September 26, 2014
Geena Davis
Source: Shutterstock
During her now infamous speech to the UN, Emma talks about how fortunate she was not to be valued less because she’s a daughter. Has she been to Wal-Mart lately? Dads are clamoring to get their daughters the Huffy Disney Frozen bike. Things are rough for daughters in China, India, and the Middle East, but here in the West, we fucking ADORE our girls. As Larry O”Connor over at Truth Revolt said, “Emma Watson Lectures all the Wrong People on Feminism.”
And yet the conference taught us that the U.S., Britain, and India are “at the back of the pack” when it comes to “gender prevalence” (a hopelessly complicated term which basically just counts how many women were onscreen). If you doubt that stat, check the footnote on the program, which clearly states: “The chi-square analysis for gender prevalence by country was significant, X2 (11,5799)=60.11, p.01, V*=10.” Who is this research for, robots?
The speakers repeatedly thanked The Rockefeller Foundation, McGraw Hill Financial, “platinum sponsors” like Google, and “bronze sponsors” like CBS and Disney. Seeing all these autistic geeks get paid to salivate over data kinda makes you wonder about the bias scientists succumb to when they see the funding available for climate change. Questioning the hypothesis = biting the hand that feeds you2. It reminded me of a seminar I attended last year called “Hacking Creativity,” where hordes of scientists were fed cash to look at studies involving creativity. We were told how few studies were done on music while a ridiculous amount focused on fine art. That’s nice. Can you hack creativity? I don”t know. It never came up.
I believe women want what they”ve always wanted: To feel appreciated and respected and safe. Watching these speakers crowbar Third World injustice into America’s criminal record made me wonder if they also just love complaining. Last year, Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a tired missive about her “One-Night Stand Life,” where she declared her fealty to the world of being single and crazy. Last week, she updated her commitment with a wedding announcement. I guarantee you she will be moaning about divorce in a couple of years. That’s what Alisa Valdes did. She wouldn”t shut up about the patriarchy and how antiquated our views of masculinity are”until an alpha male offered to fuck her and all bets were off. She wrote a book renouncing her feminist past called The Feminist and the Cowboy: An Unlikely Love Story and was dumped soon after. Her response was that her book is a lie and she’s a head case.
If you”re a feminist and you are outraged by honor killings, if you are sick of hearing Islam called a “religion of peace,” if you are disgusted by the abortion rate in China and what their one-child rule has done to the female population, if the dowry system in India makes you puke and the thought of sati fires give you diarrhea … in short, if you are focused on non-Western sexism, I”m all ears. If, however, you want to whine and moan about how horrible it is to be female in America today, please step out of the way. I”m trying to watch the game.
