Just ten days before the Mother’s Day release of the book, Say Goodbye to Crazy, Mark Judge, a sometimes writer for Daily Caller and some site called acculturated.com, used our video program to write about it, without even reading the book.
In fairness he did try to make contact — in a YouTube comment. He seemed a little frustrated that he had be unable to get through.
As you can see I responded after checking my email and finding zip. Turns out he was so hot and bothered (or frustrated from trying to reach me) to get going on this one that he didn’t wait to write his article. Pretty decent piece, too, except for the big ol’ streak of yellow running through it.
He actually wrote a very unambiguous endorsement for the idea that we live in a society indifferent to female perpetrated emotional abuse. He makes a convincing, cogent presentation well worth the read. He even goes to the extra measure to point out the reality that the issues have been politicized, and that it isn’t helping.
Then he politicizes the issues right before your eyes, by heaping some social justice on Yours Truly.
On the other side of the political spectrum, conservatives tend to scream that feminism is to blame when the discussion of abusive women comes up. Every woman who gets off a funny line about men instantly becomes Medusa. This trivializes genuine emotional abuse, and often masks simple misogyny. (This, sadly, seems the case with Paul Elam, Dr. Palmatier’s co-author on Say Goodbye to Crazy. Palmatier is a brilliant analyst, but in video conversations with her, Elam comes across as angry and crude.)”
I really appreciate this. As a very slightly right of center, fiscal conservative and social liberal who is frequently accused of running a crypto-leftist operation by right wing whackaloons it is a nice to hear the same ridiculousness from the left here and there.
While this mention of me very near the end of the article was the only time you would know I wrote half the book is something my poor deflated ego will have to suffer through, I am still perplexed at his following that with instructions to his readers that the issue was not political.
So, female abuse is being hidden by angry right wingers screaming that feminism is the reason for female abuse? I am wondering why he did not provide a single example of that being the case. OK, I lied. I know the reason, and so does Mark. He did not have one.
Mark, feminism and the left both make it is difficult to broach the subject of female abusers. The other major culprit is the right, not because they are screaming about feminism but because they are a political group mostly comprised of people on white horses who won’t hear a word about poor, soft little porcelain women being abusive.
The force that drives all these people is gynocentrism. It is the same gynocentrism that makes a woman expressing indignation a brilliant analyst, and a man doing the same thing angry and crude.
Now, I won’t argue at all that Dr. T is an eminently qualified, articulate and highly knowledgeable woman, especially in this particular wheelhouse. She is what I would call a silverback; a massive force to be reckoned with and I am honored that she was able to overcome my crude anger enough to co-author a book with me.
But Judge’s actions leave some questions in my mind. One, it appears he tried for two weeks to reach me without using the contact form on my site, or consulting the masthead, in order to ask questions of Dr. Palmatier, which he could have done through the contact form on her site. He did manage to find her site to reference one of her articles but he did not manage to find or use the contact form there, which might have given him some better results. So he went where any reasonable journalist would. To YouTube comments. Nice try but there are better places to try that would have landed him a press copy of the book.
Not exactly Woodward and Bernstein level investigative journalism skills there. After all, I found his email in thirty seconds just using his name and I am a registered techtard. Then again this is the modern media. Journalism and skills (along with ethics) seldom live under the same roof. This is precisely why Judge runs with the canard that physical abuse is a woman’s issue, endorsing a corrupt governmental, cultural and academic apparatus that only recognizes male perpetrators and female victims. “This is a good thing,” says Judge, “as violence against women remains prevalent and a problem.”
And it is no wonder he feels this way, since “Feminists have worked so hard over the last fifty years to turn men from ogres into enlightened companions…”
There is not much useful to glean about Judge from this that anyone understanding gender politics does not already know, but I do think it speaks well to the power of the subject matter. Before even being published, Say Goodbye to Crazy managed to get an obviously left-leaning gynocentrist to acknowledge at least one form of abuse from women that is under addressed.
I hope it has the same effect on gynocentrists on the right. Maybe together they will figure out how to think about the unthinkable.
