Wednesday, February 07, 2018

More inane anti-feminism from Quillette

Oh brother. A college student author at Quillette has this to say about the movie The Apartment.
It is in this context that we are treated to the famous Christmas party scene, which resonates rather differently in 2018 than it must have done in 1960 (or in 1980, or even in 2010, for that matter). The workaday hum of Consolidated Life yields to the tune of “Jingle Bells” and a hedonistic spirit of dancing, kissing, gaiety. Alcohol is everywhere. A progressive institution like Vox would never allow such a scene in their offices today. And perhaps they are right to be wary; it’s possible to see the joy of the Christmas Party at Consolidated Life as a meager veneer on a culture of exploitation and the damage wrought by the arrogant chauvinism of men like Sheldrake. In the bitterness of his ex-lover, Miss Olsen, and in Fran’s emotional devastation, are we offered a glimpse of a place and time in which it might have really sucked to be a woman? Or should the scene be understood as a depiction of authentic joy, adopting an attitude towards sexual liberation favored by Laura Kipnis or Cristina Nehring, in which heartache at the hands of bad actors is something to be overcome privately (within certain well-defined limits, of course) rather than treated as evidence of the need for structural reform? On a certain reading, attempts to fully eradicate moments like these in the workplace are suggestive of a dreadful grimness; a cure that may be worse than the disease it is designed to treat.
What MRA rock does Claire Lehmann find these people under? Of course someone published by Lehmann is going to think that the "cure" of men forced to back off is worse than the disease of men entitled to do whatever the fuck they want to women and get away with it.

...I followed a link that Slate counts as "viral" - something called "My Father Died Suddenly. He Was Just Starting a New Life" by Cristina Nehring. The article is basically what it says, but I found it difficult to focus on the rest of piece after I got to the fifth paragraph:
"Wolfgang Nehring was a scholar and a gentleman, a stoic and a romantic, a handsome devil who kidnapped the woman he loved out of the home of her boyfriend in 1964 and married her immediately thereafter."
I tried to continue but so many questions popped up. Is the kidnapped woman the author's mother? I didn't see anything to confirm this in the article. Does she literally  mean "kidnapped" as in Wolfgang Nehring forcibly removed the woman from her boyfriend's home? Did they know each other before this, and if so, how well? Did they have a relationship prior to the one with the boyfriend? What did the woman think of this situation? Was she being abused by the boyfriend and Cristina Nehring's father was a rescuer? Where were the woman's parents?
But if the author didn't mean "kidnapped" why didn't she just say "eloped"? If you're going to accuse your father of something that is at the present time known as "bride kidnapping" and considered a sex crime, shouldn't you at least try to explain, to make your father seem like less of a rapist? 
I was ready to write this off as the author being excessively dramatic or careless about wording, until I discovered something in the author by-line - a link to Nehring's book on Amazon entitled "A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century" which is described thusly:
"In the twenty-first century, political correctness, cynicism, prag-matism, and the commodification of sex have reduced romantic love to a discredited myth or a recreational sport—"a cause for embarrassment," says Cristina Nehring. In A Vindication of Love, Nehring wrests romantic love from the clutches of retrograde feminists and cutting-edge capitalists, thrill-seeking convenience shoppers and safe-sex moralists. With help from lovers ranging from Heloise and Abelard to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Nehring celebrates the wild, irreverent, and uncompromising models of love we have inherited—as she rediscovers romantic love's fearless and heroic provenance, and challenges readers to demand partnerships that fully engage body, heart, and mind."
In a review of the book The New Republic says:
"Nehring addresses her book to women. She thinks that it is women in particular who need to hear her message, because she has an unusual diagnosis of the reasons for today’s risk-averse living. Bypassing such plausible causes as pervasive human anxiety, the desire to control the uncontrollable, the felt need to surmount mortality and the limits of the body, she pins the whole thing on--fanfare of operatic trumpets!--feminism. Feminism is to blame for women’s rejection of romantic love because, says Nehring, feminism asks women to be always rational and always in control, rejecting the romantic emotions as sources of low status or even of servitude. Moreover, feminism urges us to see love in contractual terms, and that sort of calculation is incompatible with real passion."
Nehring was against #MeToo long before #MeToo was born.