September 16th, 2009
When
Lighting Up is Drinking from the Whites-Only Fountain
Given the reality of disproportionate
drug sentencing, I’m prepared to make a bold statement:
until the experience of drug use is the same for people of
all races, whites engaging in the activity are doing something
akin to drinking from a “whites only” water fountain.
Raping
Faces for Progress
While calling conservatives teabaggers
has little use beyond feel good tribalism, one should remember
that libertarians, whether traditional ones or the new breed
of “South Park” conservatives, have no compunction
about using both old style hate-speech and pornographic musings.
June 5th, 2008
The
Pimp and Ho Primary
Early in the primary, certain
clever individuals invoked the “bros before hos”
mantra. While the slogan was widely denounced as sexist —
though not universally, sadly — the racist nature of
how whites manufacture black masculinity went unremarked upon.
Barack Obama didn’t ask to become a “bro,”
nor did he ask to be a pimp, lording over his whore.
April 17th, 2008
Why
I’ll Never Be a Bookslut
Bookslut fails to address
women’s inequality. It fails to offer a feminist, non-patriarchal
vision of sex and women’s passion for reading and creating.
Using women as sexualized commodity to sell literary magazines
is not a feminist sexual revolution.
March 30th, 2008
Fathering
Daughters:
Reflections by Men Pedophiles?
DeWitt Henry and James Alan McPherson
joined those same people when they constructed the narrative
flow of Fathering Daughters. While many of the contributors
are simply guilty by association, of running in social circles
that all but guaranteed that they’d be published in
the anthology, it was Henry and McPherson who worked to guide
the reader down a foxglove path. That path is well-worn by
less literate and less privileged antifeminists.
March 15th, 2008
Frank
Peretti's Monster
The purpose of Monster
is to further the belief that American Protestants —
unlike Christians throughout the rest of the world —
are required by their faith to denounce evolution. This proof
of fealty has little to do with science or religion, but human
greed and politics: to denounce evolution is to swear allegiance
to a particular way of life and the socio-political actors
who make it possible.
January 30th, 2008
She
will not be Forgotten
Even people calling themselves
feminists, no shortage of men in that number these days, would
believe Christenson did what she did out of selfish, personal
desperation: an inability to cope with private horrors that
have little to do with what the “common woman”
experiences. To them, that can be the only reason why she
doused herself with gasoline and set herself on fire.
August 15th, 2007
Our
Bodies, Ourselves funds Abusive, Racist Porn
More important than that difference,
however, is how the simple acronym SEO supplied masculine
power to those who invoked it in the argument over Amptoons
and pornography. Those believing they had insider knowledge
of technical jargon had nothing of the sort: instead, the
constant refrain of “SEO this” and “SEO
that” was used as a phallus to silence the voices of
women who objected to the sale.
May 16th, 2007
The
Left, HPV, and Cancer
The Left, especially the men
of the Left, have had ample time to consider public policy
for both HPV and cervical cancer. Ironically, it was not the
disease that became the emergency but the “cure.”
While liberal pundits were willing to work overtime for Merck
and their advertising department, historically, that same
interest in women’s health was nowhere to be found.
April 17th, 2007
Sadomasochism
and the Political Beauty Pageant
Yet it is apparent that the contest
is not between women, but men, and Republicans win the battle
of “our women” versus “their women.”
In the momentary world of the joke, it is the Democratic men
who lose to their male peers. In the real world, however,
it is all women who lose.
October 15th, 2006
Misandry:
From the Dictionary of Fools
Even as antifeminists complain
about the fascism of Political Correctness, in this case,
they have been more than willing to facilitate the change
in the definition of misanthropy (dropping “mankind”
for the more neutral “humanity”) in order to satisfy
their goal of establishing misandry as an authentic word.
June 12th, 2006
Beyond
Fathers as Gods
While “fatherhood as pro-feminism”
has many flaws, all obvious in nature, perhaps one of the
most ironic ones is that it makes patriarchs, literally, the
best pro-feminists. It is always the men with the largest
amounts of male-privilege who are entrusted to tell other
men not to be sexist.
June 2nd, 2006
Free-Speech
Feminism:
The Far Right’s Favorite Sex
Toy
Liberal men might sometimes sneer
mirthfully about Lynne Cheney and her Independent Women’s
Forum, freely using scare quotes around their “feminism,”
and yet they never acknowledge the connection of such rightwing
women to the feminists that produce—or merely defend—some
of the pornography that they consume.
May 28th, 2006
Corpse
Fuckers, Inc.
Paul LaRosa and his Lace Curtain
Brame did not live a secret life:
his vices were hidden in plain sight, overlooked and excused
by those who should have known better, people who would do
anything to protect him, no matter what it might have cost
Judson in the end. Paul LaRosa wants this protection-racket
to continue for David Brame even in the afterlife.
February 14th, 2006
Valentine’s
Day: Jesus needs an Orgy
The fairy tale about the sexual
lottery and its constant recitation is an invention of necessity:
Christianity is sorely lacking in feminist street-cred, to
say the least.
January 29th, 2006
Murderball
Behaviors that might seem questionable
when acted out by able-bodied men in a nonfiction production
are portrayed as healthy in disabled men, their ability to
perpetrate sexism serving as decisive proof that they have
successfully overcome the hand that life has dealt them. The
able-bodied producers of the film are also exploiting the
cast in order to writ large their own misogynistic fantasies,
audience sympathy for the men’s condition serving as
a buffer against complaints.
January 16th, 2006
Hot
Cherry Pies:
Pornography and Justice for Women
I am not a closet-conservative,
but am strongly pro-choice, pro-environment, and anti-capitalist.
Most of the men I speak to about pornography agree with me
on these issues. They identify themselves as liberal and feel
that the subordination of human beings is wrong. They believe
that massive corporations do not have the right to exploit
people in the name of global capitalism—unless, of course,
those corporations are part of the porn industry.
Not Safe for
Work:
The Reasonable Patriarch Standard
The metric employed by NSFW practices
could come to have enormous cultural force in the workplace,
answering a question that few anticipated needing to be asked.
Perhaps in the near future, sexual harassment and hostile
workplace arguments will hinge on whether the email, desktop
wallpaper, or poster contained “severe insinuation of
nipples” or merely “moderate insinuation.”
December 31st, 2005
AP Photos of 2005:
A Year
in Masculinity
For
Posterity
Bush gambled on weapons of mass
destruction: it came up “tails” and he lost. The
problem is not with him losing but with his right, his entitlement
(and that of all Western Society), to be in a position to
gamble in the first place. To focus merely on that loss, the
nonexistent weapons and not the move towards war that election-minded
Democrats rushed to sign on with, is to agree with patriarchal
ideals and to suffer a struggle on their paradigm, one designed
to serve a status quo of masculine power that requires the
subjugation of others.
December 6th, 2005
Where
the White Women at?
White Liberal Men and their Race Card
This paradox, that women must
abandon feminism to support a goal that is thought achievable
only through misogyny (the one authority that can easily unify
men as a bloc), is one that can be seen distinctly in an analysis
of “Where the White Women at;” NPR might as well
have called it their “Where the White Bitches at?”
program.
September 5th, 2005
Wrath
of God, Wrath of Men
Shortly before the presidential
election of 2004 an image was circulated that ostensibly tracked
the paths of three hurricanes (Charley, Frances, Ivan; the
same three the Columbia Christians for Life cited in their
own propaganda) across Florida, the narrow black lines representing
the storms flowing from one “red” or Republican
county to the next, carefully avoiding the blue demographics
on the map.
August 25th, 2005
I
Made Some Science: Massaging the Medium
Yet the MIT Media Survey became
a lightning rod for the expression of gender politics, given
the background events that were unfolding during this time
period. As women were still fighting to win their way into
the blogger nomenclature, a feminist rally cry was sounded
to participate in the study, as if it were each woman’s
duty to stand and be counted in it.
August 18th, 2005
The
Changing of the Guard:
Men Flock to the Frivolous in Academia
While the time-honored “ladder”
or “totem pole” schematic of vertically oriented
patriarchy seems to have dissipated for Ripperologists and UFOlogists
alike, what all of these neologisms have in common is that they
are a reflection of males and their interests, interests which
have been deemed important enough to have experts in the first
place—not so for historically female pursuits.
July 27th, 2005
Rusty
White Knights
If courting popularity, often in
the most misogynistic of circles, is what makes Perverted Justice
successful in combating pedophiles (both in recruiting staff
and in lending them the ear of police administrators), then
it is a case of the ends justifying the means.
July 19th, 2005
God’s
Gift
The discussion continued, about
how people are born with various gifts, put there to glorify
God, and Rick began naming people around the room. Rachel had
temperance, Beth had empathy, and when he got to me, he froze...
July 18th, 2005
Vanilla
on Top
To be Vanilla is not just to be
normative, it is to be banished wholesale from the new process
of identity-politicking that favors choice: Vanilla people have
none and are forced to derive their class-based identity from
outside opinion, whether they are receptive of the outcome or
not.
Virginia
Woolf’s New Room
An understanding of human sexuality—what
it is, can, and must not be—is indeed integral to any
attempt at achieving social justice, but the deliberate focus
on “technique” to the perpetual exclusion of anything
that might question just how humane our society has crafted
its version of human sexuality is a political coup for the patriarchy.
June 29th, 2005
Roger
Ebert and the Terrifying Girl Next Door
While Roger Ebert has long had
a reputation of being a Liberal—in 1996, Michael Medved,
an also-ran film critic and conservative pundit, made Ebert
the target of his own personal crusade out of some sort of revenge
for his approval of Oliver Stone’s Nixon—it
took Michael Moore to make that liberalism finally matter to
Ebert’s sizeable mainstream audience.
June 17th, 2005
On
“Pleasure Activism”[sic]
The ‘sex positive’
movement in general has a substantial interest (a perverse one
considering how harmful patriarchy has been throughout history)
in eking out some form of validation by rooting around the past
for archetypes, examples, and language to impart some bit of
gravitas to the less than inspiring fact that they are ultimately
about friction.
June 13th, 2005
The
Myth of Capitalism in Criticism
Writing is typically viewed as
an enterprise of ego and the texts we create must pass a test
of relevance to our readers and be deemed as useful to them
as the act of creation was to our own person, lest it be judged
narcissistic; criticism as a genre allows for the suspension
of that rule, which is why so little of it these days is about
the subjects allegedly on the chopping block and is more often
an excuse for writers to launch into their own pet projects
with impunity.
May 16th, 2005
Our
Humanity is not in our Strength
Rather than “refusing to
be a man” as John Stoltenberg wrote in decades past, new
and improved forms of masculinity are seen as the preferred
path for the next generation.
May 6th, 2005
Even
When You Lose, You Win
When one focuses on men losing,
no matter how disenfranchised they might be (or increasingly
how disenfranchised they might “feel”), it becomes
easy to forget how that losing is an artifact of the gambles
they take when trying to win and how even in defeat they are
better off than their female peers.
May 2nd, 2005
Kill
Your Blogs
While self-publishing has never
been easier, instead of simply contending with editors, writers
are now awash in a digital world where no man will budge from
the stage and be demoted, if only for a moment, to a mere member
of an audience. This development has been widely taken as a
good thing, a universal theater for mankind to hurl his defiance
at the stars: through a patriarchal lens, dueling tyrants are
often confused with democracy.
Three Art Galleries
Amazons,
Nude
for Peace, and First
Blood
In all likelihood, David Brame felt
cornered, terrified, and battered the day that he turned his
gun on his wife: he had decided that his own life was ruined,
over, never mind that it was his own actions that had led him
down that road. With men in our society becoming increasingly
reliant on fiction to serve as a buffer for such disconnects,
the gulf between what men feel and what they are is ever widening,
increasingly losing touch with reality.
The idea of powerful, singular
images is not completely alien to us today—burning crosses
and swastikas are obvious enough examples—and yet the
very idea of that power strikes most of us as a bit funny, flying
in the face of our all important mantra of “free speech.”
Barely a week before US troops
began their procession towards Baghdad a small website was unveiled
at Nudeforpeace.org. Capitalizing on previous examples of anti-war
activists gaining media attention through nudity, the Australian
website invited visitors to submit their own nude images to
the project.
April 17th, 2005
Amazons:
The
Contemporary Liberal Male Response
Stories of fierce Amazonian warriors are of
the most enduring of male mythologies, as well as some of the
most ambivalent. These bellicose women—so warlike that
they draw their name from accounts that they removed their right
breasts to better draw a bow—were penciled in at the margins
of the known world, much like sea serpents millennia later,
but served as a convenient object lesson closer to home.
A
Letter from the Editor
It would be imprudent to guarantee that Adonis
Mirror will be around forever or to pledge anything revolutionary
that has not been done before. What I can promise readers is
hard work, high standards, and personal responsibility. And
that means using “I” both in this letter and elsewhere
around the website, rather than the traditional royal we; hopefully
an utter lack of pretending when it comes to what can and will
be accomplished.
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