comments

Time for a little of what feminists call “intersectionality.” A video went viral in which a woman walking on New York City streets is catcalled or subjected to what feminists call “street harassment.”

Allahpundit analyzes both the video and the phenomenon in terms of why do men do this? Before we address the particulars of that question, however, shouldn’t we first ask, who does this?

It’s a racist production about white women
not wanting attention from black and Latino men.
“The video also unintentionally makes another point, that harassers are mostly black and Latino, and hanging out on the streets in midday in clothes that suggest they are not on their lunch break. As Roxane Gay tweeted, ‘The racial politics of the video are f–ked up. Like, she didn’t walk through any white neighborhoods?’” . . .
What makes these catcalls offensive isn’t that they come from men. It’s that they come from low-status men. Like an unconsented kiss from President Obama, if the catcalls came from George Clooney there’d be much less female outrage.
In fact, maybe these catcalls are a way of striking back at privilege.

One of the ways I offend people — sometimes accidentally, but usually on purpose — is by calling attention to things which are true, but which we aren’t supposed to notice. In the 21st century, it is difficult to tell where courtesy ends and political correctness begins, and there are more and more Things We Aren’t Allowed to Say.

Emmett Till could not be reached for comment. http://t.co/RrXEH42UCa – @instapundit

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 30, 2014

The Left’s long-standing criticism of American culture (from the disciples of Herbert Marcuse, et al.) is that, supposedly, we are repressed, uptight and inauthentic because of our puritanical Anglo-Christian heritage. What went unexamined in the “Magic Negro” controversy (when Rush Limbaugh was excoriated as a racist for quoting a liberal commentary about Obama) was that black people have been used in popular culture as symbols of authenticity because of a sort of inferiority complex among white liberals. (Shelby Steele’s White Guilt is a useful introduction to this phenomenon.) Some WASPs grow up with the feeling that they have no real culture, or that their own culture is actually the cause of the world’s woes — the Genocidal White Capitalists Raping the Planet meme — and never recover from that deficit.

Things We Aren’t Allowed to Say: English-speaking white people are the only Americans who are denied a right to ethnic pride.

There, I said it. Sue me.

You might believe, if you were an unthinking consumer of what is taught in the government education system, that before the arrival of a wave of Irish immigrants fleeing the 19th-century Potato Famine, that the United States was a vast Evil Hate Machine. But then came the Irish (sanctified by their victimhood), followed by the wave of Ellis Island immigrants (Italians, Jews, etc.) and, through their shared experience of suffering inflicted by the Evil Hate Machine, these non-WASP Americans — with the help of their  loyal mascot-sidekicks, The Negroes — achieved the dream of A More Perfect Union.

In other words . . . VOTE DEMOCRAT!

Things We Aren’t Allowed to Say: What is taught as “history” in the government education system is, in fact, a propaganda narrative indistinguishable from the liberal orthodoxy of the Democrat Party.

This orthodoxy extends privilege (yeah, I speak academese quite fluently) to the descendants of Catholics, Jews and other non-WASP immigrants, a sort of “Get Out of Whiteness Free” card, so they can exonerate themselves from the genocidal atrocity narrative of the American founding: “We didn’t exterminate the Native Americans!  We did not enslave African-Americans! My great-great grandfather was [insert Immigrant Nationality here] who came here with nothing! My ancestors were victims of the Evil Hate Machine, too!”

You’re welcome, non-WASP Americans. My WASP ancestors did all that for you, so you could feel superior to me. Glad to help.

The Democrat Coalition and Its Contradictions

The Liberal Narrative of American History, you see, originated in the political rhetoric of urban Democrats in the 1920s, who  assembled a pan-ethnic coalition in places like Chicago, Boston and New York by appealing to the interests (and prejudices) of the Irish, Italians, the Jews and other immigrant groups. “Vote Democrat,” the Irish Catholic in Boston was told, “and we’ll take money and power from those rich Yankee snobs and give it to you!”

In an era when All Politics Was Local — when there was no cable TV or Internet to call attention to these narrowly tailored partisan messages — the Catholic in Boston or the Jew in New York was unaware that, simultaneously, the Ku Klux Klan was campaigning in the Midwest with a different message. “Vote Democrat,” the Indiana farmer was told, “and we’ll do something about those Jews and Catholics and Negroes who are destroying The American Way of Life!”

From that kind of dishonest two-faced hateful divisiveness, the Democrat Party constructed the Great Liberal Consensus that elected FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and LBJ. During a span of 36 years (1933-69) Democrats controlled the White House for 28 years, interrupted only by the eight-year presidency of WWII hero Dwight Eisenhower, whose liberal “Modern Republicanism” was the chief target of William F. Buckley Jr.’s ire in the 1950s. (If you’ve never read Buckley’s 1959 classic Up From Liberalism, you should buy it immediately.)

The Great Liberal Consensus was self-contradicting nonsense that produced bad policy and, when it finally unraveled during the debacle of LBJ’s doomstruck presidency, the liberal intelligentsia were thrown into a state of permanent crisis from which they have never fully recovered. Behind their facade of hubristic liberal arrogance, Our Moral Superiors (as I have dubbed this intellectual elite) are deeply afraid that, at any moment, Americans will see through the Fog of Phony Bullshit from which Democrat electoral majorities are built.

We are “anti-intellectual,” you see, if we refuse to accept at face value The Liberal Narrative of American History we have been taught by the government education system. There should be a sign in front of every public school in America: “Vote Democrat, Because the Teachers Union Needs More Money and Power.” The hypocritical self-interest of government employees supporting the Party of More Government is another one of those Things We Aren’t Allowed to Say, but if you want to know why public schools are more interested in teaching liberal attitudes than teaching facts and skills, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure it out.

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

We have been indoctrinated, all of us, and recovering from that indoctrination is a process, rather than an event. Once you start noticing the Fog of Phony Bullshit, you become skeptical of the narrative, and the Democrat Party mythos of ethnos is one of the most obvious elements of that narrative: There are five A’s in “RAAAAACISM!”

From that long but necessary digression, we return to the topic: A white woman targeted for “street harassment” by predominately black and Latino men on the streets of New York City.

VOTE DEMOCRAT!

C’mon, isn’t that the message of this viral video? “Vote Democrat,” the white woman is told, “and we’ll protect you from the patriarchal oppression of the objectifying Male Gaze.”

The implicit assumption of the Democrat Party’s “War on Women” meme is that the sexist misogyny by which all women are allegedly victimized is officially endorsed by The Republican Party. Never mind the fact — as the viral video ironically demonstrated — that women’s victimization is quite often perpetrated by constituencies of the Democrat Party coalition. Feminism is a left-wing political ideology that serves the partisan interests of the Democrat Party and, when feminists aren’t busy offering to provide oral sex to Democrat men, they are busy accusing Republicans of being The Party of Rape.

It does not really matter whether you are male or female, black or white, straight or gay. The only thing liberals really care about is whether you vote Democrat, because the liberal’s sense of self-esteem is dependent on his belief that, by voting Democrat and encouraging you to do likewise, he proves himself worthy as one of Our Moral Superiors. (Thomas Sowell’s book The Vision of the Anointed explains this brilliantly.)

Androgynous Units of the 21st Century

So, for what it’s worth, here’s my two cents on the multicultural diversity of the New York City street harassers in the viral video: Males who have not been subjected to elite indoctrination in universities, and who have no direct investment in the bureaucratic regime of the suit-and-tie office job workplace, have not learned to be ashamed of their heterosexuality.

College education and professional careers in the 21st century require men to learn that women are oppressed by male sexual interest. The anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology of feminism — Fear and Loathing of the Penis — has acquired hegemonic institutional authority in the elite culture of academia. We are no longer permitted to believe that men and women are different, or that their differences have any natural function. We are all supposed to be Ungendered Androgynous Units, except insofar as males are inferior to females, and if you are a normal male who has normal attitudes toward normal females, this makes you part of the heteronormative patriarchy.

It is astonishing how deeply some men have internalized this totalitarian feminist anti-male hate propaganda. A properly indoctrinated male nowadays must believe that merely to notice female beauty, to feel sexual desire toward women in a normal way, or to praise women in their roles as wives and mothers, is to participate in misogynistic oppression. Indeed, the properly indoctrinated male feels a duty to denounce you as a sexist if you merely point out that feminism is an anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology. The belief system of lesbian Marxist baby-killers must never be questioned and, if a popular feminist celebrity is also an admitted child molester, well, how dare you call attention to that fact?

Outside the hyper-politicized precincts where feminist orthodoxy exercises hegemonic control, however, there are still males who have not yet been properly indoctrinated. They dropped out of high school or they couldn’t afford to go college. Maybe they joined the Army or got a muscle-and-sweat job where Doing the Work mattered more than Having the Correct Attitude. Or maybe, as seems to be the case of the lower-class New York City men featured in the viral video, they just accepted their liberal-endorsed status as Authentic Victims and haven’t bothered to wonder if there is anything wrong with their way of life.

One way or another, these men are not invested in the bureaucratic system within which feminist orthodoxy is uncontested. So when they see a good-looking woman, they react.

They are not repressed. They are not ashamed to be male. Their basic animal sexuality doesn’t cause them any psychic conflict.

And I can totally relate to those brothers.

Back in the day, my man Bobby “The Hamp” Shearer and I used to discuss the great social issue of our mutual interest, Exactly Who the Hell Do These White Girls Think They Are, Anyway?

See, Bobby played football at Homewood High and his mother was a respectable middle-class school teacher. I was the product of an at least equally respectable socioeconomic background. By the time we got to college, however, we were both renegade outlaws. Let me tell you, buddy, we were on the hunt, and in the late 1970s it was Open Season.

Bobby and I became friends as the result of an incident in a biology class our freshman year, when somebody managed to steal the teacher’s copy of the mid-term exam, so that class was adjourned and the test was delayed. At the Copper Penny pub (drinking age was 19 then in Alabama, but we all had fake IDs), Bobby told me he had been in on the test-stealing conspiracy and, as we laughed about the aftermath over beers, the topic of conversation drifted to Exactly Who the Hell Do These White Girls Think They Are, Anyway?

There was, at Jacksonville (Ala.) State University back in the day, a very clear social hierarchy. Atop this status pyramid were the Varsity Athletes, the Rich Frat Boys and their Hot Sorority Girlfriends. There was also the Baptist Campus Ministry — at that time, the largest student organization on campus — where Nice Boys and Nice Girls congregated and socialized. Then there was the Marching Southerners Band and its female auxiliary, the Marching Ballerinas. However, almost without exception, the Marching Ballerinas were also Hot Sorority Girlfriends, so that the ordinary male band geek had zero chance of scoring with a Marching Ballerina. (Of course, many male band geeks were gay, so the not-scoring-with-Marching-Ballerinas factor didn’t bother them.) And so it was that Bobby and I found ourselves in the situation of renegade outlaws, on the hunt, trying to figure out how to get Our Fair Share of That Action on a state university campus where a substantial majority of the target population (and nearly all the really prime commodity) was off-limits to us for one reason or another.

Exactly Who the Hell Do These White Girls Think They Are, Anyway?

Bobby’s problem as a black guy in Alabama during the long governorship of the Honorable George Corley Wallace was obvious enough, while my situation as a skinny long-haired rock-and-roll white boy was such that Bobby the Hamp and I had a lot in common.

The Objectivity of Renegade Outlaws

We were both profoundly antisocial, you see. Did I mention I used to be a Democrat? Never mind. The point is, Bobby and I shared a disrespectful attitude toward the status quo, and this became the basis of a friendship and many deep discussions about race and culture and, of course, Exactly Who the Hell Do These White Girls Think They Are, Anyway?

Renegade outlaws have an objectivity about the system of social status that any Ph.D. would envy. When I talk about the psychology of crime, I speak with the authority of experience, unless it behooves me to invoke my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. I was multicultural and intersectional before it was cool and it so happened that Bobby the Hamp and I had a common interest but different aptitudes.

For some reason, I attracted a certain type of girl, usually named Donna or Tammy, who liked my Bad Boy Clown persona (and my skinny ass) and who hoped that I might be harnessed into the Acceptable Boyfriend role — not that her mother would approve of me, but her mother could be required to accept me. On the other hand, Bobby had remarkable success in playing the role of Latter-Day Mandingo to certain Hot Sorority Girls who felt an occasional urge to defy (quite secretly) the regnant social expectations of northeast Alabama during the long governorship of the Honorable George Corley Wallace.

Me and the Hamp, we knew the score, see? Beneath the veneer of respectable conformity, all kinds of things were happening back in the day — Things We Weren’t Allowed to Say, but the truth was suppressed then for different reasons than it is suppressed now.

Too stubbornly proud to tug the forelock to Our Moral Superiors, I never once played the “Some of My Best Friends” card when hypocritical white liberals accused me of racism. Nor did I play the  “Some of My Best Friends” card vis-a-vis accusations of sexism and homophobia, because I was never going to let those bastards have the satisfaction of forcing me to defend myself except on my terms, as it fit my own purposes and sense of personal honor. People who actually know me, my real-life friends, know who I am and what I believe, and no self-appointed Arbiter of Political Acceptability is ever going to intimidate me into silence.

Never forget, the Speech Police are also the Thought Police. If you can't SPEAK the truth, it becomes impossible to KNOW the truth. #tcot

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 30, 2014

No shame in my game, see, and it isn’t my job to justify or defend how dudes in New York City play their game. Feminists can go find those guys and dox them — publish their names and home addresses, please — so we can find out whether they’re registered to vote as Democrats or Republicans, and let the chips fall where they may. What the feminists want, however, is to convince women that somehow “street harassment” is a function of the heteronormative patriarchy, and the only way to fight it is (a) vote Democrat, (b) become a lesbian, or preferably (c) become a lesbian feminist Democrat.

Exactly Who the Hell Do These White Girls Think They Are, Anyway?

Hey, sweetheart: Don’t try to run that three-card monte game on me. Before you can demand from me a denunciation of New York City street harassers, you’ll first have to provide me with proof of your personal moral superiority, by which you claim the right to make such a demand. If it suits my interest to respond to your imperious demand, I might answer by saying that if (a) the First Amendment protects the right of Lena Dunham to show her ugly naked ass in every episode of Girls, then (b) the street harasser has a First Amendment right to express his admiration of a genuinely attractive woman. Note the “if . . . might” hypothetical structure of that sentence, darling, because if you want to have an abstract intellectual conversation, I’ll be happy to converse. However, you don’t actually want to have a conversation — certainly not an equal conversation — what you want to do is to make me into a Symbolic Scapegoat and say, “There! See? A white male heterosexual Republican said something sexist! Vote Democrat!”

What part of “fuck you” is so hard for you liberals to understand?

These hypocritical hate-hustling Democrats think they can get away with running the same hustle over and over again, because the rest of us are too dumb to figure out we’re being hustled.

Once their hustle has been busted, however, they have to move their crooked game to the other side of town and try it again. So now their familiar game — “Vote Democrat, Because Whoever You Hate, We Hate Them, Too” — is targeted at a new audience of chumps. Herman Cain once wrote a book called They Think You’re Stupid, the title of which is a perfect four-word summary of the Democrat Party’s basic strategy. And, hey, you can’t argue with success. After 214 years of lies, corruption and bad policy, Democrats are still open for business.

You want to talk about hate? When rich white lesbians start telling women to vote Democrat because of “street harassment,” while at the same time refusing to denounce a celebrity pervert like Lena Dunham for diddling her own sister, you may fairly accuse me of hating that kind of shameless hypocrisy. But unless or until these feminists prove to me that they actually are Our Moral Superiors, they have no right to make any demands of me, or you, or any ordinary law-abiding American citizen trying to get along in the real world.

Don’t let yourself get hustled. And if you’re ever in Homewood, tell Bobby “The Hamp” Shearer his old buddy Spacey Stacy says hello.

 

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