Before I go watch my delayed Valentine’s Day film with the girlfriend, I thought I needed to come here and rip on Laurie Penny. Yes, I’ve done that before, although it was mainly just chronicling her getting blown out at the hands of Sargon of Akkad. Today, I wanted to talk about her column from yesterday morning that’s basically an anti-man screed masquerading as a pro-woman post. I guess it’s a classic trolling technique to release some writing shitting all over couplehood on the day that celebrates romance, so no one should really be surprised. Still, there’s something about Penny that always puts me off more than usual. I think it’s because she reads like she actually believes the bullshit she’s spewing. There are definitely more odious rad fems out there, so this is about the only logical conclusion I can come up with, although she is massively annoying to both see and hear.
We can all agree that getting involved in a relationship when you are younger is fraught with difficulty. You may not be ready, and even if you are your partner might not be ready. Perhaps money woes will ruin things. School and early career soul-searching could mess everything up. Still, people have been getting paired off at a young age for thousands of years. It’s kind of how the system was designed to work. If you look at divorce rates and the percentage of unmarried people ages 18-32, you can see that things aren’t going the way they were designed to go. So why is a column like this even necessary? Is it because the SJWs know that the breakdown of traditional lifestyles makes their political takeover that much easier?
My point is, this column wasn’t even really needed. OK, I take that back. Ms. Penny had to find a way to rip men on Valentine’s Day. So, she chose this vessel…
I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t also have gigantic, awkward flaws that make me largely unbearable to be with—just that boys rarely stuck around long enough to find that out. Plenty of them were perfectly happy to sleep with me, but after a little while, when I became a real person to them, when it became more than just sex, they turned mean or walked away.
I wonder why they walked away, Laurie? It couldn’t have had anything to do with you! You’re such an amazing catch…
With hindsight, though, I’m glad that I’ve never been willing or able to narrow my horizons for a man. It didn’t turn out to be half as scary, or a fraction as lonely, as I’d been told. And, you know, I had a bunch of fun and got a buggerload of writing done.
“I chased away any decent man that decided to come within a 50 mile radius of my radioactive personality, but it’s all good because I put out a bunch of radical feminist propaganda.”
Nothing frustrates me so much as watching young women at the start of their lives wasting years in succession on lacklustre, unappreciative, boring child-men who were only ever looking for a magic girl to show off to their friends, a girl who would in private be both surrogate mother and sex partner. I’ve been that girl. It’s no fun being that girl. That girl doesn’t get to have the kind of adventures you really ought to be having in your teens and twenties. It’s not that her dreams and plans don’t matter, but they always matter slightly less than the boy’s, because that’s what boys are taught to expect—that their girlfriend is there to play a supporting role in their life.
Jesus, this is getting pretty depressing. Maybe you just had shit taste in men? I think the problem was with you though, Laurie. Especially after reading this long ass ode to misandry…
You see them everywhere—exhausted young women pouring all their spare energy into organising, encouraging and taking care of young men who resent them for doing it but resent them even harder when they don’t.
Maybe they just resented you because you were always talking about the patriarchy and whatever feminist flavor of the month was going around rather than, you know, working on your relationship?
What I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of things that are much worse than being single under modern patriarchy.
See what I mean?
We’re not supposed to acknowledge that love is political. But how can it be otherwise? How can it be anything but political, when relationships with men are so often where women experience gendered violence, where differences in pay and privilege hit home, where we do all the work of caring and cleaning and soothing and placating that patriarchy expects us to do endlessly and for free?
This woman is seriously blaming men because she spent the majority of her 20’s alone. Can anyone that isn’t a radical feminist read this with a straight face and agree with her?
The truth is that most men in their teens and twenties have not yet learned to treat women like human beings, and some never do.
You’ve just spent 1000 words calling men shit, saying they actively work to keep you down, and just generally talking about them as if they were cattle. But it’s men who have the problem with treating women like human beings? OK, Laurie. Whatever you say, darling.
The trouble is that there aren’t enough [progressive young men] for all the brilliant, beautiful, fiercely compassionate women and girls out there who could really do with someone like that in their lives. Those men are like unicorns.
Grrrrl Power ™
…I think compulsory heterosexual monogamy is the least romantic idea since standardised testing, and I don’t see why our best ideals of love and lust and passion and dedication need to be boxed into it.
I’m still in shock that men didn’t beat down your door, Laurie.
[A relationship is] just not worth it.
We have to get on with saving the world, after all, and we can’t do it one man at a time.
Yes, Laurie Penny and her ilk are going to save the world, one op-ed at a time. You’re not doing anything important, Ms. Penny. You get paid to talk shit online. To be frank, so do I. The difference between me and you is that I know that I’m not pulling the planet out of peril. I sit here and blog thoughts on my website, which I am proud of in a lot of ways. I have a bigger platform than 95% of the writers out there. That doesn’t mean a whole lot when you talk about making a living wage, but then again, most writers are also broke as well. I do this because I love it, not out of some misguided sense of world-saving. I do hope I’ve made some small contributions here and there when it comes to waking people out of their slumber, but other than that, I’m just another voice in the crowd. That’s all you are too, dear. The quicker you realize that, the better for not only your mental health, but also your love life.
