
Call me old-fashioned but I’m not big on calling women “whore” or some permutation of the word, especially women who are trying to do something good for someone. To me the only time it might be appropriate to make such a reference is when a woman has done something especially horrid, like Shana Brown, a woman I happily referred to as a gutterslut when she was caught drugging her 13-year-old daughter so her boyfriend could rape her.
Outside of that level of depravity I think it’s disgusting to call a woman a slut or whore. I don’t care if they are Internet models, porn stars, strippers or the girl you know who is cheating on her boyfriend, it is immature misogyny to call a woman a whore simply because you happen to not like or approve of some facet of their life. It is a crass and unmanly position to take in all but the most extreme circumstances.
Shamefully there are those that disagree and happily attempt to degrade any woman that draws their petty ire. During the ’08 elections I wrote about adult film actress Gauge suffering outrageous personal attacks from her “fans” after writing what was essentially Republican boiler plate about supporting John McCain because she was pro-life and pro-Second Amendment. In that case there was a hypocritical element to the attacks because she was abused with comments like this:
Hey Gauge, I just watched a video of you fucking 5 guys. Please tell us again how wrong irresponsible sex is. I’ve seen a lot of your work but you never had the guys wear condoms. Don’t you think it’s irresponsible to engage in unsafe sex? How many STD’s have you had? Considering how big a skank you are, I bet you’ve had a lot. Well since your boy McCain is crashing and burning, I can’t wait for the election. Obama is going to win in a landslide.
This of course from someone who watches her movies. This liberal, as I said on that post, viewed women like Gauge as de facto sex slaves who perform deviant acts for their pleasure and aren’t entitled to be anything more that a girl on a DVD doing things that are marketed to people whose self-loathing and anger makes them want to see attractive women degraded. I don’t like modern pornography, which has replaced hedonism with humiliation and decadence with degradation, but the people who attacked Gauge are fans of that. They are the ones who should be ashamed, not Gauge.
Now in a similar incident Tila Tequila was apparently called a whore by “Perez Hilton”after pictures of her in lingerie and a trenchcoat showed up on gossip blogs. The rotund celebrity parasite didn’t provide his emotionally stunted followers the context for these photos apparently. It seems the world’s most famous Internet model was raising money for a breast cancer charity:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWNJD7ST7MI[/youtube]
Think what you want of Tila Tequila, and I happen to think she exemplifies Capitalism and American exceptionalism as I’ve said before, but here’s a woman taking time to help the Keep-a-Breast foundation and while doing that she is called a whore by not just a narcissistic star-stalker but by the rabble of ne’er-do-wells who seem to travel from website to website calling this person who they’ll never meet and will have no effect on their lives vile names. My question is why?
There’s an essay by Anton LaVey (I think it’s in The Devil’s Notebook but I’m not sure) in which he examines misogyny and comes to the conclusion that the misogynist is competing with women for male attention, and his anger derives from his failure to win that competition. Using such now eyebrow raising phrases as “closeted homosexual” for men like this he implies that they are predominantly stunted people who live in a permanent state of semi-girlish pre-adolescence. With the ever more misogynist pornography, attacks on female political figures and and the abandonment of the ideas of womanhood being something to respect I think this essay has become more important than ever.
Were this simply a spat between two celebrities this story would be meaningless but Perez Hilton’s brand of envious misogyny has become an acceptable stance for men to have regarding women. One need only check the comments on some YouTube video or article that allows comments to see men partaking in what is essentially gender specific class envy where women like Tila Tequila are claimed to be deserving of abuse simply because they are successful.
The same jealousy and misanthropy that drives class warfare drive the hatred of pretty, rich and famous women who a large segment of our society believes are “whores” for simply living their own lives. That would be bad enough itself but in this instance a woman doing a good deed, one that anyone who has the opportunity to do should do, is being attacked for no other reason than that it is now acceptable to treat women poorly in our society.
Call me “Conservative” but I believe in respecting women, even ones you may not agree with. I don’t believe in infantilizing women by any means, I think respecting a person means treating them as individuals equal to yourself, but I simply won’t accept that it is O.K. for a man to call a woman a whore simply because she has a photo of herself in lingerie when she’s basically a lingerie model. I don’t think it’s acceptable to encourage degradation in porn by buying the mot extreme forms of it, then claim adult film actresses are skanks for working in the industry which you created. I think men should reserve name calling for the Shana Browns of the world, not women who are simply minding their own business.
I’m not a misogynist. I like women, even ones I disagree with, and think that all are worthy of respect. But it seems that this is a minority view these days.
Update: Welcome Tila Tequila fans! Due to a surge in traffic to the site, comments are taking a few minutes to appear. Please be patient, and thanks for reading.