The article opens with an image of an innocent girl's aspirations to 'marry' a prince, with no commentary on where those aspirations might have come from. Then there's a bit of Tea Party-style leader bashing. Phyllis Chesler calls Monica Lewinsky a hoebag, and after she says that Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner were hoebags.
Feminist protip: don't call women hoebags.
Chesler says it's fine that these adult women were hoebags because at least they were consciously advancing their careers. But God forbid the president have consensual sex with a 19 year old -- one can't meaningfully consent at 19. Basically, in one paragraph she accuses president Kennedy of command rape and in the next says, "but he wasn't a rapist."
Glad we cleared that up.
Next she describes sex workers as hoebags, then implies that they are traitors for writing about
their encounters. She vaguely refers to "similar" abuses from our leaders
(without clearing up which of the many abuses she's written about are in question) and nuclear weapons in the same
sentence, implying that our long history of leaders with knobs instead of
brains has made us less safe.
If anything, sexually deviant presidents
have saved us from total annihilation: I'd rather the president was
getting a blowjob than launching a strike during a nuclear crisis. In fact, I propose keeping anyone who has the authority to use weapons of mass destruction SO busy with blowjobs that they can't remember their own name-- at least until such time as our puny human minds have figured out that nuclear weapons are never an option.
Chesler makes out that one's sex life
isn't private in an age where some people make sex tapes to gain notoriety. 24/7 news cycles and Facebook don't in themselves constitute an argument for anything, and for all the wacky antics our Supreme Court has gotten up to these last years, it seems to be moving in a sensible direction with regard to keeping government out of your bedroom.
She turns to breaking down
our golden age view of the past by giving a litany of presidential and
gubernatorial infidelities. For good measure, let's throw Anthony Weiner
in the same boat as Tiger Woods, because that makes sense. Why not slag
off the recently dead Ted Kennedy, too? In the face of all the Kennedy
tragedy, "One would have hoped for no further dirt." Alas, some hoebag
had to dig some more up, shattering my golden age image of Kennedy as a
sex maniac to replace it with one of a sex maniac who has been accused
as a rapist.
Wow, Luke, did we read the same article? Chesler nowhere calls anyone a 'hoebag'. When she says that Exner and Monroe "were adult women who chose to use their sexuality to further their careers" she was not saying that sleeping with JFK was the way they did that. She was saying that they were not young and inexperienced in the ways of the world like Mimi Alford was. I can't speak about Exner because I don't know who she was, but Monroe's career was very much based on her sexuality. She was as much a sex star as a women could be in her day. Mimi Alford on the other hand was just a young intern. Also, she did not imply that JFK was a rapist by sleeping with Alford. She said that in doing so he abused his power and commitment to his wife by using Alford's youth, inexperience, and awe of him for his own sexual satisfaction, by treating her in a "in a shameful and inappropriate fashion."
ReplyDeleteYou are of course entitled to your own opinions but you are not going to advance your argument by mischaracterizing your opponents position.