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Beware the #MeToo Furies — 26 Comments

  1. The Left isn’t just using “1984” as a how-to manual.

    It’s also using “The Crucible”.

    And it would appear that like suicide bombing, a weapon used originally to target opponents from the other side ultimately evolves into a weapon that is used against opponents on the same side—funny how that seems to happen—which should make the continuing train wreck of the Democratic presidential campaign fascinating to behold (in a gruesome kind of way).

  2. Frightening! I count myself as fortunate to be long gone from my career as an airline pilot. Even in the 70s and 80s we were beginning to see women (flight attendants) who were becoming feminazis. I never was accused, but was called a few times as an eye witness to an incident where the woman complained about a word, a joke, a laugh, an “improper insinuation,” or other interactions that had “triggered” them. The incidents were rare at the time and I thought they were caused mostly by women with poor self esteem or daddy problems.. I had no idea such incidents would become so ubiquitous and damaging. How to stop such anti-social and damaging acts? I have no idea. Just glad I’m an old codger and don’t get out much anymore.

  3. I hesitate (possibly owing to the hideous presence of the cult of #MeToo? [a jest, right?]) to make this comment, but what the heck: in the realm of the senses, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

    So, as to the metaphorical invocation of The Erinyes in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, an alternative thought crept in, and a wonder suggested itself: “Might we not find a more fecund metaphor in Euripides’ Bacchae?”

    Albeit, a Bacchae “In the best modern way”, (as Yeats put it) turned inside-out, upside-down, enantiomorphic, or mirror imaged, however the best descriptive case may be?

    Here however is the true cause of my hesitance: I haven’t been able to work out the detailed correspondences, the proper mappings, though I believe they’re there. Braincramps or old age, I dunno. Or I’m just not poet enough.

    Still, someone may be, I hope.

    Haveatit. Gesundheit.

  4. I regret to observe that Neo’s essay addresses the fact of many women’s episodic irrationality.
    “Hysteria” has its root in the Latin word for uterus.

  5. The valid point about the Furies, aside …

    Nothing like being a dweeb and engaging in needy recreational sex with a woman you have no reason on earth to trust.

  6. The #MeToo crowd is betting that not only does God not exist but that even if he does exist, he didn’t really mean it when “bearing false witness” was declared to be a major sin worthy of being included in the Ten Commandments.

    Given eternity, that’s quite a bet. Can a soul that darkened face its own responsibility for what they’ve wrought? IMHO, perhaps more than anything else, redemption of the soul requires self honesty.

    “For those with eyes to see”, there is a personal benefit to the #MeToo movement; it clarifies just how serious and potentially horrendous for the victim is that mortal sin.

  7. It seems to me that social media has created an environment in which irrationality (on the part of men as well as women) flourishes. A woman who posts under the name “Helena” posted several articles about the noxious effects of Tumblr (and Twitter) on a blog (4th Wave Now) devoted to the emergence of rapid-onset gender dysphoria in girls. Although the blog as a whole focuses on transgenderism rather than #MeToo, Helena’s analysis of the dark side of social media made a lot of sense to me. Here is a link to her first post: https://4thwavenow.com/2019/03/20/tumblr-a-call-out-post/

    My own impression is that the Internet as well as social media has fractured people’s ability to pay attention to a given subject for long periods of time, to reflect, and to analyze rigorously. Nicholas Carr, a freelance writer who has published several books on the effects of technology on culture, has recently posted on what he terms content collapse. Content collapse, as I define it, is the tendency of social media to blur traditional distinctions among once distinct types of information — distinctions of form, register, sense, and importance. As social media becomes the main conduit for information of all sorts — personal correspondence, news and opinion, entertainment, art, instruction, and on and on — it homogenizes that information as well as our responses to it.

    The whole essay is worth reading: http://www.roughtype.com/?p=8724

    This may seem like a long detour from the #MeToo Furies, but I think they are only one type of social mobbing and witch hunting. Ginned-up accusations (whether sexual, racial, or economic) amplified by social media are a game that any number can play.

  8. I have no sympathy, naturally, for rapists and men who engage in serious sexual harassment of women and girls. But I also feel strongly that men are entitled to have actual evidence of real offenses brought against them in such cases, not just hysterical feelings and allegations.

    I always told my two daughters that if they were actually raped or assaulted, they should call the police; and that they should be careful about where they go, with whom, and how much they drink, in order to avoid situations which might put them at risk. Fortunately, neither ever ran into trouble. Nor have they ever made false accusations against any man.

  9. I usually have zero interest in Hollywood gossip, but supposedly the hostile divorce of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard some years ago, is now causing some implosion of the MeToo movement in Hollywood.

    Apparently, many audio recordings of the couple’s arguments were made, and suggest that Heard frequently struck Depp with thrown objects, and slapped and smacked him, then claimed that only if she punched him with a closed fist would it constitute assault. She also ridiculed him saying that no one would believe him if he claimed a much smaller woman was abusing him.

    All this is happening a long time after his career was seriously damaged.

    Just one example article here.

  10. Maybe we need to go back to having chaperones for any male/female social interaction outside of marriage…! No chaperone, no claim of rape possible. Once married (or even before ) Mike Pence rules should be followed.

    Think those women would go for that?

  11. Starting to sound like MRA
    this open box has no hope in its bottom…
    check out the red pill…

  12. “Think those women would go for that?”

    I think that has already been answered. Shortly after Pence made his policy known, and some men in business saw the wisdom and practiced same, many women began complaining that this idea was shutting them out of opportunities to learn from male co-workers or get get higher-ups to mentor them. They no longer got one-on-one working lunches or dinners as male executives took defensive measures. As a group the women appear to have fouled their own nest.

  13. ” be an adult and take responsibility for yourself. And that includes your own inebriation.” – Neo

    Leaving aside the actual predators who have justly been outed by the earlier proponents of #MeToo,* a lot of the stories being publicized involve excess consumption of alcohol.

    Who was that writer (female IIRC) who was criticized for suggesting that women just not get drunk and shack up with the guys, and they wouldn’t have this kind of problem? It’s been a while, back at the beginning of the #MeToo frenzy, and this formerly unexceptional and practical advice was greeted with hysterical (heh) cries of oppression and misogyny.

    One of my good friends in college (1970s) told me that her father deliberately taught her how to drink responsibly for that very reason, and she would always take her liquor neat, as he advised her that mixed drinks made it hard to judge the alcohol content reliably.

    Coincidentally, perhaps, one of the plays I directed in college was The Bacchae.
    The connection sdferr is looking for could be in the nature of the frenzy that caused the women who were worshiping Dionysus to tear people and animals to fragments, including their leader’s son.

    Dionysus or Dionysos[a] is the god of the grape-harvest, winemaking and wine, of fertility, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre in ancient Greek religion and myth.[2][3]

    He is also known as Bacchus (/?bæk?s/ or /?b??k?s/; Greek: ??????, Bákkhos), the name adopted by the Romans;[4] the frenzy he induces is bakkheia.

    A wine-making god inducing a frenzy sounds very much like being drunk.

    *Another article cited by Neo in her linked post.
    https://quillette.com/2018/11/06/how-the-metoo-movement-helped-create-a-script-for-false-accusers/

    The #MeToo movement has drawn appropriate attention to historically ignored injustice. Thousands upon thousands of real sexual-assault survivors have come forward to tell their stories and seek justice. But all movements, no matter how virtuous in intent, open up unintended misuses of their cause. In this respect, #MeToo is no different.

  14. Opera superstar Vittorio Grigolo was fired by both the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera because during curtain calls he jokingly rubbed the foam rubber fake pregnant belly of a female cast member. He did make things worse by losing his temper and getting into some kind of quarrel when confronted, but I suspect it was the “groping” that got him in trouble, even though it was obviously a harmless prank done in full view of the audience and the cast. I’ve seen him perform. He’s a showboat and he always goofs around during the curtain calls, but it was always harmless fun. Destroying his career at age 42 is a ridiculous overreaction.

  15. Question: will this lead to more responsible sex among college students and fewer MeToo claims, or set up more conflicting stories about who did what where when and how?

    https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14382
    “U of Utah sends free, made to order ‘Pleasure Packs’ to students’ dorms”

  16. There have thousands of years of mostly male abuse of their partners, including many homosexual cases (the Olympic diver…).
    There is a socially destructive acceptance of promiscuity, including my own prior mistakes of “responsible promiscuity”. For most women, having multiple sexual partners is less optimal for a happy life than having one life-long partner with whom one is married.

    “Immorality” is, in most cases, a pre-social sciences form of “sub-optimal”.
    What is optimal for society? (and how is it measured??)

    Men should stop shacking up with women they don’t love, even those who agree to have sex, drunk or not.
    Women should stop getting drunk in order to enjoy sexual tension and, frequently, intercourse with men who don’t love them.

    The #MeToo movement is pushing more men to have less sex, and pushing men to much less often ask/ push to have sex at all. (Especially with women?)

    These many false accusations are accompanied by many true accusations, and in most he said/she said instances, the truth of the actions is hard to know, but the truth of the feelings is unknowable.

    The putting of feelings truth above actions truth is terrible. The reduction of men hooking up with women mostly for sex is not so bad.

    The Church of England, Anglican but not Episcopalian, has recently re-affirmed it’s long teaching that sex is for male-female marriages only.

    https://www.christiantoday.com/article/sex-is-for-male-female-marriage-only-church-of-england-confirms/134075.htm

    Some part of the response to #MeToo will be more folks agreeing with this, tho I don’t see the OECD legal structures going back towards this optimal ideal in my life. But “responsible promiscuity”, as an “ideal in practice”, is a major target of the #MeToo movement, false accusations and all.

  17. I was a Never Trumper. The Kavanaugh hysteria turned me into a Trump voter. Way to go, scary ladies.

  18. In part there is that, AesopFan, the frenzied worshipers annihilating the unbelievers (Pentheus, Agave, et al).

    Dionysus is god. A “new” god, in need of defense, or “argument”. But an “old” god, by his own measure, for he “returns”.

    His Maenads are our #MeToo cultists. Our cultists worship a “new” god(ess), here unnamed, though momentarily located in the linked Reason article as a sticker on the computer of one of Kaiman’s inquisitors: “The Future is Female”.

    A burning bush! She is who she is (mixing metaphors and so to speak). Acknowledge Her, or perish.

    Our frenzied cultists — the #MeToos — are drunken alright, drunken on power. Our Pentheus is here the bewildered rando male who falls unknowing into their clutches, to meet his dismemberment.

    Paglia ought to be able to have a field day with this stuff, I’d reckon. But better her than me.

    In some other, possibly quieter sense, it seems we have here a mere reemergence of an ineradicable paganism, a paganism long thought gone extinct, due to the beneficent ministrations of universalist Christianity.

    Not so fast, eh? Stubborn human nature sticks around.

  19. OK, you’ve MADE me do this….
    “…hearing about that gives me the willies!”
    “Hell hath no Furie, like a woman scorned”

    How nice that what was once known as “The Walk of Shame” , now has a “recovered memories” Title IX option for “buyers remorse” in restoring one’s contractual virginity.

  20. I pass along a link to Roger Kimball writing in American Greatness blog (? adapted from an earlier given speech at the University of Arizona) on matters relevant here: Wokeness, Free Speech, and the Role of Education

    A tiny snippet:

    ** The intoxication that follows from moral certitude is one important reason that the modern academy is increasingly inimical to free speech and everything that surrounds the cultivation of free speech: free inquiry, free action, and free minds. **

    And a longer:

    ** In my book Tenured Radicals, I included a section on “academia and infantilization.” But when I wrote in 2008, the rhetoric of “safe spaces,” “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings” had not yet blazed its destructive path through the hearts and minds of students. Women back then made a point of declaring their independence, their ability to stand on their own two feet and make decisions for themselves. They would have rejected with contemptuous ridicule the idea that a college dean or “diversity officer” should police or protect their sex lives.

    Nowadays, of course, victimhood is a badge of election. I will not attempt to plumb the depressing reasons for this unlovely development other than to note that it represents another side of that infantilization I mentioned a moment ago.

    The crybully, who has weaponized his coveted status as a victim, was first sighted in the mid-2000s. He has two calling cards, race and gender. By coincidence Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, was involved in the evolution of both. **

  21. “Who was that writer (female IIRC) who was criticized for suggesting that women just not get drunk and shack up with the guys, and they wouldn’t have this kind of problem?”
    Probably Dr. Ruth Westheimer. IIRC she said she didn’t want to hear some coed claim she was raped after she got drunk, went home with some guy then got naked and went to bed with him.

  22. Ray – Bingo!
    This isn’t what I read at the time (that was reactions to her honesty), but RS seems to be the source.

    https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/dr-ruth-interview-documentary-829825/

    Even Duck-Duck-Go isn’t helping; this is all I could find on the backlash, but I know I didn’t read Huffpo at the time. Anyway, the point is, Dr. Ruth is correct about the decision point being BEFORE you get into bed together.

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dr-ruth-sexual-consent_n_7499626

  23. AesopFan: “U of Utah sends free, made to order ‘Pleasure Packs’ to students’ dorms”

    My, how romantic. 🙁

  24. I suppose you all saw the attack of the flip-side of the #MeToo furies — with tits! — against Bernie Sanders in Nevada?

    “No support for diary industry!, Sen. From Vermont!”, they demand.

    Oy. Poor Bernie doesn’t seem to have the capacity to defend himself from these angry women, nor will they stop I think, now they’ve had two such assaultive successes against him. He needs help — like strongmen on and astride the stages to take down the milchcows before they get to him.

    Anyhow, on my knees hands clasped skyward: thank you Jesus for answering my prayers. And Jesus, keep ’em coming, please you.

  25. Humanity hasn’t advanced much from the dark ages. The ego construct is still strong in the Veil of Maya.

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