Jerkwads of Occupy Wall Street by Alex Snider

There's a lot of Internet discussion on whether sexist, objectifying video and Tumblr Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street is sexist and objectifies the women featured. Most women and feminists and some guys are in agreement that yep, a video which reduces women to pretty faces is misogyny at work.

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The Worst: Margaret Wente

Another day, another gem from national treasure, Margaret Wente who this time sets her sights and in depth knowledge of non-neurotypical behaviour on Norwegian terrorist, Anders Breivik. She begins by addressing the growing concern that the vitriolic rantings of right-wing writers such as Mark Steyn have fed into a culture of Islamophobia and encouraged Breivik. Quoting terrorism expert, Mark Sagement, who said in the New York Times that "this rhetoric (the anti-immigration/multiculturalism/Muslim)...is not cost-free". But, Margaret Wente knows better than a silly old terrorism expert! She quotes another commentator  who wrote on Al Jazeera's English-language site that Breivik's rampage demonstrates “the extent to which reactionary bigotry has infected mainstream thought”. 

She follows up with her own deep, thought-provoking opinion that because Norway doesn't have an extreme right-wing political party, the constant stream of anti-anti-immigration/multiculturalism/Muslim can't be that pervasive. Good stuff. Wente is never all that in touch with her white, upper-middle class privilege but can she really believe that there hasn't been an increase racialized discrimination against Muslim people (and Arab people in general) since 9/11? Not to mention France's veil ban, talk in the Netherlands about banning the Koran, Switzerland banning  minarets, just to name a few major examples of Islamophobia in Western Europe, countries a stone's throw from Norway. 

OK, great, so far so good, Wente thinks y'all are just overreacting to a bunch of right-wingers who use their platforms to propagate hate. But then, not satisfied with her blatantly wrong assessment of how insidious and dangerous hate propaganda can be (at the risk of going full-Godwin: um, Margaret, open a history book and read about the Holocaust), she had to go full out Ableist and, informed by her vast knowledge of mental illness, suggest that Breivik is simply "crazy". 

My question is, what the fuck does "crazy" mean? Last I checked there was no listing in the DSM for "crazy". I guess Wente means that he suffers from a mental illness. Him and millions of other people in the world, like me. 

And what mental illness are we talking about? Depression? Schizophrenia? ADD? Anxiety? Which one makes a person more likely to murder 76 people? 

It's time to retire the exhausted habit of blaming mental illness for terrible things that people do. It's time to acknowledge that mentally ill people are statistically more likely to self-harm than ever harm someone else. It's time to stop equating violence with mental illness. This line of thinking lets people like Breivik (not to mention people like Steyn which I guess is the whole point) off the hook and it stigmatizes mental illness further.

Even if it is revealed that Breivik suffers from a mental illness, that doesn't excuse or explain why he murdered all those people nor does it explain his 1500 page manifesto. And it certainly doesn't absolve all those right-wing hate-mongers who have so influenced the rampant Islamophobia. 

Worst Person of the Week: The Dick-Weed Who Writes that Shitty Comic, Dilbert

Scott Adams is an idiot. To save you the painful experience of actually going to his blog here is a summary of his post entitled Pegs and Holes (yep):

Scott Adams thinks that a vast woman conspiracy is keeping men from doing what they really want which is to rape women ALL THE TIME. It's man's nature, yo! And, this incessant rape-policing is making men unhappy. Need an example? Lions eat zebras who dare drink water! Need another less convoluted example? Well, everyman, Hugh Hefner, tried to get married and something, something, something... MEN JUST WANNA RAPE WOMENZ! Don't worry, there's a solution! No, it's not that society should condemn rape and rape culture, it's that everyone should be drugged so that sex becomes a thing of the past like that amazing show, Outback Jack! And, let's hope, Dilbert.

Good grief. Scott, just because you want to rape women doesn't mean that every other man is with you or that you are justified in raping a woman by quoting evolutionary science or that you are anything other than a piece of human garbage. 

Worst Person of the Week: Bret Easton Ellis

Remember when all we talked about when we talked about Bret Easton Ellis was whether or not American Psycho was horribly misogynistic, or a feminist novel in disguise? Actually, I think only BEE really argued that. When feminists condemned it's  "degradation, evisceration, and brutalization of women" while Mary Harron directed the better-than-the-novel-but-still-difficult-to-watch movie adaptation? I love Harron, and Ellis has a lot to thank her for, and yet all he could muster up in an interview was basically that she did a better job with it than he would have expected from a woman director.Yeah, maybe it was a satire, but was the glamorization of all that violence really necessary? It got people talking, but I think at this point we're all pretty sure that the book fetishized something that should never, ever be fetishized. Those were far simpler times, weren't they?

Now, it seems BEE can't keep his mouth shut, and everything that comes out of it is specifically intended to keep him in his ever shrinking spotlight. His latest tweet is Ellis' attempt at #winning the Post-Empire game. Too bad he doesn't realize it's a game he made up and he's the only one actually playing. As with Charlie Sheen, there's something quite sad about his out of touch posturing, his desperate attempts to stay relevant in a post-post-empire world where people do actually give a damn about things. That's right, "Post-Empire" may have actually meant something at the height of 80s excess and consumerism, or for the apathetic hipsters of a post-9/11 Bush-era, but the second decade of the 21st century is about caring about people and about making our communities and the world around us a better fucking place to live. BEE would probably brush me off as being so totally "Empire" and therefore irrelevant and not worthy of his time, but if he stepped outside he'd see that there is a newfound earnestness out there that is like a breath of fresh air after the last 10 years of apathy! Ellis  may not actually believe any of the shit he says, in fact he probably doesn't believe in anything but himself. He's grasping on to the last little bit of fame he has left, and he reeks of desperation. 

1. The Recent Tweet

via Shakesville

2. This Little Gem:

"There's something about the medium of film itself that I think requires the male gaze...We're watching, and we're aroused by looking, whereas I don't think women respond that way to films, just because of how they're built...I think, to a degree, all the women I named aren't particularly visual directors. You could argue that Lost in Translation is beautiful, but is that [cinematographer Lance Acord]? I don't know. Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn't a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don't know. I think it's a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility. I mean, the best art is made under not an indifference to, but a neutrality [toward] the kind of emotionalism that I think can be a trap for women directors."

(via Women And Hollywood)

3. The Gimmick He Used To Try And Sell His Last Book:

via Shakesville and also read this at Jezebel

4. The stupid Fucking Tripe He Wrote on Charlie Sheen Last Month:

"Look, I’m not denying he has drug and alcohol problems, and perhaps even struggles with mental illness, but so do a lot of people in Hollywood who hide it so much better or that the celebrity press just doesn’t care enough about, and I’m not denying that Sheen is exploiting a problematic situation that he has helped create. But you can’t step around the fact that the negativity certain people feel about Sheen has never outweighed our fascination with the hedonism Charlie enjoys and which remains the envy of any man—if only women weren’t around to keep them liars. His supposed propensity for violence against women hasn’t hurt his popularity with female fans either..."

(via The Daily Beast) 

 5. Oh Yeah, This:

He's a fucking hack piece of shit writer that will soon be forgotten. Glamourama? Did anybody actually like that shit? Did anybody read his last book? Does anybody actually care about any of this crap? His work is empty and soulless, just like him.

(Paraphrasing what Alex just said when I told her what I was writingt)