When Jaclyn Friedman told Paul Elam upon first meeting that she couldn’t be civil to him it was unsurprising. It was unsurprising because Friedman is a very unpleasant woman who brags about her membership in “a shady cabal” where not-being civil is Jaclyn Friedman’s way of life.
To avoid sounding like a conspiracy theorist let me explain.
The internet that Friedman is so happily making a living from is also a record keeper. While people may change their ideas and beliefs over time, the internet actually still keeps us accountable for our contradictions. For most honest people our changes will take place over years, not within the same article. But for Friedman one need not look that far back.
I love when Jaclyn blesses the world with her voice because no one does so much to show feminist hypocrisy and lunacy as well as she does.
In 2011, re:publica gave Jaclyn Friedman the stage to perform a skit which she called “How Feminist Digital Activism Is Like the Clitoris.” Friedman describes herself as a performer so I’m confident she won’t take objection to me characterizing her public appearances in that way.
Friedman claims that the title of the seminar arose from her perceived similarity between men having trouble finding the clitoris and people having trouble finding active feminists but that they are both very easy to find. Friedman seems to have confused the clitoris with the g-spot.
She later clarifies that men actually find the surface part of the clit quite easily but fail to understand that the “flashy part” is just the surface and there is a bulbous layer underneath – just as every feminist activist online is part of a bigger, deeper body of thugs who you need to suck up to.
I support Jaclyn’s idea of exposing and teaching us about the hidden layers of the massive internet clit. Let us take a closer look because, as Jaclyn has allowed, women are comparable to anatomical drawings and can be reduced to body parts for the purpose of entertainment or discussion. Unless you are Naomi Wolf.
Naomi Wolf made one big mistake: she defended Julian Assange against politically motivated sex crime charges at the same time she was publishing a book called Vagina: A New Biography. Wolf and Friedman had a debate on Democracy Now and we are asked to believe that is not connected to why so many feminists decided to trash Wolf’s new book at the same time Friedman explains why it is intensely connected. Jaclyn’s seminar about the clitoris tries to explain why the resulting attack on Wolf is both hilarious and a result of not understand how the clit works.
First we must understand that Jaclyn’s clitoris is the size of the entire internet but that her part of the internet is is just a fraction of a bigger system that is, presumably, the size of the universe. Though she has only recently decided to incorporate men into her sex life, Jaclyn is an expert on what men do and do not know about the clit and she is ready to explain to us how big a clit can be. My clit, in comparison, is quite small so I was quite intrigued with her explanation.
Like the clit, online feminists are not just a button you press. Friedman happily explains that they won’t sign your petition just because it’s a good idea, you have to spend time becoming friends with them first. You have to earn their support by “snarking” about your day and swapping recipes or telling them what you had for lunch long enough that they feel like they know you.
Once you’ve put in the time and effort to be their BFFs they will assign you a place in their hierarchy and invite you to fun events like their “hate-read” of Naomi Wolf’s book. The whole feminist circle of influence has a map. They first co-ordinate hate reviews of your work, then they start Twitter campaigns against you, they tag team to make sure someone is watching the results in every time zone of the globe, then they revel in the mass media attention their bullying achieves.
If you doubt her sequence of events, The Millions website published the evidence online for all to see. Why would they allow their bullying to be published online? Because they are proud of it and because they want to warn everyone what happens if you cross their path.
That’s what they do to friends.
At this point we might offer an explanation to Friedman as to why no one was laughing at her presentation. It’s not because they were German and have learned from the past, it’s because it’s not fucking funny. Naomi Wolf was one of their peers and they destroyed her, so an outsider like Paul Elam would just be fresh meat in the lion den.
In the roundtable hate-read Wolf is accused of being a misogynist and a narcissist, and the accusation is justified by one of the hate-spewers because Gloria Steinem gave her a hug when they met and Wolf did not.
Girls just want to get hugs… and never be challenged to defend their opinions.
While Jaclyn Friedman waxes poetic about how emotionally traumatizing it is to receive troll threats online, which she acknowledges have never been followed through on, she fails to address the trauma caused by having “the sisterhood” turn against you. She is quite confident that will never happen even though the statistics show it to be a more likely event than getting raped by a Tweeter.
Jaclyn Friedman doesn’t protest A Voice For Men and Paul Elam because he’s a threat to her. She met with him because he’s less threatening to her than her own social group. Paul has no power in her world, the power is where it historically has been kept: the opinion of women and their decision as to whether or not they accept you in their group.
Jaclyn does not fear hypocrisy. She eagerly campaigns to force media site Clear Channel to advertise what their policies object to right after campaigning to force media site Facebook to eliminate what they don’t object to.
Jaclyn does not fear encouraging misery amongst her fellow women. She eagerly announced herself a slut and begged women to support sluttiness and become slutty themselves whilst explaining how unhappy she is with her own life as a result. What she really wants is for other women to encourage her poor choices and celebrate their freedom to be miserable together and blame it all on men… with whom she’s hardly slept.
Of course, when the psychology of her misery was spelled out, all of Jaclyn’s friends arrived in the comment section to rescue her from responsibility. Meanwhile, Friedman was free to go about explaining how to lower personal standards to get laid and still be a feminist. She now has a podcast called “Fucking While Feminist” which is rather strange since she admittedly has a hard time getting satisfactorily laid.
While Jaclyn Friedman looks like the sister of Andrea Dworkin, Dworkin was the poster child for sex-negative feminism and Friedman is the billboard girl of sex-positive sisterhood. How different are they? Dworkin said all hetero sex is rapey. Friedman wants to brand male sexuality as evil but encourage female sexual liberation. With whom does she think these girls are going to have sex? One of these things only pretends to not be like the other but they both look the same to me.
When Jaclyn and her BFF Jessica Valenti published the book Yes means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape they were met with reactions from women claiming that they couldn’t give enthusiastic consent because they didn’t know what they wanted.
To a normal person this would mean that girls who regretted sexual encounters after experimentation weren’t actually raped, they just tried something new and didn’t like it. To Friedman it meant that women needed to know what they wanted sexually before they’d ever tried it. She has, as a result of feedback, made it her life goal to introduce “pleasure based” sex education for girls in public school so that they can be in complete control of every sexual experience they might have in life. Again, with whom? And who is telling the boys what they might enjoy?
Although these questions burn for an answer, Friedman has enough to worry about with the clitoris cabal at her heels. I’m trying to avoid writing something nasty about her because she’s got enough trouble already.
Watch your back, Jaclyn. Paul Elam is the least of your worries; he actually speaks his mind consistently, doesn’t play head games, or create rigged social ladders. Neither does he try to take what he hasn’t earned or make a living off other people’s tears.
Paul Elam and the MHRM are something you’ve never understood because you didn’t have to. Men aren’t the ones who pose a threat in this world, it’s your girlfriends who do–and you know it.
Editor’s note: feature image by re:publica 2013. –PW
