The Opinionated Bastard

So the Noise, the local art monthly I write a column for came out this week. My piece is here, I posted it on my blog 3 weeks ago. As I expected, it had two slams against me. Funny thing is, the second slam is in the form of a letter to the editor supposedly written by a independent person. Except it quotes almost word for word what Sylvia said to me at the editorial meeting a month ago.

You know, its funny, because what really happened is that I had three complaints about Sylvia:

1. She was a whiner.

2. Her writing was a boring rant no one would want to read.

3. It seemed to me that her piece confirmed the worst aspects of some feminists, the whole “we’re all victims of the patriarchy” nonsense, and then made comparisons I found offensive by drawing equivalency between genocide in some countries and wearing high heels in ours. I generally associate that sort of nonsense with lesbian feminists, as heterosexual feminists usually have a little more clue about men. Given that she also used the word queer, something most enlightened heteros won’t do, I assumed therefore that she was an intelligent lesbian instead of a clueless heterosexual.

That’s basically because I don’t disagree with most feminists, I just think the ones that blame all their problems on men are idiots. Men and women have different strengths and weaknesses, but not everything women struggle against is sexism.

Guess which one complaint Sylvia focused on to the exclusion of the others? The lesbian part of course. God forbid she actually improve her writing.

As an example, this month she had this 2000 word rant called Outdated Stereotypes of Feminism. Here’s an excerpt (bad punctuation and missing words are as published):

Feminists are Humorless

We tried and tried to come up with something funny respond to this one, but we just couldn’t think of anything because we…we’re feminists.

But, Seriously, folks!

Feminists would have all committed suicide by now if they didn’t have a sense of humor, for the reality of sexism is grim and serious, not funny.

That was the funny bit. The rest of the article was just as grim. Three women who know me read the part about me, read 2 sections, then moved on because it was too boring. Eventually, they got to my article, and complimented me on it.

Anyways, men and women have different strengths. Women are really good at networking, but that means that if you piss one feminist off, they tend to form a pity party to pick you apart. Hence the term feminist mafia. However, they picked the wrong fight this time. Ganging up on a single person who complained about a feminist being whiny is well, just silly. Ganging up on someone who has “The Opinionated Bastard” in his newspaper masthead for being opinionated is just stupid. Here’s what my masthead looks like.

Would you write a letter to the editor about someone who has this at the top of his column?

The other weird thing in the letter to the editor (first a fake interview, then a fake letter to the editor, geesh) was an offhand comment that PMS Media was doing their activities in no way to be self serving. It took me awhile to realize this, but that was supposed to be referring to me. Well, all Art is self serving, its all about the ego chicky-babes, otherwise no one would do Art. My main issue with these so called feminists is that all their art so far consists of “look at me, look how cool I am”. Do cool art, and people will know how cool you are. The letter to the editor also mentioned this terrible thing in Juarez. Which is funny, because if you go to the PMS Media website above, they’ll tell you all about how they traveled to Mexico to protest this horrible occurrence, but not one word or link about whatever the horrible thing was. I even emailed them and asked, but I never got an answer, so I still don’t know what the hell is going on with this terrible thing they’re supposedly trying to “raise consciousness” about.

It’s still weird how my situation parallels Estrich vs. Kinsley.

‘Ware the feminist mafia!