A Reference to Julian Assange For Your Brief Amusement

My thanks to George Rolph for the sharing the following.

This is from the Huffington Post, of all places -- admittedly, not a publication that I read much. The article is handy, however, because it addresses the Julian Assange debacle -- which I have certainly kept up with, but (gasp!) haven't blogged about!

"Thank you again, Interpol. I know you will now prioritize the global manhunt for 1.3 million guys I have heard similar complaints about personally in the US alone -- there is an entire fraternity at the University of Texas you need to arrest immediately. I also have firsthand information that John Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, went to a stag party -- with strippers! -- that his girlfriend wanted him to skip, and that Mark Levinson in Corvallis, Oregon, did not notice that his girlfriend got a really cute new haircut -- even though it was THREE INCHES SHORTER."

And the author of this piece -- are you ready? It is the notoriously narcissistic, crybaby feminist Naomi Wolf! Mind you, Naomi is past her prime and not so high on the radar screen as erstwhile. But hey, she can still knock 'em dead, as we see presently. Right? But here is the link to the full article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/interpol-the-worlds-datin_b_793033.html

Now, this one comes straight from the department of "consider the source". The funny thing is, that Naomi Wolf's expressed opinion on the Julian Assange case so very closely matches my own! Truly, I would take exception to very little of this -- why, it could easily have been written by one of our more temperate MRAs! All except the bit about "suffragette foremothers", anyway.

To me, it almost sounds like Little Ms. Fire-with-fire is positioning herself -- or rather, re-positioning herself. And I don't even claim to know if she is consciously doing this, but on the objective surface of matters, something of the sort surely appears to be happening.

Anyhow, Naomi is practicing satire. She does it well, and yet . . . in so doing she reveals more about the true face of feminism then she is perhaps aware! The caricature of a ditzoid victim-feminist which she enacts for our entertainment, is in fact a chillingly accurate portrayal of what feminism in its naked essence, when pushed to its logical extreme, actually amounts to. Does it not occur to Naomi Wolf that what she narrates is no fantasy -- that INTERPOL is actually behaving in the way that she describes, that Swedish police are actually behaving along similar lines, and so on? And has it never once crossed her mind that feminism has been a critical guiding factor in the genesis and efflorescence of this whole imbroglio?

I will leave aside the distinct possibility that earthly powers are out to nail Julian Assange for more compelling reasons. After all, Naomi pays no mind to this.

So, Naomi Wolf plainly wants to distance herself. What she describes is not her feminism, you understand! And so she invites the lot of us -- moderate MRAs included! -- to join in the big, bright, happy club of Those Who Know Better, and to smirk happily along that primrose highway toward a big, bright, happy future of "true equality". . . or some such. Well, thank heavens I am not a moderate MRA!

You might gather that I don't think much of Naomi Wolf -- and that could be a whole essay in itself. But now let's hear from somebody else who doesn't care for Naomi. Only, this person takes aim from an opposite compass bearing. The party I will next introduce, blogs on Wordpress under the monniker of Hellonhairylegs -- that's "hell on hairy legs". And Hellonhairylegs is by self-description a radical feminist -- did the name give you a clue, perhaps?

In this blog post from almost precisely two years ago, Hellonhairylegs reams Naomi Wolf for her bestselling 1994 book Fire With Fire:

http://hellonhairylegs.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/fire-with-fire-naomi-wolf/

I left a comment on "Angry Hairy's" blog, and this presently awaits moderation. So for the sake of posterity I share it below:

How interesting that Naomi Wolf apparently "isn't radical enough". As a non-feminist outsider, beholding the discourse, as it were, 'from afar', the compression of perspective gives the illusion (to my eye, anyway) that the distance between Naomi, and the author of the present blog, isn't really much at all. Call it feminist subjectivism v. non-feminist objectivism.

And now, if I didn't make it clear above, here's at it again. In feminist terms, Naomi Wolf and Hairyhell have quite a gap between them. And it's true that if you are standing close-up, within the perimeter of the feminist world, you'll find this gap wide enough to accomodate a fleet of 18-wheelers, shoulder-to-shoulder. But the feminist world is small, and the distance which separates our world from their world is immensely greater than the space between a pair of squabbling insiders. Yes, objects viewed from a distance always look closer together.

Hairylegs shouldn't trouble herself that Naomi is creating a binary between Liberal and Radical feminism. That binary is and always has been false -- as Hairyhell would undoubtedly agree! For whether you call it a binary or otherwise, it is what it is. The future of liberal feminism is, and always has been, radical -- because that is the direction in which the logic naturally unfolds! Naomi Wolf rightly recognizes that women are a de facto ruling class. And the only reason that Hellonlegs doesn't recognize this is because, to her, women are not yet enough of a ruling class -- they don't quite rule sufficiently for her liking; she wants to secure MOAR power for them.

So finally, I don't want to see Naomi Wolf OR Hellonhairylegs in the driver's seat of sociopolitical power. They will both take us to the same place in the end, even if Naomi (a supremacist lite) drives slower and pays better attention to the road.

But, giving credit where credit is due, I was genuinely entertained by Naomi Wolf's opinion piece on Julian Assange, and I agree with most of it.