For your WTF Files, in case you had not seen this particular ‘Q&A’ segment from Down Under in other videos:
It features a grand and revelatory rant by Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American feminist lunatic with fake red hair. ‘How long must we wait for men and boys to stop murdering us, to stop beating us, and stop raping us? … How many rapists must we kill until men stop raping us?’
Note the follow-up questions that need answers. Unasked and unanswered.
Note especially that she does not inquire how many rapists were killed in the past by actually patriarchal society, not today’s fantasied one. Until the rise of liberal society in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, the death penalty for even small infractions was common. We live in the societies that grew out of those harsher times. By inadvertent breeding, there are almost certainly less rapists today than there would be otherwise had not those bloody-minded patriarchs killed all those stupid, criminal young men before they could sire children, by rape or by seduction or by whoring or by conjugal relations.
But she’s against that — well, at least the State’s death penalty — suggesting, instead, that women should directly kill their rapists, something I am OK with in self-defense but not as revenge. Women just need guns.
I expect she and I would get along swimmingly, heh. Maybe she will join the ranks of women with firearms.
Now, this video’s commentary is helpful and droll. But it is Eltahawy’s racist and sexist rantings that take center state here, and include a classic riff: decorum and manners were invented by white men, you see, only for the benefit of white men, no one else. ‘Marginal voices’ are further marginalized by manners . . . or so her argument appears to run.
An absurd idea, but it should be responded to rationally, as absurd as it is.
Which I will leave for another time.
But most absurd of all? Eltahawy’s advice to straight men: don’t seek just sexual intimacy with women. ‘Be queerer. Be more bisexual. Be less cis-gendered. . . . Just fuck it all up and be free!’
This reminds me of the Sixties, when hippies told us to take LSD: tune in, turn on, drop out. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
As an answer to problems of violence in society, it is ridiculous.
As, I am afraid, is Mona Eltahawy.
Wirkman Comment 