Joan of Arc & Judith of Murdoch
If there were blogs back in Joan of Arc’s day, feminists would have accused her enemies of having her torched because she was a woman.
Not without justification, mind you.
And so it comes as no surprise that some feminists are questioning whether Judith Regan was booted from Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire because she is a woman and not because she was so appallingly deaf to the marketplace that she consorted with O.J. Simpson to publish a book on how he “might” have committed the murders.
Zuzu at Feministe, who calls out Regan on non-gender grounds, has a pretty good debate going on among her readers that is a window into the minds of the Feminism Police. You know, the people who will bust you for not hewing to their Taliban-like rules. (Pun and irony intended.)
Meanwhile, Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise has a pretty good debate going on about the debate.
* * * * *
What is so interesting to this to a hairy-chested observer is that discussions about high-profile women almost inevitably devolve into food fights over whose Feminism Police badge is bigger and before long no one is arguing over the original premise.
A good example was the kerfuffle over Loretta Nall, the Libertarian Party candidate for governor in Alabama, who as an Associated Press scribe put it, “[is] campaigning on her cleavage and hoping that voters will eventually focus on her platform.”
Nall provoked a debate on whether a woman can be a feminist and a libertarian if she shows cleavage. (I’m not making this up.) That debate was foreshortened when the Feminism Police raided the joint and arrested everyone for having a civil discussion.
My own view is that feminism is in the eye of the beholder.
I am qualified to say that because some of my best friends are women and my mother was one. I read Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Djuna Barnes and Anais Nin when most men wouldn’t be caught dead doing so (although I have to say that Barnes is one of the most overrated writers in English literature, while Nin was a rank plagarist).
But face it, feminism is a third-rail issue and no matter what one says, they’re going to catch grief from one quarter or another.
So bring it on.
MEANWHILE . . .
The father of Ron Goldman, whom Simpson hypothetically murdered in his unpublished book, has filed another lawsuit against him.
Goldman asserts that Regan advanced The Juice $1 million for the book and TV interview deal and wants that money to go to the victims’ families. He claims the advance was paid to a shell company to avoid detection.
More here.
9 Responses to “Joan of Arc & Judith of Murdoch”
That’s why me and some friends have decided to found an organization called MAF.
Movement Against Feminism.
LMAO
And the real funny thing is… we’re only half kidding.
Oh geez, this is the sort of thing that drives me insane. I couldn’t get through the whole thread, these ladies give me a headache. What makes me crazy is that the hysterical tone (they’d probably call me a chauvinist pig for calling them hysterical, before they discovered I’m female) with which they affront everything serves to cover up the real issues with sexism that still exist. Much the same thing seems to happen with racism.
Regan was fired. She was fired for having the kind of taste that would gross out a dung beetle. Whether her being a woman had anything to do with it (which I doubt) matters very little. She’s worthless and does not need defending. Making sexism an issue with her only serves to dirty feminism.
In fact, while I’m on the subject this fits rather seamlessly with what happened with OJ himself. Many blacks took him up as a symbol for the race, claiming that it was all racism (as opposed to him having killed two people). Race is an issue, especially in law enforcement, but picking that kind of scum as the hero hurts the cause.
The kind of rhetoric I hear out of the more dedicated feminists turns me off in the extreme. There is no admission that women ARE naturally different from men (not lesser, but yes different) and a tendency to assume that any woman who wants to look nice is just being subservient and that any man who looks at a pretty woman is one step away from clubbing her on the head and dragging her into his cave.
Lynx:
I could not agree with you more. The Feminism Police have done for women’s rights what Greenpeace has done for the environmental movement and Amnesty International has done for human rights. All are so far over the top and so intoxicated with themselves that they do more harm than good.
I agree with the both of you, the feminism ‘police’ as Shaun calls them, are counterproductive (and highly annoying may I add).
And Lynx, it seems that she also might have said something quite… anti-Semitic.
This coincides with the issue of affirmative action.
I prefer our society to move more towards a meritocracy that works to ignore characteristics that people can not control and focus on character that people are responsible for.
I have not problem discriminating against someone who is incompetent or uncivil.
I am a feminist but by no means part of the police. As someone who’s always been a bit PI long before PC and PI existed, I’m more likely to be a target. Judith Regan got fired for being disgusting.
Michael I will not easily forgive you for making me go through the whole thread. At least the threads at LGF are mildly amusing for the utter outrageousness of them. This just made my head hurt. Put me out of my misery please, where is the anti-semitism? I just saw a huge debate about whether an article using “sexist language” (God knows what that means to them) can be validly used as evidence in their little trial for Regan and the rest of bloody humanity.
Lynx… see center of attention
Thanks Michael. If true, it’s actually funny as hell. Can you even imagine someone less likely to show up on a list of the “zionist jewish communist baby eaters running the world” than Rupert Murdoch? I think he’d get in just above Mel Gibson.
Little trivia, in fascist Spain, the bad guys were clumped together thusly: Monstruo Comunista Judeomasónico. That is to say that the Enemy was a secret cabal of Communist, Jewish Masons. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.