Today's shorters and longers

More guns, more libertarian video:

Matt Welch and I have a new bloggingheads up about guns, politics, and other matters of interest. If you are Freddie, Mindles Dreck, Brian Dougherty, Julian Sanchez, or my ex-boyfriend, you should watch it just for the name check. The rest of you should watch it for Matt's dreamy eyes.

Megan is literally regressing in front of our (not quite so dreamy) eyes. Her Althousian trajectory continues unabated, in other words. Soon she'll be making poop jokes.

Summer cooking: raspberries: Susan already touched on this post, but I can't leave the following unnoticed.

Add whipped topping if you roll that way.

I don't know when it became de rigur for yuppie white women to say "roll that way" or "that's how I roll" or any other variant, but it's fucking stupid, ladies. You don't sound hip when you say it, you sound like a 12 year old trying to copy their 16 year old brother, with epic, and comic, fail. (Just for record, it sounds moronic when guys say it, too, and meaning it "ironically" just makes the person an even bigger idiot.)

Question of the day:

Is it really possible that the Large Hadron Collider is going to accidentally end the universe? CERN says no, but every organization has a tendency to believe its own press releases. Discuss.

Is it possible that Megan is actually a reptilian alien working for the Illuminati to dumb down humanity so that we won't even realize it when we're colonized? She says no, but spies always lie. Discuss.

A pack, not a herd:

Commenter Freddiemac asks me whether the vicious pack behavior displayed by girls is nature or nurture.

Now Megan is an anthropologist who can answer one of the most fundamentally vexing questions about human behavior in regards to a feminist hive mind which is out to get her for not wearing the right kind of shoes.

Given its universality, and how young it appears, I'd bet mostly nature with an able assist from the surrounding culture. I expect this also explains the visceral pleasure that most women get from gossip, which most men really don't seem to enjoy nearly so much--the perhaps sad truth is that I feel closer to my female friends when we have gotten through a really good round of "what's wrong with everyone else". Though I don't actually find what seems to be the male equivalent, "who's winning the cocktail party?", any more attractive.

So because Megan enjoys being a catty asshole and discussing the personal lives of supposed friends behind their backs, women are bitches, all of 'em. Megan's personal failings show that the people arguing against her are vicious and motivated by personal issues. This is such blatant projection I'm almost surprised Megan didn't recognize it. (We'll come back to the "winning the cocktail party" bit in a moment.)

But saying "nature" doesn't tell us the thing is inevitable. Lots of behaviors are natural, like rape and murdering strangers, that we struggle mightily to overcome--and mostly succeed. Even if my gender has a preprogrammed tendency to self-define through the people we can exclude from the group, we can rise above that.

It's just human nature to rape and murder, which is why pre-schools are such dangerous places. Kids don't know how to control these inherent, natural urges, which is why they're so cruel and brutal. It says nothing whatsoever about Megan calling herself a feminist that she's implicitly endorsed the incredibly stupid, and harmful, idea that rape has anything to do with sex. The desire for sexual gratification is natural, that much is hard to argue against. Rape, however, is not about the orgasm, but the "power" of violating another person. Unless Megan wants to call that urge natural, she's saying rape is about sex, which is to say she has no idea what she's talking about. Nothing new, but kinda strong proof she isn't a genuine feminist. They tend to be informed about topics like this.

Feminists who use the phrase "anti-feminist" to describe anyone who disagrees with them are choosing to view the world as composed of two mutually exclusive groups: feminists, us; and the bad people who have not joined the group and are therefore our sworn enemies. They are choosing, too, the nastiness that tends to result from giving into our baser primate instincts.

No, Megan, feminists who label you an anti-feminist are simply empirically correct. You're actually quite misogynistic in a number of your expressed opinions, such as calling women inherently gossipy Mean Girls, and you neither have absorbed the most basic lessons of feminism nor done anything to contribute to the cause. In fact, you argue against feminist positions and try to justify many of the worst stereotypes about women and feminists. That's why they call you an anti-feminist. It's not us/them, it's that you have staked out a position that is anti-feminist. You can't understand this because, being a horrible narcissist, you can only see that you aren't having your idiocy indulged, and you think feminism means you get what you want because you have a vagina, which is wrong.

Yes, society is gendered: Now we get to watch Megan misuse the terminology she's half-absorbed from her limited actual investigation of feminism to try to justify her half-assed assertions about human nature, this time as it involves men. Tomorrow Megan will make sure to deeply offend as many kinds of transgendered folk as she can, in the spirit of being inclusive.

I've had about ten requests from men to explain the phrase "winning the cocktail party". None from women.

Where do I put the [sic] in that quote? (And Megan, you've driven off your female readers. Even Anonymouse has been giving you grief. That's why they aren't asking you what the fuck you're talking about.)

A male friend, who spends a not inconsiderable time cruising feminist sites, was one of those who asked what it meant. I find it odd to realize that most men don't observe something that is obvious to every woman I know: that there is a competitive male dynamic to groups that is completely different from the way female groups act.

Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
No.
In groups of fratboys, no matter their age, sure. In groups of adult males, not so much. Megan is saying either she mostly hangs out with shitty people, or she has no idea how the male mind works and has accepted the same empty pop culture definition of masculinity that she has of femininity. Guys are jocks, girls are gossips. I think Megan lives in Archie comics.

[Men] don't know, of course, because unless the group is overwhelmingly female, the dynamic of any mixed group always defaults to male, with women fading back into supporting conversational roles. Maybe it's the kind of thing you can only observe by contrast to the extremely anti-competitive nature of female groups.

"Anti-competitive nature"? What the fuck?
Granted, my experience at Vassar has biased my selection sample, but women are just as competitive as men, if not moreso. Guys tend to pick one or two things to compete over, whereas women seem to have much more detailed scorecards, in my experience. Forget Archie comics, I think Megan lives in "Little House on the Prairie".

The easiest way to put it (and this is hardly original) is that men in groups are focused on their role within the group. Women in groups are focused on the group. Men gain status by standing out from the group; women gain status by submerging themselves into it--by strengthening the group, often at the expense of themselves.

*sigh* This bullshit is so devoid of actual meaning that even Megan would attack it if it came from a critic. Megan is trying to use the cultural tradition that women should be submissive as proof women are submissive. That is the very heart of sexism, and most bias. Society forces a group into an unpleasant role, then points to the role as proof the group is inferior. It's one of those unfortunate things that link women with racial and sexual minorities in regrettable ways, and Megan is trying to use it to justify the claims she pulled out of her ass. And what I, at least, find most annoying is that Megan thinks she's being enlightened about gender by drawing on these traditions, and not at all judgmental.

Both these styles have advantages and drawbacks. I'm not trying to establish that one is better than the other. But I'm kind of shocked, though I shouldn't be, to realize that men don't even see it, the way they don't see catcalling, because it never happens when they're around.

And she closes with a blatant attempt to kiss the ass of genuine feminists with a nod to an odd phenomenon and passive aggressive swipe at men. It's our fault we don't see women being catcalled, because we choose not to. Megan doesn't even understand that misandry isn't a feminist virtue.

I feel bad for Kathy G and the rest of the Mean Girls who'll feel forced to read and potentially respond to all this. I can't imagine how infuriating it must be to be lectured about feminism by a misogynist and misandrist, especially when feminism is your passion and calling.