editor’s note: all links and style fixed. I suck.
As a gentle introduction, let’s start with the scary-looking foreign word - chauvinist.
Merriam-Webster says:
- excessive or blind patriotism — compare jingoism
- undue partiality or attachment to a group or place to which one belongs or has belonged
- an attitude of superiority toward members of the opposite sex; also : behavior expressive of such an attitude
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/chauvinism
In this instance, we’re clearly concerned with the third definition. Male Chauvinism, it seems, can be described as an attitude of male superiority towards females.
I’m personally male, even though I sometimes disagree with other commenters here, and yes - I believe that my Y-chromosome makes me infinitely superior to not just one woman, but to all of womankind - both individually and collectively.
As an example of my overwhelming superiority, and of the superiority of men everywhere, let’s take a look at our title. Not by the tongue of a strapping be-testicled cunning linguist was this phrase first uttered. No, it’s clearly a female invention.
You see, one of the things that first riled me about feminism, as far back as childhood, was that oh-so-clever phrase, “male chauvinist pig”.
Male - okay, guilty. Chauvinist - fine. Pig - uh… what? I mean, come on. If you’re going to attempt to insult me, at least have the balls, or indeed ovaries, to try to do so in an inventive and amusing manner.
I remember thinking, as a child, that there was something dreadfully wrong with these women. How could they justify the blanket labelling - as a farmyard animal, no less - of people with whose opinions on gender politics they did not agree?
Intellectually, this is on a level with a Republican referring to Democrats as “Dumb-o-crats”, or of fans of the Man City soccer team referring to their arch rivals, Man U, as “Man Poo”. It’s an irrelevant insult that tells us nothing, other than the approximate mental age of the individual in question.
Modern feminists should surely have enough faith in their own convictions to be able to hold a reasoned debate - to engage us, the enemy, in a discussion whereby both sides may end up understand each other a little better.
“No”, they say. “We will stick our fingers in our ears and call them pigs. That ought to do it.”
Which brings me to my point, which is that as I was enthusiastically chomping on my carbon-neutral, fair-trade mung bean and tofu salad last Friday lunchtime, I was perusing The Guardian’s website. For those of you not familiar with the British press, The Guardian is a left-leaning broadsheet daily newspaper, read by middle-class people with beards and sandals, all of whom are called Tarquin or Jemima.
Random Acts of Feminism, said one of the front-page headlines. And, like a fool, I clicked.
Gentlemen, I was astounded. Wendy Roby, by way of the splendidly hippyish “Random Acts of Kindness” of Professor Chuck Wall, clumsily but astonishingly comes around not to approaching the great gender debate, nor even to lay out her beliefs, but to make the suggestion that modern radical feminism might be best served by a campaign of vandalism, graffiti and the abandonment of female pubic grooming.
Here are my three favourite examples of Wendy’s womanly wisdom, but please do read her piece for yourself. It’s gut-wrenchingly embarrassing.
- What to do when you see a “lad’s mag” in a shop“Lad’s mag” is British parlance for a magazine along the lines of FHM, Nuts or Maxim, usually featuring a scantily-clad hot chick on the cover. Inside, the discerning reader can look forward to articles about cool stuff, fast cars, and hot chicks. Because men like cool stuff, fast cars, and hot chicks. Duh.
Initially, Wendy suggests that good feminists should, and I can’t quite believe I’m going to say this, “ferret out some copies of Good Housekeeping and Mary Beth’s Beanie World, and put these nice homely publications neatly at the front of the racks, obscuring the latest lads’ mags. You don’t even have to touch the hateful things!”
At this point, I decided that Wendy Roby was clearly a pseudonym for one of us, and that the article was in fact a delicious satire on the idiocy of petty-minded neo-feminists. And so I typed “Wendy Roby” into Google. To my horror, I discovered that she is real. Not only is she real, but she has fans. I discovered articles of nodding approval from presumably-big-boned correspondents at UK feminist websites The F Word and Feminasty. Dear god.
“[D]raw a speech bubble ready to animate one of the pouting cover girls”, suggests Wendy. “It might say, ‘I am somebody’s sister’, or ‘Despite my come-hither expression, I wouldn’t shag a Nuts reader for a million pounds’.”
“Somebody’s sister”? What difference does that make? If a hot chick has a sister, who’s also a hot chick, we simply lust after both of them. Extra marks for twins.
And given that FHM covergirl Sophie Anderton recently got caught offering to shag an undercover journalist for just ten grand, I’d advise against the latter suggestion, too.
Astonishingly, Wendy does not mention traditional pornographic magazines. So presumably they’re okay.
- What to do when your minge is a mess“When the boyfriend of Christine from London started making crude hints about her bikini wax being overdue [...] she decided that it was time to let her hair flourish.”"‘In this case,’ she writes, ‘two weeks was enough to prove the point’. (Said boyfriend has since been banished.)”
The mind boggles. I suspect that the now ex-boyfriend was rather relieved to be “banished”, and would like to think that he has now found a nice girl who doesn’t have a muff like Bob Geldof’s hair.
- Amend offensive graffiti
“The WCs of Britain’s clubs and pubs might also be a nice place to awaken some solidarity. Whenever I see something nasty scrawled on the back of a toilet door, I like to add amendments of my own. It only takes a second - and a handy marker pen - to transform something mean-spirited.”
“Cross out the ‘c’ and the ‘h’, for example, and ‘Jilly is a bitch’ can quickly be changed to ‘Jilly is a bit of a genius’.”
I cannot even begin to contemplate commenting on this suggestion. The woman is clearly insane.
Readers, if there really is a gender war being waged by neo-feminists, I think they just lost it. This website’s very own glabrous gigolo, pmmp, observed that here in Thailand, despite Thai women being victims of the Thai education system, they’ve managed to figure it out. Critical feminist theory would be an alien concept to most of them, and yet they run the place.
If anyone deserves ridicule and unglamourous labels, it’s the Western women who focus their sense of frustration at their own failures on some entirely imaginary global conspiracy of male supremacists. We’re not a conspiracy, dearie. We’re just rather more focused than you are.
See, if we don’t approve of something, we won’t resort to petty-minded vandalism or idiocy - we’ll do something about it. We didn’t approve of most Western women, which is why we sprang to action and came here. Given the abject lack of justification for labelling me a pig, I’m going to correct it.
Which is why, from now on, I’m going to refer to myself as a Male Chauvinist Awesome Dude. I suggest readers do the same.
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