WrongBot

To be honest, I expected a little better from a blog titled Feminism, Sex, and the Liberated Mind. And, well, this Halloween piece starts out okay. Commercialism bad, objectification bad, sexism bad, and so on. Not the most original of sentiments, sure, but this stuff sort of explodes all over the place in the days leading up to Halloween each year. So, no points lost so far. By paragraph three the language starts to get a little worrisome, but still, relatively safe territory. Young girls dressing sluttishly opening the door for pedophilia is an argument I'm not sure I'd agree with, but it's still well within the realm of reasoned disagreement.

Oh, but by paragraph four this article's earlier promise has been thoroughly fulfilled. Sluts! Sluts everywhere! They're cold and I want to slap them! Jessica definitely doesn't like sluts. And she sure doesn't want girls to have "the expectation that Halloween is a time to dress like a slut and get away with it" (emphasis mine). Because no one should get away with being a slut. Women should be punished for dressing immodestly, and we can't allow girls to grow up thinking that it's okay for them to be loose women. It's all the fault of "expectations laid down by the porn industry," corrupting our youth and convincing them to act like whores. Also, objectification! The only reason women dress like sluts on Halloween is so that men will look at them, and that's bad!

I've run out of palms for my face. To be honest, I'm not even sure where to start. This person holds a graduate degree! And her other posts aren't much better, judging by this post's argument that capitalism is sexist because women's shoes are more expensive than men's.

Okay, wait. I do know where to start. Jessica calls herself a feminist. This is, more than anything else, my problem. People are going to run around thinking (and saying) dumb things. That's basically inevitable, and if I were to write angry blog posts at all of them (what power I have!), I'd never have time go out and do all the things they disapprove of. But being a misogynist while calling yourself a feminist, that's a little different. That's pushed me into flame-mode. There are few things I like less than hypocrisy (broccoli and cryptic error messages are the only things that come to mind).

Some people think that sex is shameful or wrong and that it should be carefully controlled and performed only with your One True Love or only in the confines of marriage. Or performed not at all. And some "feminists" hold this view. I use the scare-quotes because I am thoroughly convinced that this opinion is incompatible with anything even resembling feminism. But there's a shocking amount of disagreement about this, so I will lay out my argument as carefully as I can:

• If a type of behavior causes harm to both those who practice it and those who do not, and offers no benefit to anyone, it's bad.
• Promiscuity is such a behavior, according to this line of thinking. It's bad for "good" women, and women who are promiscuous can't possibly be happy.
• So, women who are promiscuous are acting badly.
• If they're acting badly and it's not making them happy, then they must be misguided.
• So all women who have made the choice to be promiscuous are misguided.
• Thus, no woman could ever reasonably choose to be promiscuous of her own free will.

This line of reasoning leads us to the conclusion that there are some choices that reasonable women just can't make. So no matter what a woman says about how happy and fulfilled she is, if she's promiscuous she's either misguided or lying. Now, I've always thought that feminism was about giving more freedom to women. It strikes me as anathema to its central tenets to instead try to take freedoms away from women, but that's exactly what Jessica and the many people who agree with her are doing. Though really, it's worse than that. They're not just trying to take away the freedom to behave a certain way, they're trying to take away the freedom to even disagree. If you disagree with them, you're not just wrong, you've been influenced by pornography. Or the patriarchy. You can't possibly hold the opinion that you do of your own free will, because no real woman would think that way.

Luckily, there are plenty of sane people out there who don't hold this view. Some of them even let Dan Savage write in a newspaper! In his infinite wisdom, he has defended the wonderful hetero-sluttiness of Halloween, making the argument that it's just the holiday that straight people need, as they head down the road to being less sexually repressed. Go read it. I'm out of things to say, and he's more articulate than I am.