October 8, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Essays by Ilana
Mercer and Christopher DeGroot, and Some Comments on the Feminist Beast of the
Apocalypse
Friends,
Today I
pass on two essays which you may not have seen. Both are by friends whose
writing and work I greatly esteem.
The first
is by national columnist Ilana Mercer, and it explores the striking
psychological and scientific deceptions present in much of our current age’s
dependence on psycho-therapy, in particular, on the idea of “recovered memory”
as a reliable factor in any type of sexual abuse situation. This is the kind of
detailed data and information that should have been utilized by the Republican
senators in their consideration of the Christine Blasey Ford account.
Secondly,
I pass on a superb essay by Christopher DeGroot which addresses sexual
manipulation and its quite profound and disastrous consequences in our modern
society—and its uses as a mechanism to control and dominate.
Thankfully,
the Kavanaugh confirmation process is over, indelibly imprinted on our
consciousness and forced on us each time we flipped the television switch, or
signed on to the Web. As far too many columnists and on air commentators have
endlessly expounded, what we have just witnessed is a giant watershed, the fearful
emergence of something that has been there, that has been festering culturally
and infectiously in our midst for decades, even for more than a century—but that
now has surfaced, full-blown, palpably and visibly for all who have eyes to see
and half a brain to think.
For mirror
imagery none is better than St. John in his Apocalypse (ch. 13):
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out
of the sea…and upon his heads the name of blasphemy….and they worshipped the
beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And
there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies…. And he opened his mouth in
blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that
dwell in heaven. And it
was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power
was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. And all that dwell upon the
earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the
Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. If any man have an ear, let
him hear [vs. 1-9, excerpts]
Indeed,
the passage is filled with imagery, and it has been employed in similar
fashion in the past each time an immense catastrophe or convulsion seems to
threaten the foundations of our civilization and the orthodox beliefs of
millions. Were not the challenges of world Communism, or perhaps of Hitler, or even
of the French Revolution focused in analogous terms, at least by some authors?
Yet—and I
find this to be a significant difference between those cataclysmic assaults on
the Christian West and what is transpiring today—each of those previous
challenges, including the Communist one, did not, in fact, attempt to overturn
and completely negate the moral order of nature, itself. That is, even though
proposing—and attempting—to create a new natural order in society, imposing an unnatural egalitarianism and destroying the inherited traditional structure of
society, those earlier revolutions left more or less in tact the reality of
sexual and functional differentiation and the importance and centrality of the family
in their “new orders.” Of course, lip
service was paid to equality and the supposed liberation of the female sex; but
the reality was far different, as Joseph Stalin and those commissars reviewing
the troops on each May Day in Moscow made crystal clear.
In fact,
the new promised egalitarianism in the Soviet spheres meant only that one
oligarchy replaced an older one: equality was a fraud and never could exist,
even by force.
Today the latest revolutionary fervor, feminism in all its
forms and disguises, not only rejects any remnant of the old morality, but is
in full and open rebellion against the natural moral order, feverishly seeking its
virulent and violent overthrow and the upending of the laws of nature and of
physiology. And that includes the submission of men to a new and totalitarian
matriarchy, under pain of hounding them out of the workplace or the kind of
treatment Brett Kavanaugh received, whether for a Supreme Court nominee or for
the guy down the street who stole a kiss from a girl way back in primary school
forty years ago.
It makes
little difference to today’s fanatics: It is not equality they want or desire;
it is authoritarian domination and a control that even Stalin and the radical Jacobin
Montagnards of the French Revolution never allowed, for they intuitively
realized its destructiveness and insanity.
It
manifests its awful face in such statements as the following by a supposedly
respected professor of security studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of
Foreign Service, Christine Fair, who declared online: “Look at
thus [sic] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist's arrogated
entitlement…All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they
take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine?
Yes….F--k them.” [https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=11374]
But that is where we are: a society ravaged by raving and frenzied
Harpies, outside rationality, who have been educated and instructed on what to
think in ideologically-extreme hothouses called colleges, conditioned by cult-like
psycho-babblers who have replaced the priesthood and pastors as counselors, encouraged
and goaded on by a tendentious culturally Marxist media and entertainment
conglomerate, and funded by global revolutionaries like George Soros. It may
not be a Beast of the Apocalypse, but it surely comes close.
Now, here are the essays by Ilana Mercer and Christopher
DeGroot:
Christine Blasey Ford and Her Hippocampus
Ilana
Mercer Posted:
Oct 05, 2018 12:00 PM
One of many cringe-making moments in Christine Blasey Ford’s protracted
complaint before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and the country—was an
affectation-dripping reference to her hippocampus. “Indelible in the
hippocampus” was the memory of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually
assaulting her, some 36 years back, asserted Ford.
With that, the good “doctor” was making a false appeal to scientific authority.
Ford had just planted a falsity in the nation’s collective consciousness. The
accuser was demanding that the country believe her and her hippocampus.
All nonsense on stilts.
We want to believe that our minds record the events of our lives meticulously,
and that buried in the permafrost of our brain, perfectly preserved, is the key
to our woes. Unfortunately, scientific research negates the notion that
forgotten memories exist somewhere in the brain and can be accessed in pristine
form.
Granted, we don’t know whether “She Who Must Never Be Questioned”
recovered the Judge Kavanaugh memory in therapy. That’s because, well, she must
never be questioned. Questioning the left’s latest sacred cow is forbidden. Bovine
Republicans blindly obey.
I happened to have covered and thoroughly researched the “recovered memory ruse,” in
1999. Against the prevailing trend, one of my own heroes is not Christine Ford,
but a leading world authority on memory, Elizabeth Loftus. Professor Loftus,
who straddles two professorships—one in law, the other in psychology—had come
to Vancouver, British Columbia, to testify on behalf of a dedicated Richmond
educator, a good man, who had endured three trials, the loss of a career and
financial ruin because of the Crown's attempts to convict him of sexual assault
based on memories recovered in therapy.
I attended. I was awed.
Over decades of research, Loftus was able to plant many a false memory in
the minds of her research subjects, sometimes with the aid of nothing more than
a conversation peppered with some suggestions. "A tone of voice, a
phrasing of a question, subtle non-verbal signals, and expressions of boredom,
impatience or fascination"—these are often all it takes to plant
suggestions—false memory—in the malleable human mind.
Loftus does not question the fact of the sexual abuse of children or the
existence of traumatic memories. What she questions are memories commonly
referred to as repressed: "Memories that did not exist until someone went
looking for them." Suffice it to say, that the memory recovery
process is a therapeutic confidence trick that has wreaked havoc in thousands
of lives.
Moreover, repression, the sagging concept that props up the recovered
memory theory is without any cogent scientific support. The 30-odd studies the
recovery movement uses as proof for repression do not make the grade. These
studies are retrospective memory studies which rely on self-reports with no
independent, factual corroboration of information.
Sound familiar? Dr. Ford (and her hippocampus), anyone?
Even in the absence of outside influence, memory deteriorates rapidly.
"As time goes by," writes Loftus in her seminal book, “The Myth of
Repressed Memories,” “the weakened memories are increasingly vulnerable to
post-event information."
What we see on TV, read and hear about events is incorporated into memory
to create an unreliable amalgam of fact and fiction.
After an extensive investigation, the British Royal College of
Psychiatrists issued a ban prohibiting its members from using any method to
recover memories of child abuse. Memory retrieval techniques, say the British
guidelines, are dangerous methods of persuasion. Recovered
memories," inveighed Alan Gold, then president of the Canadian Criminal
Lawyers Association, "are joining electroshock, lobotomies and other
psychiatric malpractice in the historical dustbin."
Not that you’d know it from the current climate of sexual hysteria, but
the courts in the U.S. had responded as well by ruling to suppress the
admission of all evidence remembered under therapy.
Altogether it seems as clear in 2018, as it was in 1999: Memories that have been
excavated during therapy have no place in a court of law. Or, for that matter,
in a Senate Committee that shapes the very same justice system.
================================================
A Story of Sexual Manipulation
Women should use their beauty to get ahead, says sociologist Catherine Hakim, an advocate for the special value of “erotic capital.” The maverick Camille Paglia agrees. Like Hakim, though in a pungent and polemical manner, she’s long encouraged women to do so. Both women seem refreshing contrasts to feminist scolds.
Good advice
for women, you may think, but in the present climate women leveraging their
attractiveness to advance in areas where it’s not actually relevant can be bad
news for men. For it allows for irresponsible and—even worse—manipulative
behavior, which many people, given their deep, unconscious paternalism in favor of women, are unlikely
to notice. Nor is justice served by such female privilege and bias against men.
Consider the Harvey Weinstein video that
recently went viral. Taken in September 2011, it shows Weinstein and a woman
named Melissa Thompson at the Weinstein Company offices in New York. Twenty-eight
at the time, Thompson wanted to pitch her tech start-up company’s new video and
analytics service to the man, then so powerful. Thompson says she showed up
expecting to meet with Weinstein’s marketing team, but it’s unclear why she had
that expectation. Did she get it from Weinstein himself? Or did she assume,
based on past experience in such situations, that that would happen? As part of
the demo, Thompson recorded their meeting.
While they discuss business each flirts with the other, the man
leading the way, as is usually the case between the sexes. According to
Thompson, who is suing Weinstein, after the initial meeting they met later that
night at the Tribeca Grand Hotel lobby. She went back to his room with him and,
once inside, Weinstein raped her, she claims. Weinstein denies all
nonconsensual sexual contact, his lawyer describing Thompson as a cynical
opportunist.
There
are…exchanges when she engages with Weinstein, leans towards him, touches or
play punches his shoulder and arm, and responds to questions about her personal
life. During one interaction they are talking about the video platform and Ms
Thompson says to Weinstein: “Data’s so hot right?”Asked by
Thomas-Peter whether she had led Weinstein on, Thompson said: “I don’t think
I purposely encouraged
him.”
The italics
are mine, because here the key word—so psychologically revealing—is
“purposely,” suggesting as it does that Thompson was never honest with herself
in the first place about her own manipulative intent. We are to believe,
evidently, that an external
force—perhaps some phallogocentric phantom—came over her when she
flirted with Weinstein both physically and verbally. Twenty-eight years old and
having her own company, Melissa Thompson, but in eros as clueless and helpless
as a child. She did not “purposely” lead Weinstein on. She did not “purposely”
repeatedly tell him he can flirt with her—one of the earliest topics of their
conservation—nor did she “purposely” let him run his hand up her leg under her
dress and caress her shoulders. It all just, like, happened, like, you know.
Needless to say, Harvey Weinstein is a creep and I’ve no desire to
defend his behavior in general. It must be said, though, that this rape
allegation seems rather dubious. Maybe Weinstein did rape Thompson, but in any
event she flirted with him and allowed him to do the same when they were alone
together earlier in his office. If Thompson didn’t want to be intimate with
Weinstein, she shouldn’t have gone back to his room.
Simple, isn’t it? “No, Harvey, I’m not interested in that.”
“But she wanted him to become her client,” some will say.
Once again: “No, Harvey, I’m not interested in that.”
Not every client is worth having; not every compromise is worth
making.
The fair sex, to be sure, is often wrongly pressured by men to
compromise themselves. But if they don’t want to play the dirty game, then they
must not play it. In a perfect world there wouldn’t be any Weinsteins, but in
our world there are Weinsteins, lots of them.
Nor are men alone a problem. For what many women want, it’s clear,
is to manipulate men like Weinstein without actually having sex. So it is with
Thompson. She wanted to use teasing deception to obtain her ends. She wanted to
obtain a good—Weinstein, with all his connections, as a client—without actually
doing the deed with the man.
Doubtless Weinstein, ever seeking to leverage his power, wanted to
use Thompson just as he had many other women. Yet in this crass
instrumentalism—hardly unusual in eros now—he and Thompson are very much
alike, and the following statement of hers smacks of projection:
I
think [he] was playing a cat-and-mouse game from the very beginning to see how
far he could push me, and what my reactions might be, so that he could gauge…how
he would play me; where my levers where, what were my vulnerabilities.
Behold
Thompson’s self-delusion. How oblivious, this woman, to her own cat-and-mouse game,
as if she weren’t trying to play him, too. It’s more accurate, even, to call
hers a bait-and-switch game. For having baited Weinstein with the idea of sex
in order to get his business, she now switches her story, and indeed with a
lawsuit in view. Aided by selective memory, she affects to be innocent. Out
comes Thompson’s tape—seven years after it was recorded. What took so long?
Here fill in the mind-numbingly predictable talking points, as reliable as the
ending of a Lifetime movie: “I saw that other brave women had broken their
silence. I didn’t want to be complicit in letting this happen again. If I
didn’t take a stand…”
I don’t doubt
Thompson’s sincerity. But I believe her account of what transpired is
inaccurate, an effect of self-deception. She’s a true believer, Thompson—that
is to say, truly self-deceived. For she doesn’t want to face her own
manipulative intent, and in her hurt feelings, in her accurate awareness of
having been used, she’s turned Weinstein’s manipulation of her into rape. Such mental gymnastics are far
more common than people realize, and correlate closely to the loss of traditional mores since
the sexual revolution. Men and women are now freer than ever before to exploit
one another, and so, in their different ways, they do.
But though
Thompson has fooled herself, why should she expect to fool us? The reason is
that self-delusion, by its very
nature, entails a willful misunderstanding of events, with the result that they
subsequently appear to you other than they actually were. The truth thus
obscured, you cannot but expect others to perceive as you do. Alas for the
pretender, the discordance with reality gives the game away to others. “It may
justly be concluded,” said Dr.
Johnson, “that it is not easy for a man to know himself, for wheresoever we
turn our view, we shall find almost all with whom we converse so nearly as to
judge of their sentiments, indulging more favorable conceptions of their own
virtue than they have been able to impress upon others, and congratulating
themselves upon degrees of excellence.”
What men see as mixed signals, women experience as reality itself
as they surf hypergamy’s whimsical waves. Older women used to teach young women
that certain actions have a symbolic meaning. From them young women would learn
to set firm boundaries, and not to tease a man if you don’t want him to come on
to you. Not going back to a man’s room when sex is not desired—this was common
sense. Today anything goes. Today traditional good sense, according to feminist
obtuseness, is considered “blaming the victim.” “Where’s my cake, wicked
patriarch?! What?! I can’t have it and eat it, too?!
Women from outside of the Western
world, their minds not ruined by other women, but used to following
customs created by men, tend to find facile talk about “blaming the victim”
bizarre, and I have met many who regard it with contempt. “How silly, how
childish are these feminist women,” they think. And it’s constantly lost on
feminists, the irony that by failing to take responsibility for their behavior,
women only reveal that they are not really serious about “gender equality,” but
rather want special treatment. Indeed, they want chivalry smuggled in under equality’s
name.
Thus feminists
show that all along their feminism was motivated by mere
status envy: They want the same worldly esteem men
get—and who can blame them?—but are unfit to navigate the sexual jungle. Well, that’s
certainly disappointing for feminists—all stunners forever in demand—but
perhaps Rosie O’Donnell, Hillary Clinton, or some other national sage can lead
a quilt-making revival: Diversion, after all, is as good as it gets in this
world.
Watching the
two videos—Thompson’s meeting with Weinstein and her subsequent commentary on
it to Hannah Thomas-Peter—the woman seems to be two different people. Seven
years later, she’s now overweight, her hair short, wearing schoolmarm glasses.
It’s as if she was given a makeover by the Women’s Studies department at
Berkeley! Is Thompson taking revenge, at bottom, on her own declining sexual market value?
Whatever actually happened between her and Harvey Weinstein,
Melissa Thompson might have learned a lesson about the need for responsible,
adult behavior in the sexual domain. Instead, she’s gone the familiar feminist
route, a partisan of moralistic banalities:
We
don’t have to live with things that are illegal and abusive.
We
don’t have to live with being raped when we think we are going to a business
meeting.
Pass the chocolate cake, big sister—#MeToo!
As ever, the media is happy to cash in. Notice that, despite
having published a video that, if anything, would seem to discredit Thompson,
Sky News nevertheless gives us the clickbait headlines: “Video shows Harvey
Weinstein behaving inappropriately with businesswoman,” and “The producer is
heard telling Melissa Thompson he wants to ‘have a little part’ of her in a
meeting to discuss her tech firm.” Nothing here about Thompson’s own
manipulation and mixed signals. The more damsels in distress, the better for
advertisers.
In the present
climate, of course, it is perfectly acceptable to talk about the many bad
things that men do. For progressives, in fact, doing so appears to be a sign of
moral sophistication, what intelligent and educated and, above all, good people
do. It is not so with women. Their evils are unspeakable, even if the manipulations of Sen.
Dianne Feinstein, Christine Ford, and her attorney Debra Katz would have cost
Judge Brett Kavanaugh confirmation to the Supreme Court. For again, when it
comes to women’s culpability, paternal bias toward them
hinders objective thought, and quite unawares. Thus, sex and romance, though
endlessly complex, are made to seem rather simple: All will be well if only
those horrible men get in line.
The simplification of eros goes on in the age of unfettered
sexuality, when even eminent scholars like Catherine Hakim and Camille Paglia
counsel women, in so many words: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” Man is to be
enticed by his greatest pleasure, yet one false slip, or false accusation, and
God help him. And all the while, owing to paternalist bias toward women, everybody
is supposed to believe the #MeToo movement is altogether pure. That it is—like
so many things human—rather mixed, nobody is supposed to acknowledge.
Anyway, if we
really care about equality, we must be willing to make both sexes accountable for their behavior. We must be willing to
accept that sex is darkly complex. Otherwise we are merely hypocrites, women
shall have a license to perpetual childhood, and no man
will be safe from false accusations.
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