“You’ve come a long way, baby.”
That was the annoying mid-‘70s slogan a cigarette company plastered all over magazines along with stilted, overly-posed shots of “Modern Urban American Women” grinning far too wide to be human while in gleeful mid-action, flouncing in their size-zero polyester slacks and “giving it to the man” by smoking slim cigarettes that complimented their seemingly care-free lives. It was a foundational part of “Feminist America”, and it was easy to see its prepackaged nature.
Forty years later, the slogan could be applied to both the radical “feminist movement” and its meat-grinder pop media cohorts, because their almost constant stream of self-righteous, culture-of-victimology, anti-male invective is becoming so unhinged and hysterical, it’s led to a writer for NBC straight-facedly determining that “heterosexuality is the bedrock” of oppression against women.
The blinding comet of intellectual certitude comes by way of Marcie Bianco, a “writer and editor” whose work has appeared at “outlets like NBC Think, Pacific Standard, Quartz, Rolling Stone, Salon, Vanity Fair, and Vox” -- much to the likely vexation of many of their readers.
And whether it’s original or it’s been stripped off the walls of a padded cell, one can’t be sure, but her cultural-evoluntionary thesis can be summed up in a few lines. First, there’s the headline:
Miley Cyrus' split with Liam Hemsworth isn't just celebrity gossip — it's a blow to the patriarchy
… Because, ya know, Liam Hemsworth is so outspokenly, routinely, patriarchal. Just look at all the time he’s spent vociferously opposing equal respect for men and women, rather than just being a regular person and going about his life as best he can. Yeah, he’s a real, willing bad guy, “keeping women down.”
Those would be the women who view him as a sex symbol and have helped make him a film star whose face has appeared on all kinds of magazines published and purchased by women and who has appeared on talk programs targeted towards what women show, with their own viewership numbers, they like.
Thankfully, Ms. (Miss? Mrs.? Mr.?) Bianco dives deeper into the swamp to hand us:
Over the past week, an assortment of trending stories — from Jeffrey Epstein to the Dayton and El Paso mass shooters, to Miley Cyrus’s separation and Julianne Hough’s declaration that she’s “not straight” — together have laid bare the strictures of an American patriarchy on the edge of a nervous breakdown. As the status quo, heterosexuality is just not working.
Because, of course, those mass murderers were driven by their desire to promote male-domination, right? Yeah! Even though the alleged shooter in Dayton openly stated he would vote for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who, I think, last time I checked, is an American Indian Woman – or something close to that.
Then again, Bianco doesn’t provide a hyperlink to any background information about the accused Dayton shooter… Funny, that.
Thankfully, her overall point is a clear, logical conclusion based on that Mulligan’s Stew of disconnected items she’s thrown into her mental cauldron. Why, of COURSE! All those news stories are tied to heterosexuality as not a naturally occurring biological imperative for the vast majority of humans in all world history, but a system of sociological oppression that is finally being broken by courageous, completely balanced, liberated women.
“You’ve come a long way, baby.”
While men stew in their mess, women are rising. They are taking back control of their lives and their bodies and they are questioning the foundation of the patriarchy — heterosexuality — that has kept them blindly subordinate for centuries.
But this begs a few nagging questions, not the least of which is how Bianco can claim there is a “patriarchy” in a nation-state that sees women owning 51 percent of all businesses, that sees the continuing dominance of female-written and female-bought books (that’s the “romance” genre, and all its sub-genres, totaling 87 percent of the top “e-books sold on Smashwords and their aggregators”), that sees television talk shows and entire networks orienting their content to appeal to women – leading to females dominating the “richest talk hosts” category, that sees motion-picture studios making movies specifically to appeal to women, that sees vast mega-corporations creating music festivals specifically tailored for women, that for decades has seen the federal government take money from men in order to fund abortions for women (the vast majority of whom voluntarily engaged in sexual activity) and sees women who don’t choose to leave their jobs in order to take advantage of their biological power to give birth earn salaries on par with male counterparts.
The list could go on, and there’s another nagging question Bianco’s unsupported set of assertion begs.
If there really is a patriarchy, how has heterosexuality kept women “blindly subordinate”?
Either women are really unobservant – note, she doesn’t write that women have been kept unwillingly subordinate, she uses the word "blindly", which implies female participation in their own subjugation – or they are willingly subservient and willingly being lorded-over by their hetero-male slave-masters.
And this is where the expected camel’s nose of postmodernist “we can tell you the ‘real’ meaning of what you said” semiotics pops its head under the proverbial tent.
Patriarchy is at its most potent when oppression doesn’t feel like oppression, or when it is packaged in terms of biology, religion or basic social needs like security comfort, acceptance and success. Heterosexuality offers women all these things as selling points to their consensual subjection.
“For their consensual subjection.”
Well, since one cannot be “subjected” to something consensual, that’s a non-starter, but it’s the entire nonsensical, postmodernist “foundation” on which Bianco’s thesis rests. And this is important, because this kind of reworking of textual, linguistic, and power-relationship realities is at the heart of all collectivist strategies going back to Marx, and, earlier, Rousseau when he wrote his “Discourse on Inequality” in the 18th Century.
It’s always “David v. Goliath”. Rousseau and his common-law wife had five children, he sent them all to the Foundling’s Home to be cared for by the government, and then he blamed “society” for not “enjoying the pleasure of a father’s embrace.” Marx was subsidized by business people, used industrial revolution tech to move to London, owed friends money when he died, praised the “patriarchy” in the Communist Manifesto, yet is seen as a paladin for the “little guy”.
Bianco’s baseless and lunatic piece typifies the tactics and strategy of collectivism to use anything, true or false, to demonize those who might stand in the way of more collectivization. It’s not merely about treating men, women, kids, adults, old, gay, straight, etc., fairly, it’s about destroying impediments to the expansion of political control over other people and their property. It’s political, and it always will be political.
Bianco’s harangue might shut some eyes, or prompt people to turn away in frustration, but people might want to read it, as an example of a pernicious mindset that is always trying twist reality in order to gain power.
Don’t think her type of false-paladin mindset will ever disappear. As long as there is a machine of government to access, collectivists will use any means necessary to get their hands on it.