Fuck Politeness

Ah women…we hold *such* a prized place in society don’t we?

If we diet and exercise we can adorn the pages of men’s mags between the ages of 16 and 25. If we look like what they demand of us they will call us ‘Princess’ for a while. As if the role of Princess was ever good to women, ever allowed them any freedom or self determination.

Even that is only until they’ve fucked her a few times and the novelty is gone, or she says something inconvenient, or she’s not wearing makeup one day. Then they remember how much they HATE the Princess ‘type’: so SHALLOW; all concerned with looks!

Did you notice that? How they demanded what they want: LOOKS (because everyone KNOWS women aren’t real people, don’t have desires/careers/personalities/opinions strong enough that they could possibly bother mine – I’ll take mine straight up hot and otherwise utterly blank, thanks) and they got it, and that they then become angry that what they ordered didn’t necessarily come complete with all the shit they dissed earlier as *chick stuff* in favour of LOOKS? Well hey guys, it might be time to reassess YOUR priorities since you’re the ones sounding pretty shallow here.

Shallow? Where did that come from. Oh Sam in the City’s latest effort, Why the Younger Generation Fail At Relationships. See the thing is she’s looking at young men who wanna hang around Playstations all day (!! Is this even a TOPIC??). Is it their fault that they’re more interested in acting like morons than dating? Or that when they DO date women they treat them like shit? Why of COURSE not!

It’s WOMEN’S FAULT!! How, I hear you ask? Well it’s women’s fault because men see us as “dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging”. I don’t know about you, gentle readers, but I’d call that men’s problematic attitudes to women rather than it being somehow conclusive of men treating women badly being women’s fault.

And the women they would use to back that up? Well let us assume since it’s the same guys that don’t give a fuck about personality/mental health/fulfilled lives/intelligent opinions since all that matters is if a chick is HOT ENOUGH chose women on that basis who are proclaiming they don’t bother since women are disease ridden gold digging whores…that maybe once or twice they got what they wished for. Hot. Perhaps she’s not dishonest at all, maybe all she represented herself AS was hot, which she is, but now you don’t like it that when you’re a pig she calls you on it. You want a ‘traditional woman’ so she’s nice and compliant how you like, but when she expects you to pay for dinner (all nice and ‘traditional like’) she’s a gold-digging whore. You want her to be all Maxim style Up For It Anytime, but when she is she’s slutty. You want her to groom herself out of existence for the sake of your cock, but when she does she’s self absorbed. So basically women can never win? Plain? NEXT!! Hot? SLUTTY SHALLOW BITCH!

Sam goes on to quote a reader. It’s really a simple technique to write like Sam. Pick a topic, any topic that’s likely to sound FASCINATING when you reveal the SHOCKING conclusion that…wait for it…WOMEN ARE TO BLAME, for everything, everywhere, the suffering of men, and their own suffering, the suffering of all women everywhere, and possibly the collapse of the economy too if she can find an angle. So what you do is pretend to examine an ‘issue’. Then you find an ‘expert’ (dude you SERIOUSLY need to examine your ideas about what constitutes an expert, a cock with a typewriter who got published because his wildly misogynistic ideas are already hugely popular? Not so much an expert in anything but wankery) for a soundbite on why it’s women’s fault. THEN she follows it up with some sick-fuck reader to lay it on even thicker about how it’s women’s fault, and OMG Q.E FUCKING D, it HAS BEEN PROVED, CAN I GET AN HALLELUJAH!?

This weeks sick-fuck reader?

“Maybe we turn to video games not because we are trying to run away from the responsibilities of a ‘grown-up life’ but because they are a better companion than some disease-ridden bar tramp who is only after money and a free ride.”

Sam’s response: “Ouch!”. It’s her favourite. It lets her sound like she’s distancing herself from such brutal and as Richie from Crimitism would say bare-knuckled misogyny, while allowing her to include it to underpin her own argument and sail on by. Can’t you just see it? A flip of the hair, a widening of the eyes, and “Ouch!” Sam, he’s talking about YOU here as well as about me and about all women everywhere, it’s your goddamned column could you muster some strength of character and kick his arse for the misogynist prick he is instead of a blithe little ‘ouch’?

Apparently not.

Anyway, believe it or not the final straw was a misquote of Beyonce. Yeah, I know. It’s just that, well, this level of misogyny is in its heyday it seems, we’re all discussing Bettina Arndt’s suggestion that women ought to ‘give men sex’ when they don’t want to have sex…I’m reading about feudalism and how women were chattel, women were things men owned to beget heirs ‘on’ them (no, that’s the language used). How has anything changed, except now the priorities of men have shifted and instead of heirs, we chattel are expected to lie back and let our husbands get to an orgasm ‘on’ us – NO. MATTER. WHAT. Cos that’s what it amounts to if it’s sex you don’t want to. We are seen as chattel for men to get off on.

So this level of misogyny…it’s hard to keep on hearing it, to bear it, to see how wildly fucking popular it is, to see more and more evidence of how little women are respected or even seen as fully human, so sometimes when it gets too much I have to kind of blank it out, go numb. For a beautiful explanation of the pain it causes women when they haven’t managed to block it out on a given day, see Helen at Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony’s post ‘You’re Soaking In It’. But this day the rage induced white noise was getting loud enough to do damage (DISEASE RIDDEN????) so I had to go blank, but then this misquote just tripped me up. She researches so very very little that she can’t even get the main line from a hit pop song right (it’s called GOOGLE, look into it shithead):

Sadly, along with Hymowitz, many experts (including Freud himself) blame it on the behaviour of the fairer sex. Case in point: one minute SYFs (Single Young Females) want something casual, a fling, an F-Buddy or a one-night stand because, heck, we’re modern women who can have sex without emotional connection or a ring on our fingers. And the next minute, we find ourselves asking that very same one-night stand what he thinks about marriage, when he envisions himself having kids and how he feels about raising a family in the suburbs versus the city.

Oh, ok dick, except we do fucking NOT so thanks a whole lot for making us all sound both deranged and marriage obsessed as if we don’t have fucking lives of meaning outside the all important fucking MARRIAGE. Like everything else is just a decoy that we can drop once we’re married, because marriage is SO GREAT for women! (LOOK AT THE STATS! SHIT! Men live longer, women less long if they’re married, men’s finances recover more quickly than women’s, men go for round two quite quickly, women do not – hat tip to Wildly Parenthetical for this last point).

Then she UTILISES Beyonce for this bullshit and says:

As Beyonce recently crooned in her new go-girl anthem, “If you like what you see, put a ring on it,” encouraging women to dump a dude who refuses to propose. (No wonder we’re all single.)

Except that she DID FUCKING NOT!!! I’ve been at the gym a lot and that song is literally ALWAYS on, and she DID FUCKING NOT! I can’t get the goddamned song out of my head, and I was scandalised on first listen, but I’ve looked it up and she DID. FUCKING. NOT!

It’s about being out dancing and her ex is there and is getting jealous that she’s dancing with another guy, and she’s saying get out of my face, you had me for three years and you weren’t very nice to me then, you don’t own me, and maybe if you wanted to ‘own’ me, to be able to treat me like an ‘object’ you should have ‘put a ring on it’.

Now it may be too much to hope that it’s also a critique of the institution of marriage and the way it reduces women to objects men now officially own (though it does seem to be a bit of an anthem to the single ladies to stick up for themselves and NOT be *owned*, and not let dudes act like commitment is HER desire and pathology, and he wants nothing to do with all that, and to treat em like shit and also THEN get all possessive of those women they’ve not wanted to commit to in any way), but she is still NOT singing that men can window shop and slap a layaway tag on some chick they see walking down the street, which is what ‘If you like what you see put a ring on it’ suggests – it’s a song of get out of my face fuckwit, you had me, you took me for granted, I’m moving on and you can just fucking DEAL. Possibly somewhat problematic in what it may suggest about marriage, but it’s NOT what Sam suggests, the line is “If you liked it you shoulda put a ring on it” – ie/ if you liked WHAT WE HAD, if you liked BEING WITH ME, if I AS A PARTNER meant all that much to you, maybe instead of treating me badly and letting me go you ought to have worked on it then, so now you can take your jealousy and go fuck yourself.

Is it too much to ask that Sam does a quick Google before she just ASSUMES that Beyonce is as much of a passive, simpering lapdog of misogyny as she is? FUCK!

Tags: Ask Sam, Beyonce, Beyonce: Put a Ring on it, LEARN THE LYRICS DICKHEAD, Sam in the City