It’s no secret that New Statesman is an unbalanced publication. Their content, almost always slovenly, conjures up the image of Rosie O’Donnell at a carnival, shoving uncounted numbers of fried Twinkies in her face with one hand while dutifully holding a Diet Coke in the other. Everything I have ever read by them leaves me with that uneasy, “what’s wrong with this picture?” feeling.
This is especially true with their “coverage” of the men’s rights movement. From their sloppy conflation of PUAs (pickup artists) with MRAs (Men’s Rights Advocates) to the “Oh ya, men haz some problems, too, uh, we guess,” motif that permeates media from TIME to Tumblr.
Apparently, even a condescending acknowledgment of men’s issues is too much for mainstream feminists like New Statesman’s Suzanne Moore. She feels like her sisters made a mistake with their laughably insincere backpedaling after being called out on their bigotry.
She yearns for a return to class hatred ala Robin Morgan (without, of course, noticing it never ended), and makes a sincere but lame stab at the verbal gymnastics required to explain to readers how hating men as a class actually doesn’t make her anything like the despicable bigot she is.
She highlights her passion for gender equity with such ideological brio.
Men. You can’t live with them. You can’t shoot them. Well, you can, but this is the New Statesman.
You can’t hate them [abused boys] individually, can you? You know what? I can.
I want to see this class [men] broken. There can’t be even basic equality for women without taking away the power of men – and by that I don’t mean feeling sorry for them because they have no friends or suggesting that they have small genitals. I mean the removal of their power.
There is a lot more hate in the article. Basically every line in it except for the ones dedicated to convincing you that she is not a hater. Here is one example:
“The more I hate men (#YesAllMen), the more I don’t mind individual ones,” she says, following her declaration that she is cognizant enough of her emotions to know the difference between personal hurt and politically motivated class hatred. Like most feminists, she is not cognizant enough of basic human psychology to know that there is no difference between the two and never has been.
Her attempt to proffer this delusional distinction is the can of Diet Coke in her hand as she inhales mouthful after mouthful of fried sugar and simple carbohydrates. It is the imagined proof that there is a resilient shred of human decency in someone whose humanity likely vanished before it ever had a chance to take shape.
Perhaps it started with fatherlessness. An American-British hybrid, Moore was a product of a divorce in her childhood, after which she was shipped off to an all girl’s school — out of the home at 16. Seems a good enough start on the road to Daddy Issues.
Later in life she went to school, attempting to major in psychology but was later swayed into “cultural studies.” Surely no man-hating there. Nothing at all that would channel her Daddy Issues into an ideologically bitter worldview, right?
One has to wonder if the recent attempts by her feminist sisters to rebrand and resell themselves as something other than Daddy, uh, man hating harridans bent on the destruction of men has caused a bit of panic in Moore.
She really has nothing to worry about. After all, here she is today using a platform like the New Statesman, waxing apoplectic in a way that if done by a man about women would have Mark Potok of the SPLC gearing up for another round of Pin the Publication on the Hate Map.
Don’t worry, Suzanne, there is still plenty of bigotry and hatred in the world for you to wallow in. If all else fails, go back to school and finish your doctorate.
I have always found feminists of Moore’s ilk (read: all of them) standout failing is their lack of recognition of, or appreciation for, irony. I mean, here she is, writing on a computer that was made easy enough for her to operate without understanding, by men; enjoying a career in a civilization that men built well enough to allow people – even those who can build nothing — to earn a living by tapping keys on a laptop; and whining about all of it through a worldwide technology that would not exist save for the men she hates so much.
All that is left I suppose is for some man to figure out how to make people move on from childhood and start living like adults. Once that is accomplished, perhaps even people like Suzanne Moore will start giving men a little slack.
Just enough, I am hoping, that they can use it to hang her with.
Of course, I mean that figuratively. After all, this is not the New Statesman.
