Reflections on Playboy: Amanda Marcotte’s road to hell paved with empathy

July 31, 2007

Amanda Marcotte’s road to hell paved with empathy

While researching my previous post, I browsed left-wing feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte’s recent work. It reminded me of why I get so angry at people who seem to think they own the patent on compassion while they support policies that unintentionally hurt the less fortunate.

I discovered Marcotte when she publicly called me a loser because I write a libertarian blog about Playboy. Still, she implicitly claims to feel sorry for me in this passage from a more recent post:

Update: August Pollak alerted me to an article in Campus Progress about the [Independent Women’s Forum] conference [on campus sex and dating], an article that seems a bit more honest about the ugly sexism on display. Contrary to my theory that men act like dicks a lot of the time because they’re living under some pretty ugly pressures, the ladies at IWF seem to think that men were born dogs. But you know, having an empathetic attitude towards male feelings [serves as] evidence that one is a man-hater. You only love men if you see them as no better than leg-humping dogs.

I can’t say why exactly Allison Kasic of the IWF fascinates me so much. I think it’s because she’s smart enough to have clued into the fact that there’s [something] disillusioning and miserable about the attitudes of so many young men towards young women, but she comes to the exact wrong conclusion about how to handle the issue, arguing that instead of combating the misogyny that’s handed down to young men as a birthright, we reinforce the sexist notion that female sexuality is more of a commodity than a set of autonomous female desires. She’s got a write-up of [the] IWF sex conference that the evil sleeper cell [right-]winger Dr. Drew [Pinsky] spoke at, and it’s just a train wreck of false assumptions and pie-in-the-sky hopes about how to coerce a less contemptuous attitude towards women from the frateratti.

[Personally, I don’t see Dr. Drew as belonging to the cultural right. Instead, he’s one of our too many vaguely left-leaning public-health busybodies. But as I explained in an earlier post, one shouldn’t expect Dr. Drew to have very consistent political convictions on anything. Now I’ll let Marcotte speak for herself some more.]

By the way, to calm the nerves that a paragraph like the before invariably ruffles, I’m not saying all college age men are pigs. But it’s been my experience that there’s a lot of pressure on men when they’re younger to demonstrate a certain level of contempt for young women in order to satisfy their male peers that they’re all man. As they get older, their priorities shift and some of the compulsive misogyny falls away for a lot of guys that were only into it half-heartedly. But when you’re actually in college, sometimes the amount of pressure on men to be disdainful towards women can be stifling. In fact, my heart goes out on a level to a lot of young men who find themselves in a situation where respect for women is simply incompatible with having camaraderie with men in college. It’s this tension that I think is driving a lot of the unhappiness with men coming from the college women at this conference that Kasic talks about.

Ah, but does Marcotte really know what empathy is? In opposing school choice, she effectively favors a public-school monopoly for America’s poor and middle-income families, who have much less discretionary income for private schooling than wealthier families. Let them eat cake, indeed. Besides the direct name-calling I’ve already mentioned, I believe I have good reasons to take her stance on school as a lack of true empathy for me, thank you very much:

1.) As time goes on, every wise and honest person will eventually recognize Judith Rich Harris as the Copernicus of child development. To the degree that misogyny among American men is the problem Marcotte says it is, it must be because of the way American ~~boys~~ children* socialize each other—and not a direct consequence of the way American parents treat their boys.

2.) Jokes about schoolyard bullying, even as presented in entertainments like The Simpsons and A Christmas Story, may become even more ambiguously funny after a study of Harris. After all, jokes about prison rape aren’t necessarily funny, either. It’s obviously not the moral equivalent, but the difference is only a matter of degree.

3.) In light of Harris’ scholarship, my seemingly endless guilt over my failure to stand up to my father when he was alive is certainly the effect, not the cause, of having such a horrible time with the brutal machismo of the public junior high school locker room. The only way I knew to preserve my self-respect in the face of the assault on it was to feel superior by being the biggest goody two-shoes in the room. Unfortunately, the ruse corrupted me until I was too sheepish in the face of authority, and too lacking in personal ambition, to grow up gracefully and become an unbitter adult. In principle, Marcotte surely hates that locker-room culture as much as I did. But since public-school gym class is too stupid and cruel to survive the rigors of a free market in education—especially if I had my way and teenagers weren’t the new niggers—she aids in the oppression of millions of young people of both sexes.

4.) Alarmingly, Marcotte doesn’t seem to worry about the creep-up in legal age of majority that has taken place for the last few generations of Americans. Compulsory high school is an historical aberration (like marijuana prohibition, cough). It shouldn’t be such a sacred cow across the political spectrum. Andrew Sullivan has made the mistake of supporting it, but somehow I wouldn’t expect him to play the more-empathic-than-thou game in debate about it that Marcotte does about feminism. (For the record, I support Playboy’s good-faith effort to ensure a minimum employee age of 18.) Five days out of every week are a needless sorority initiation for millions of girls during the difficult early years of puberty. Meanwhile, the heart of the teacher’s pet bleeds for 18-year-olds who get drunk and expose their breasts for Girls Gone Wild. The child is father to the man—and to the woman, too. (Sorry, ghost of Emily Dickinson, but you were right about long dashes being so much fun.)

5.) My credibility gap between Marcotte and Sullivan lies in the respective presence and absence of the Blank Slate doctrine in the mind of each. Between the two, Sullivan shows more respect for the influence of evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics on our policy debates. Nineteenth-century racists and sexists thought those sciences were on their side; twentieth-century racists and other dangerous idealists (Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Woodrow Wilson) are exposed as fools by them. (And yes, the sexual revolution which Playboy heralded has sometimes had Blank Slate conceits of its own, although I still don’t think that that revolution has always been wrong.)

Marcotte’s compassion for me as a man is at best the compassion of the elephant for the merchandise in a china shop. Her intellectual clumsiness makes the analogy fair. I already know that I can’t trust her to see my fascination with Playboy as something other than a kind of brainwashing. I don’t need her “empathetic” missionary work to save my tribe from devil worship. If that’s her agenda, can anyone blame me for resenting it?

By the way, the Playmate mentioned in the blog post that Marcotte favorably links to in her anti-GGW rant is Miss March 1987, Marina Baker (her Playboy Cyber Club [workers of the world, beware of breasts] headshot):

Baker is 39 now, and probably still smokin’ hot. Marcotte is pretty cute, in case that’s at all germane. But since she seems so militant about its possible effect on her credibility (“God knows someone like me could never just, oh, put up some erotic pictures of myself without losing all credibility forever amen”), I won’t post her photo here.

More dirt on Marcotte

*Update, 2:57 p.m.: I’m truly embarrassed by the sexism of my original draft.

Update, December 4, 2007, 8:38 p.m.: For a few months, the Baker JPEG was missing. Now it’s back.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:23 PM

Alec Leamas left this comment at July 31, 2007 2:50 PM
I just now discovered your blog and I find your characterization of Marcotte absolutely abhorrent.

How can a man who purports to appreciate female beauty consider Marcotte “cute?” I mean - come on now – that mug is incomplete without a Nylabone placed conspicuously between its jaws. I have some pictures of her and her greasy, undead-looking boyfriend that could make a Billy Goat puke.

By way of introduction, I am not a libertarian or a Libertarian, I am much more given to the preservation of Western Culture, and economically, I tend towards an updated iteration of non-coerced Distributism. The problem with Capitalism, to quote Chesterton, is too few capitalists. Having said this, I will state that Marcotte’s facile notion of libertarianism as articulated (rather poorly, at that) on the proffered webpage is offered in bad faith. But you should know by now that Marcotte’s entire raison detre is straw-manning, however the disturbing part is that it is not entirely clear that she is aware that generally speaking, in intellectual discussions one is not afforded the opportunity of substituting your characterization of another’s views as proofs of the correctness of your own. Its called “Marcottery.”

Now, having been banned from pandagon under several names and IP addresses (Marcotte, apparently, is ignorant of the “dynamic IP address) I ask you this – have you ever thought to openly question her assertion that women are entitled to rights equal to men? I mean, under the Constitution (actual, written and ratified), there is no mandate of equality between the sexes other than suffrage, so it would appear that the “equal rights” claim is founded in some extraneous and undefined moral business that is never explained nor defended but rather taken as self-evident despite the copious evidence to the contrary. I also believe that there is more evidence extant for the existence of the Easter Bunny than there is for the mythical patriarchy, the convenient empty vessel into which all manner of nastiness can be poured immediately before it is needed to demonstrate inequity. I suppose she would call me a bigot, which well may be true, but even in that event, it would prove neither actual or Constitutionally mandated equality between the sexes, nor the existence of the patriarchy. This is not to say that coerced inequality is a preferable policy, but I think Marcotte should give some account from whence this terrific notion of equality arises. I am certain that you find Marcotte Fantasy Land as interesting and amusing as I do.

Brian Sorgatz left this comment at July 31, 2007 6:05 PM
Thanks for the suggestion, Alec. But I think men and women do have an equal claim to individual liberty. As far as that goes, I have no quarrel with feminism.

Alec Leamas left this comment at August 1, 2007 9:37 AM
I believe that I was less than explicit: I believe that Marcotte and Company’s derision was particularly directed at the libertarian foundation myth of the social contract, and as such, her preferred foundation myth – viz, that there exists a conspiracy of men known as the “patriarchy” to systematically disadvantage and enslave women, whether they know it or not, and whether they enjoy their state of affairs or not – deserves to be challenged for wont of evidence. I think that turnabout, in that instance, is more than fair play. The extent and meaning of women’s individual liberty, and whether the government may acknowledge natural distinctions and predilections between the sexes, or whether government must compensate and remedy inequities, would seem to be a matter of some extraneous moral requirement subject to policy debate – arguendo, I’m not taking a side – but certainly Marcotte’s preferred state of affairs cannot be said to be compelled by reason or law.

sir jorge left this comment at August 4, 2007 12:49 PM
Another great post!

Brian Sorgatz left this comment at August 4, 2007 1:50 PM
Thank you, Sir Jorge. I worked particularly hard on this one, and I take particular pride in it. Did you know that my birthday is el día de San Jorge?

Robert Paulson left this comment at August 13, 2007 8:04 AM
Brian, you breathed the same air as the Goddess Miriam Gonzales, and you let a post by Marcotte stick to you?

BTW, Marina Baker is another Goddess. I had just bought the issue with her in it [March 1987] at Cal State Fullerton and was reading it between classes when I heard on the radio that U2 was playing a free concert in downtown LA. Good thing I didn't bother making the drive since the cops shut it down long before I would have gotten there.

Where was I?, oh yeah, Marcotte. Ughh, back to Marina Baker. She was hot. Dare I say, Centerfold with the greatest hips? I will say it!

P.S. the back to back Centerfolds of Marina Baker [03/87] and Anna Smith [04/87] were perhaps the greatest 1 2 punch since Patricia Farinelli [12/81] and Kimberly McArthur [01/82].

Brian Sorgatz left this comment at August 13, 2007 11:47 AM
Robert,
Thanks for the input. But the April 1987 Playmate is Anna Clark, not Smith.

July 31, 2007

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