OK, so this summer Cassius and I got in a big argument about personal, not political or ethical, issues, and it was several months before I talked to him again. I happened to see him around and he admitted that he had made a total ass of himself and apologized and asked if we could start hanging out once in a while again. I, feeling generous and partially forgetting all the stuff about his personal ethics that skeeve me out, agreed. So on Friday I ran in to him on my way home and he and I sat down and had a cup of coffee together and we were talking about literature, my thesis and the research I’ve done on John Clare, mostly, when he breaks this question out on me: So, do you think that, if Clare were only rediscovered just now, he wouldn’t get any attention because he’s a white male?
...As you can see, Cassius and I became friends because he and I have similar interests: poetry, leftist politics, veg*ism, Buddhism: what could possibly freaking go wrong? A lot. Namely that Cassius is one of our numerous and plentiful Racist and Sexist Liberals In Disguise. That’s right! He’s an academic, he thinks that there’s nothing inherently wrong with black people (although “the culture they’ve created” might be another story) and he never once said that women don’t belong in academia. However, I have oft caught him saying things that you would think would come out of the mouth of an MRA (granted, he said this stuff to me before my feminism was as developed as it is now): “but men don’t have support groups, we don’t have any of the stuff that women have, we’re the ones discriminated against” as well as racial profiling in traffic (as I said over at Sylvia’s, yelling “Nice one, Shaqueesha!” when a black woman cuts him off, but since he doesn’t yell it out the window at the black woman, it’s not racist), and do stupid sexist shit like making fun of any and all chubby girls he might see jogging, and then leaning over to tell 115-pound me, “But I’m just making fun of that [i.e. her chubbiness], not her."...
...Back to the question: So, do you think that, if Clare were only rediscovered just now, he wouldn’t get any attention because he’s a white male?
And this is my direct answer without commentary: Yes, because John Clare is a damn good writer...
(commentary and more back at yellowhammer).
52 comments:
Cassius is a casshole.
There are times when I worry that I'm not as enlightened as I think/hope I am, but that guy makes me a feel a lot better somehow.
I have to question whether he's really even a liberal at all, or just pretending to be one to get laid.
MRA = Men's Rights Activist? Or Mafia Related Assassin?
Anyone who thinks men or white people somehow need their rights & privileges protected needs their fucking head examined. And I am one, so if there were any oppression of white males going on, I think I would have noticed it by now.
On the other hand, I expect there's a lot of overlap between MRAs and idiots, so they may just be drawing the wrong conclusions from their own experiences.
Casshole!!!
That is so freaking awesome. Too bad Cassius isn't his real name. I just chose it because it's a Roman name with negative connotations.
What a hoser.
I just chose it because it's a Roman name with negative connotations.
Muhammed Ali was a roman before he was a muslim?
"Muhammed Ali was a roman before he was a muslim?"
I think my brain flipped over once in my head trying to figure this out before I remembered that Muhammed Ali's given name was Cassius Clay.
I meant no dis to him, but rather to Cassius, one of the leaders of the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar. Not that I'm a fan of Caesar, but at least he did his back-stabbing up front...umm...front-stabbing? I just need to shut up now.
Sure he was, R Mildred...the Claccius (predecessors for the Clay's) family was really powerful back in the day; I heard that they were Augustus' chief enforcers.
[/snark] ;-)
Oh, and this Cassius dude...pure unadulterated casshole (Nice one, Eli!!). I'll bet that this dewd never attempted to pull that kind of shit near any person of color...he would have been a decked "racist and sexist liberal" after his ass meets the business end of said person's foot.
Sounds to me like he only wants to get back into your panties, Emily...probably best to ignore him. Unless, of course, you want him back in your panties....it's your decision.
Anthony
"and he has an interest in Buddhism, although he is always talking about Buddhist philosophy and never mentions things like compassion, oh, and he apparently has something against meditation because he will go to great lengths to prove that meditation just wasn’t that important to many great Buddhist teachers."
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHA.
Point go zoom. Zoomy zoom! Point do acrobatic spins over head.
Not that I'm a fan of Caesar, but at least he did his back-stabbing up front...umm...front-stabbing?
Does this have something to do with missionaries?
Sounds to me like he only wants to get back into your panties, Emily...probably best to ignore him. Unless, of course, you want him back in your panties....it's your decision.
Which would be, of course, a Cassius Lay...
But yeah, this guy's a liberal like I'm a teen heartthrob.
"and he has an interest in Buddhism, although he is always talking about Buddhist philosophy and never mentions things like compassion, oh, and he apparently has something against meditation because he will go to great lengths to prove that meditation just wasn’t that important to many great Buddhist teachers."
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHA.
Point go zoom. Zoomy zoom! Point do acrobatic spins over head.
I think he was in A Fish Called Wanda: "It's a Buddhist meditation technique, focuses your aggression. The monks used to do it before they went into battle."
On the first glance i'll brand cassius as a leftist imposter.
Now, on closer inspection what's so silly is cassius' inability to cover his tracks.
I mean, mocking overweightness and people of color in front emily...*unbelivable* when looking at a guy w/ that much education.
Like, Lets say that the stars misalign and we pretend to be fascists to get laid (this fascist is *that* tempting).
Are we going to then start insulting the very basis of our fascist crush's worldview via little jabs?
Now i'm probably wrong, but It looks like either this guy wanted to distance himself from emily without hurting her feelings or he's simply a very very dull racist/sexist er..individual.
Um, Anthony? Unless I'm misreading, I don't think that this man and Emily were actually y'know having sex. In any case, Emily can speak for herself, but from where I'm sitting, that feels rather inappropriate, at best.
Clampett: I'm thinking the latter.
...apparently several men here are reading this as though he -wanted- to, though. curious; that never even occurred to me. Emily?
anyway, yeah, he is sounding very Kevin Kline.
"And the London Underground was not a political movement."
...apparently several men here are reading this as though he -wanted- to, though. curious; that never even occurred to me. Emily?
I read your excerpt first, and assumed they were contemporaries. After reading Emily's post (heh), it seemed maybe a bit less plausible. But on the other hand, he *is* a pig, and what better way to impress a young woman you're interested in than showing off what a racist, sexist, sizeist man of the world you are?
(On the plus side, he doesn't have enough money to qualify as a member of The Patriarchy, right?)
Hm..Interesting American specimen
Yes, I don't doubt that Cassius started talking to me because he wanted to get into my pants. I truly believe that he wouldn't have talked to me had I been overweight or ugly, even if I had the exact same intelligence and personality.
However, I don't think he was making fun of overweight people to curry my favor, I think it was more a case of him feeling comfortable doing it around me because I'm thin. And no, he would never be caught dead saying those things in front of an overweight person or person of color and I'm really ashamed I actually became a safe space for him to spew his bigotry.
But no, I never slept with him, never even considered the thought for a fraction of a second, although I'm sure he wanted me to.
Like I said (in a part of the post not excerpted here) he pulled all the abusive relationship moves on me pretty fast, and as soon as he found out I was engaged, which I believe was on the second or third day that I knew him, he immediately acted as if my engagement was going to come to an end, without even meeting the guy that I'm engaged to, while at the same time hinting that he was somehow a more worthy candidate...
But anyway, is he just pretending to be a liberal? No, I don't think so. The scary thing is that he somehow thinks he is liberal.
in sum: ick.
"Hm..Interesting American specimen "
FUCK YOU
[in so far as you are a kneejerk Antiamerican. If I misunderstood you I apologise]
(ya'll: I don't tolerate antiAmericanism, please excuse my foul mouth)
"But anyway, is he just pretending to be a liberal? No, I don't think so. The scary thing is that he somehow thinks he is liberal. "
Yes, I hunched that but i'm too stupid/shy to articulate it as well you, Emily.
So Emily, do you mind expanding on that topic...I mean, how exactly does cassius consider himself liberal, in your mind/inlightofyourexperiences?
Agggggggggggggggggh –
Where do you meet these people Bell? I didn’t go read the article because I’ve seen enough of this crap on feminist boards for a lifetime.
“but men don’t have support groups, we don’t have any of the stuff that women have, we’re the ones discriminated against”
This is the kind of stupid remark I am referring to. Does he think women’s groups grow like mushrooms? Women’s groups don’t just occur naturally anymore than beds makes themselves up. Women’s groups occur because we get off our derrieres and put them together. Are men discriminated against because snickers don’t grow on trees?
Keep him away from me.
squickmonkeys. That is full of gross.
Oh, wow....
Sometimes the things that spill from my piehole embarrasses even me.
Emily and Belle, I sincerely apologize to you for that completely out-of line "getting into your panties" remark. Sometimes I really should think for at least a second before I type stuff.
Feel free to delete that offensive comment if you wish, Belle...I totally repudiate it.
Anthony
(Anyone has a gallon of Listerine to remove the taste of foot out of my mouth??)
Except it sounds like you were right, Anthony, even if your phrasing may have been a bit...infelicitous.
I think the discrepancy between who he is and who he claims to be triggered the same alerts in both of us.
Most of the time Im pleased with the lack of socialising that goes on in my life. Though saying that, its only the other day I found out two school friends of mine are now misogynistic dicks, like most other guys my age.
Still, Im sorry to hear Emily is having trouble with her friend. Shame really, sounds like such a likeable bloke....
Anthony, if you want to delete it you can do it; just click the trash can icon in the corner of the post. I'll leave it up to you.
All that could be said about Cassius having been siad, except that Mr. Dick might be a more apt sobriquet, and that I personally would not choose to befriend him,
I wanted to say a word about Cassius Clay. Clay the athlete was named for Cassius Clay the kentucky abolitionist active before the Civil War. I'd bet it was a traditional name in his family. Just like people ended with slave names, bearing the family name of their former owners, Ali's name sound skind of like an anti-slave name.
And I didn't know Clare HAD been rediscovered.
Anthony: Don't worry about it. We all fill in the blanks in different ways.
Clampett: He thinks he's a liberal because he knows he not a conservative, if that makes any sense. Since he's against the war, against capitalism, against conservative Christian tyranny, etc. He's liberal on a very ideological level. I don't think you can hang around English departments long and not be liberal. It's really just a world where conservatives are not welcome for various reasons. I also think Cassius probably adhered more strictly to his anarchist/Buddhist/vegetarian ways until he just became a curmudgeon, and that's probably when all the latent racist and sexist stuff that he'd been suppressing for most of his life reared its ugly head. Just a guess, tho.
Chuckie: Thanks for the anecdote about Cassius Clay. And about Clare, I guess I should have clarified (I'm NOT going to make the joke, not going to do it): he has been rediscovered in England in a big way, and although his books are readily available in America (go to any Barnes and Noble or Borders or anything like that and you'll probably to find one of his books on the shelf) most Americans have never heard of him. No American publishing house has put out a book of his poetry yet.
well, i admit i hadn't heard of him before, but thanks to you i'll be checking him out soon.
He thinks he's a liberal because he knows he not a conservative, if that makes any sense.
He's actually a "Nice Guy", that is, he's deeply convinced that he's a good person because... he's deeply convinced he's a good person, and so he spends alot of time telling everyone how nice a person he is by explaining his beliefs - which are all shitty and ignorant and fucked up because he can't be having with any of that self analysis stuff or Teh Learning (because he knows it all already of course).
On the plus side he doesn't spend most of his time with you explaining over and over again about how women only like jerks and so "Nice Guys" (hence the label) like him can't find a hot chick to bang.
they're sadly common enough online and in real life that they've been parsed down to rather stereotypical archetype that, despite being a archetypal stereotype, is none the less amazingly accurate.
WV: hubprda
Hmm... For most of my life, *I* was a Nice Guy that most women would have nothing to do with. I hope that doesn't mean I was actually a total jerk...
"He's actually a "Nice Guy", that is, he's deeply convinced that he's a good person because... he's deeply convinced he's a good person, and so he spends alot of time telling everyone how nice a person he is by explaining his beliefs" - too funny, R Mildred. I just read Gides "L'Ecole des Femmes." A woman marries a guy like this after he convinces her he's a good person. Over the years she discovers what he really is. for god measure, at one point he founds a journal to distribute his goodness and the news of his goodness more widely. It goes bankrupt.
Until you commnet, I hadn't stop to think that the story is about one woman but the title says "women." I didn't realise we were so transparent and so widespread. Wait, no, I mean "they" ... that they are so transparent and widespread.
No, I just figured I either wasn't attractive enough or wasn't normal enough. (I was pretty fucking not normal back in the day; I'm merely moderately not normal now.)
Wasn't happy about it, but that's life. I willingly chose to be a freak, and I accepted the consequences.
what Jack said.
as Veronica once put it,
"Nice is like Zen. if you keep talking about how you are it, you probably aren't."
(to which i replied, "If you meet the Nice Guy on the road, kill him")
as Veronica once put it,
"Nice is like Zen. if you keep talking about how you are it, you probably aren't."
Oh, kind of like being a strong leader.
(Verification word: fghat. I love that song, "Slw Rde"!)
Ah Nice Guys™. I estimate the distance between soulful puppy eyes and expressions of tolerance to "fuck the [insert prejudice here]" to be generally about 3 drinks. Or 6 if they're like, a Super Nice Guy.™
So emily, which one of us is the evil one? I am thinking it's probably me..
Fortunately, I don't drink.
And I couldn't do soulful puppy eyes to save my life. If *absolutely* necessary, I would probably just link to this.
"(to which i replied, "If you meet the Nice Guy on the road, kill him")"
Wheeeeeeeeee belle i love you and hereby propose the
OMG GAY GAY GAY E-MARRIDGE
because you're so freaking awesome.
Emily,
"He thinks he's a liberal because he knows he not a conservative, if that makes any sense. Since he's against the war, against capitalism, against conservative Christian tyranny, etc. He's liberal on a very ideological level. I don't think you can hang around English departments long and not be liberal. It's really just a world where conservatives are not welcome for various reasons. I also think Cassius probably adhered more strictly to his anarchist/Buddhist/vegetarian ways until he just became a curmudgeon, and that's probably when all the latent racist and sexist stuff that he'd been suppressing for most of his life reared its ugly head. Just a guess, tho."
hmm, I dunno about latency, but that sounds familiar.
Rmildred,
on this nice guy tm, i'll hand it to yas, that seems accurate.
I find that the arch-niceguy tm is usually shrewd enough to *get away with it*
The litmus test there is the ammount of time he's able to keep somebody attached/in luv after they are onto him.
Quoting JackGoff:
"The problem is that there are nice guys (read: nice people, in general) and then, there are Nice Guys™, who think they deserve to be given some type of sexual gratification for giving a modicum of civility to women. These are the type of guys that usually think that all lesbians need is a good fucking and a cuddle from the Right Man™, which is invariably them. They also tend to begrudge women the right to have sex with whomever they want to, whenever they want to, however they want to. "
Indeed, Jack.
What seperates these "Nice Guys(TM)" from legitimately progressive men is that they attempt to parlay their "courteousness" towards women into a roll in the hay..and when they are refused or rebuffed when the woman reads through the lines and catches them on their act, they immediately transform themselves back into the woman-baiting MRAs that they repressed for so long. "I did all this for you, beeyatch, and you refuse me?? You dirty, rotten whore!!! I KNEW that you f'n feminists were man-hating lesbians!!!"
On the other hand, legitimately sexually progressive men aren't obsessed with attempting to bed down women by playing nice, because they have enough self-confidence and self-worth to accept themselves. Plus, he figures that if the woman's sexually attracted to him for his merits, then she'll make the first move and tell him so; otherwise, it's no big deal.
Besides...more than likely, if he's like certain progressive men I know, he has the adult chat rooms and the porn collection to relieve his tensions..if you catch my drift. ;-)
Anthony
there are plenty of liberals who are just as racist and bigoted as the right- they just hide theirs behind a mask of political correctness and snobbery. the bottom line is in america that if you aren't a white male- you aren't much. the poor maligned white male is having to fight for his supremacy against the hordes of brown and black folks who are apparently wanting to take over the country. even though- we have all lived side by side for decades- it is suddenly an issue. ahhh---- the resurgence of christianity in a 'christian nation' that will have the old white money ruling the masses with their little women home at the hearth waiting with dinner. a return to the good ole' 1950's. we on the left can feel superior because we fancy ourselves so enlightened- and then you have cracks like biden's about obama being 'clean and articulate.' imagine that. so much for education. education does not change who you are as a person- a bigot with a degree is just a well read bigot. sorry about the ramble. i just get tired of white men feeling maligned when they don't need the support groups or anything because- well- they have the power.
well, as we're talking about in the other thread--sure, you may need a support group. There are various ways in which (straight) men (white, i think is a separate thing) are isolated, and yes that's worthy of a sociopolitical analysis as well as needing to form a community: by all means. -Form them.- If you need help, by all means, ask. If, on the other hand, yer gonna -blame- the people who already did this work for not including you, much less -oppressing- you; well, no, not having a lot of sympathy, here.
Thanks for the apology. But,
See you around.
Not here, you won't be.
"Not here, you won't be."
THANK YOU !!!!!!!!!!
Davidbyron is one of the worse antifeminist MRAs on the net.
(one of) Byron's last comment(s) defended me from a particularly snarky&mean comment from Daran that was provoked because i was being particularly snarky&mean towards Byron. Byron told daran to 'go fuck yourself'.
-twisted-
Politics aside,
I was impressed by the fact that my ideological opponent Byron would defend me after i attacked him, espically considering that I didn't even afford Byron common courtesy.
Byron told daran to 'go fuck yourself' - clampett
Yes, he did, but I somehow doubt that the exclamation was prompted solely by concern that you shouldn't be bullied. I think he may have had an agenda all his own.
Tom:
heh. me too,Of course Byron had a grudge with that dude in which i was a pawn,
But he's one of the cleverest and most nefarious trolls i've ever seen on a feminist blog, so I kinda don't want to piss him off anymore...If that makes any sense.
Socksexual.
OMG. Love.
clampett: he's been banned from there, so you needn't worried.
as for cleverest troll...neh.
"I've 'ad worse."
"worry"
Pardon me, but what the hell are you folks talking about? Links for the ignorant, please!
wv: zusbk
1) the link to yellowhammer's in the OP
2) this joint
also see post below, or rather the comment thread.
Thanks, bd! Number 2 was the missing link.
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