By Fidelbogen

Today, I will examine an article written over a year ago by a feminist journalist in Australia. This might not seem “current”, but we mustn’t confuse currency with relevancy. Feminist behavior, being consistent through time, remains perennially revealing and educative. And too, I think we should develop our perspective view of history. Viewing history enters into the task of writing history, and writing history, so we are told, is what the victor does. Does anybody have an appetite for victory?

First the article:

http://archive.is/1knPm

Very well. Michelle Andrews, the author, is clearly a feminist, although she will not admit this in set terms (which is a violation of protocol number 2). Accordingly, I make the point on her behalf, and I hope that Michelle will be more forthcoming in the future.

Relevant disclosure as concerns myself: Unlike Michelle Andrews, I am not a feminist. I am a critical non-feminist. That is both a descriptor and a political label, and I will not fail to share this information when the moment calls for it.

So feminist Michelle starts off her opinion piece with comments about the culprit du jour, Andrew Nolch. It would seem that he is three things: scared of women, scared of feminism, and scared of “equality”. Does Michelle provide evidence for any of these allegations about Nolch? She does not.

Is she possibly a mind reader? You never know, but with due respect for Michelle’s paranormality, we have nothing better than her word for what she says. Psychic or not, she must support her case when she makes personal claims about other people. She has got to check her feminist privilege and conform to the same standards as anybody else.

To give credit where credit is due, Michelle (despite being a feminist) does seem to recognize that “women” and “feminism” are separate things. (Per protocol number 6.)

While Andrew Nolch’s first two alleged fears are no doubt points of interest, the third is insidiously interesting: equality. This fine-sounding political buzzword has been buzzing around since the French Revolution. It has outlived its semantic shelf-life by a good stretch, having become both a thought-terminating cliché and a dog-whistle for people who are pulling a fast one. We must replace this word with meaningful words that will illuminate rather than obscure.

So the writer must explain the meaning of “equality” if she wants to justify her statement about Andrew Nolch. Better still, she must discard that word and communicate meaningfully in more original language. Far too much feminist journalism gets laced with cult jargon, so they need to improve their game in this area.

Feminist Michelle also informs us that Nolch fears what equality “might mean for the people who look and think like him.” So, as if it weren’t bad enough to use buzzwords long emptied of meaning, Michelle tops it off with a confoundedly idiotic statement. I am honestly not aware that non-feminist people look any particular way at all. They have every look in the book as far as I can tell, and I have been around a while. So I call this statement rubbish. As to how non-feminist people allegedly think (about “equality” or anything else), we can get back to that whenever.

I think Andrew Nolch is a greenhorn. Painting obscene grafitti onto a murder scene in order to make a political point was a piss-poor, bird-brained idea that only a rookie would try. What the hell was he thinking? If it had been me, I would have painted “feminism creates problems” onto that grass, and next to it an internet URL. This would have linked to a thoughtfully crafted statement of some kind, adding a new set of concepts to the public discourse.

Michelle Andrews informs us that Nolch wanted to “communicate the scientifically debunked piece of fiction that there is a link between vaccinations and autism.” Here I must be harsh on Nolch again. He should have simplified his politics, and kept vaccination and autism out of it. Further, he should never have established his prior reputation as a man of flamboyant and dubious thoughts. He should have focused narrowly and unwaveringly on the feminist problem, and crafted his persona accordingly.

Next, the feminist writer quotes Nolch directly: “This was purely an attack on feminism, on mainstream media for hijacking a vaccine-causing issue and turning it into a men are bad, women’s rights issue . . .”. Those are important words, of Nolch’s. If you can disregard the obsession with vaccination and all that, and focus purely on his thoughts about feminism, a core significance emerges. Nolch was condemning feminism for its longstanding narrative that “men are bad” – an ugly, vicious, reprobate narrative – and chastising the mainstream media for signal-boosting that narrative (which they unabashedly did in this case, and frequently do). I’d say that Nolch saw Dixon’s murder as an opportunity to force a counter-feminist message into the public mind, using shock tactics to generate a “teachable moment”.

We may take exception to Nolch’s dizzyingly tasteless methods, but not, I think, his core message. I endorse that message. Over the years, feminism has done some rotten things in this world, and we need to build a strong public conversation around that distasteful fact. However, a lot of reactionary people don’t want this conversation to happen, and they will do almost anything to stop it. I fear that Nolch’s stunt will have fuelled their efforts.

After informing us that Nolch is a Scientologist, Andrews paraphrases him: “He says men’s violence against women is not the issue here.” Study this closely. The devil hides in the phrase “he says”, which can be taken to mean either a.) that he actually said it, or b.) that he effectually said it – something like, “it was tantamount to saying.” If Michelle valued clarity she could have avoided this ambiguity very easily. Instead, she leaves us wondering.

Another telling point is the phrase “men’s violence against women”. This is boilerplate feminist vernacular, and we’ve heard it a thousand times. Only a feminist would utter this phrase, because only a feminist would harbor that weird compulsion to label violence according to the sexes of the victims and perpetrators. People who are not feminist haven’t got that compulsion, so they don’t reflect it in their language. (Eurydice Dixon was not “women”. Her killer was not “men.” See what I am saying?)

So who does Michelle Andrews think she is fooling? In the end, we needn’t accept that Andrew Nolch overtly said, or had in mind to say, what Michelle Andrews represents him as saying; she was only stuffing words into his non- feminist mouth. Feminists are notorious for such behavior, and it is no joke when they do this constantly, on a large scale.

Michelle Andrews (the feminist) continues: “Eurydice Dixon’s death did not make Andrew Nolch uncomfortable because an innocent woman was sexually assaulted, then murdered…” Here again, Andrews presumes to be a mind reader. But we cannot precisely know what manner of discomfort the Dixon case spawned in Nolch’s mind. Only Nolch can tell us that, and who knows? He might tell us something nuanced. So let’s call this a case of feminist presumption.

Now, since feminist Michelle will not enact the labor of speaking plainly, we must do this in her stead. In a nutshell, she claims that Andrew Nolch was uncomfortable about Dixon’s death for the wrong reason. That is the burden of her statement, so let it sink in.

Clearly, this is only Michelle’s opinion. She is welcome to hold that opinion, and welcome to share it, but the rest of the world is not obligated to take it on board. For feminist Michelle, the only “right” reason would have been a feminist reason. But we mustn’t expect a non-feminist to embrace feminist reasoning – that would be a “square circle” conundrum. We who are not feminist are free to form our own assessment about the propriety of Nolch’s thinking. If it suits us, we may flip the tables of evaluation altogether on the strength of our own criteria.

Permit me to say that murder is horrendous. Would any feminist take offense at these words? Hopefully not. But murder has happened regularly since the dawn of history, so it is nothing new. However, Eurydice Dixon’s case (out of all actual or potential murders) became a feminist communal drama. It galvanized these people. This is all very well, but I cannot overlook that plenty of other murders, happening from time to time, patently did NOT galvanize these people. They were selective about which murder would outrage them. Interesting, wouldn’t you say?

I am apt to wonder what the reaction would have been if an outspokenly anti-feminist woman had suffered Eurydice Dixon’s fate at the same location. I am also apt to wonder what the reaction would have been if an unknown homeless man had been murdered there. Heaps of flowers with media coverage and nationwide grief, in either of those cases? Permit me to doubt.

Michelle writes: “ . . . It made the amateur comedian upset because of the impact such an event has on men . . . He and his peers are the real victims here, Nolch says.” So do you see what feminist Michelle does here? She treats Nolch’s non-feminist claim as beneath contempt – but only her feminist privilege lets her get away with this! Yes, I say privilege. Feminist ideologues are emphatically not entitled to ride roughshod over the concerns which other people might raise.

How if Nolch is right? Granted, it is a feminist practice to insist that women are collectively “victims”, or that they “have it worse” in some generic way. Yet these are nothing more than claims, and if you are not feminist you are not bound to embrace them as gospel. Claims may be disputed, hence you are free to conclude that feminism is wrong about this or anything else. You have that option. Yes, we know that feminists feel passionately about many things, but then, so do people like Andrew Nolch. Let’s not forget that.

Note the funny twist she puts on the word “real”. She implies that Nolch doesn’t consider Dixon a “real victim”. But does Nolch really think that, or is Michelle just being a mind reader again? I wish feminists would stop playing skeevy head games with the rest of the world.

After all, it is quite possible that Dixon’s death, in itself, DID make Nolch uncomfortable – but so did other things. The world contains plenty of things that might undo our comfort, and we are always free to enunciate this. Nolch, it would seem, chose to exercise that freedom.

Assuredly, Andrew Nolch, who is not a feminist, had a non-feminist agenda. That much stands to reason, so let’s cruise with it. Nolch evidently felt comfortable in exploiting the Dixon case to spread his alternative message. Granted that a feminist might not like this message, a non-feminist might find nothing amiss about it; indeed, Nolch appeared rather at ease in what he did. Not that he was insensitive to Dixon’s murder (who are we to say?), but that he was more sensitive to other things, and prioritized accordingly.

Nolch seemingly felt that his priorities were defensible, but nonetheless, the question becomes: was he right to prioritize in the way he did? On the whole, should feminist concerns take precedence over non-feminist, or should it be the reverse? To my knowledge, this point has never been properly addressed at all, let alone disposed of. Feminist Michelle Andrews skips over it like a flat stone skimming over a pond, and that’s the essence of shallow.

Michelle and her peers, worldwide, feel that feminism is the world. They act oblivious to the living reality of the non-feminist sector, which presses upon their feminist bubble with counter-claims and alternate possibilities. It does not occur to them that their feminist drama is embedded in a larger, ongoing political context – a non-feminist context. They persist in ignoring that context, and when it sometimes intrudes into their world nonetheless, they collapse it to feminist terms as quickly as possible in order to be magically rid of it. Call this political solipsism.

Feminists might feel outraged that Andrew Nolch has “hijacked” the Eurydice Dixon case and piggybacked his counter-feminist message onto it while ignoring their communal pathos, but so what? Who cares? Do feminists own the issues? And in light of the ongoing political context, do they even deserve such consideration?

Nolch, for his own reasons, felt outraged also, and decided to voice this. He is sorely displeased that feminists and the mainstream media would conduct an anti-male smear campaign in society (as they have done for years). He plainly tells us so. Moreover, he is disgusted that they would exploit the death of Eurydice Dixon in the service of that narrative. “Just think of it (Nolch might say): a young woman was brutally raped and murdered, and these people want to exploit that in order ratchet up their hate campaign against half the human race. Disgraceful!”

I too find such feminist conduct disgraceful. As a critical non-feminist, I foresee only a poisonous future for the human race if feminism keeps operating this way. That is why I cannot find fault with Nolch’s essential project, although I can readily admit that his conduct of it was over the top. Nolch was not morally wrong, but only politically inefficient.

Despite what any feminist wants to believe, the verdict of history was never officially concluded in feminism’s favor – pray tell, which unbiased panel of judges delivered that ruling? Nevertheless, feminism imposes its will through spiritual violence, as a hegemonic system which ignores or suppresses the non-feminist voice. So that voice must find ways of breaking through, and those ways are not guaranteed to be orthodox or polite. On the contrary, they are apt to appear as a kind of home invasion, a scandalous instrusion, a striking through the mask.

Andrew Nolch was doing just that – striking through the mask.

Sounding scandalized, Michelle continues: “You see, according to Nolch, a woman’s gut-wrenching murder pales in significance to a handful of men’s malaise.” Here a feminist plays deceitful games again, for as earlier, Michelle pretends to be a mind reader. Did you notice that sneaky little phrase “according to”? This insinuates a lot, yet it remains undemonstrated that Nolch literally thinks or says what Michelle puts in his mouth. Michelle just interprets him to have thought or said this, hoping that you wouldn’t notice what she did there.

In principle, this is identical to Cathy Newman’s “so you’re saying”. Feminists use this trick all the time, so I’m saying you must train yourself to recognize it.

Feminist Michelle, like most of her peers, acts oblivious to the ongoing political context. In the first place, feminism promotes a man-hating social narrative, propped up with untruths and half-truths. In the second place, many non-feminist people are aware of this (having studied it for years), and very unhappy about it. All in all, this totals up to quite a context – it is the rest of the story, as you might say. But feminism’s followers cannot come clean about what they are doing here. That would be fatal to their whole endeavor; they must persistently deny it and cover it up, and that is why the world beyond feminism must step up and supply the rest of the story.

For example, gut-wrenching murder, on average, happens to men more than it does to women. And too, arguably, men are the greater misery sponges in the world at large. All of this, and more, feeds the counter-feminist metanarrative which informs Andrew Nolch’s thoughts and actions. Yet feminism downplays men’s misery compared to women’s, even insisting that women have it worse. At the same time, piling insult onto injury, feminism systematically demonizes men as the world’s primary wrongdoers. (“Men are the problem” informs feminist rhetoric as an underlying motif.) As an activated non-feminist, I make note of such things and point them out to the general public. It would appear that Andrew Nolch understood his mission similarly, against the feminist backdrop of downplaying and demonizing.

I should point out that half the human race is vastly more than “a handful”. The male population on Earth composes roughly 3.5 billion souls, and Michelle Andrews calls THAT a “handful”? Another baffling idiocy. Maybe feminists aren’t very good at math, but I know perfectly well that the male demographic amounts to more than a handful. Most non-feminist people would agree with me – we’re not fools.

Very well. If Michelle was offended that Andrew Nolch would exploit a so-called feminist issue, Nolch had every right to be equally offended that male misery not only gets downplayed and ignored in general, but that men themselves get pilloried and bombarded with rotten slanders. Not only in this particular case, but in case after case on a longstanding basis. That brings us to our next snippet from Michelle:

“When we discuss women’s suffering, women’s inequality, women’s anger, women’s pain, such conversations must always be prefaced with how men suffer too, you know.” So let’s talk more about that ongoing political context. Using women’s hardships or tragedies to construct an anti-male narrative is all of the following: wretched, reprehensible, unconscionable, creepy, slimy, sickening, disgusting, abhorrent, vicious and vile. This swings a wrecking ball through any high moral platform that pearl-clutching Michelle Andrews (and her peers) might pretend to stand on. Welcome to the mud, Michelle and peers! That’s the ongoing political context, and Andrew Nolch had that context fully in view. Need I say more?

Actually, I could say more. I could work my way along that entire string of clauses containing the word “women’s”, ripping out their stuffing and saying sharp things about them. But I will skip that fun because I don’t want to bog myself down.

The feminist further intones: “No matter the injury to women, no matter the weight of our collective bloodshed, there is always a tiny sliver of male discomfort that feeds the minority’s paranoia.” “Paranoid” is a word that armpit psychologists use to blow off bothersome suspicions you might be feeling at any given moment. This word has a proper clinical meaning, of course, but the average Joe or Sally have nothing like that in mind. They only want to shut you up by implying that you are an idiot. (Pssst! Today’s “paranoid” is tomorrow’s obvious truth!)

Those collectivist bits about “injury to women” and “the weight of our collective bloodshed” were tossed in for the sake of pathos and gravitas. If you are not a feminist, you are expected to feel morally intimidated by all of that heart-rending melodrama. But to put this in perspective, injury and weighty bloodshed (collective or otherwise) are the common lot of humanity. Don’t get me wrong, feminists are welcome to zoom in on the female share of this calamity if so inclined. But if, while so doing, they wage a vicious war against half the human race, they must suck up the rude culture-jamming that Andrew Nolch and his ilk are keen to dish out. They are not entitled to be free from this.

And which “minority” is meant here? Is the journalist suggesting that feminists are a majority? I challenge Michelle Andrews to make the case that non-feminist people are a minority, as she seems to imply. All the studies I have looked into suggest that we compose 80% or more of the human race. (In England, the figure stands at 91% – and mind you, that is according to the feminist Fawcett Society.)

I would also like Michelle to explain what that “tiny sliver of male discomfort” is. Seriously. This lacks intuitive clarity by a mighty long mile. Is discomfort limited to half the human race? Don’t non-feminist women also feel discomfort, when they see what feminism has done?

And, why a “tiny” sliver? What the hell is tiny about it? Does she mean to say it is trivial? Incomprehension is making me flounder, so I would like feminist Michelle to be crystal clear about this. Given that feminism owes the world an explanation (and not the reverse), I think she owes us that much at least.

“Women are sick of being murdered on their walks home? Yeah, well, first how about we talk about the men who die in one-punch attacks! Women are plagued by postnatal depression? Have you heard about the rates of male suicide! Women want to talk about female genital mutilation? Not unless we cover male circumcision first!” Here’s an irony: the bulk of violence, worldwide, falls upon men rather than women. The same is arguably true of painfulness on average, so at the very least we are entitled to say that women have it no worse than men, that the male and female misery heaps would balance the scale. Yet feminists are avid to talk the hell out of women’s troubles, asymmetrically – a procedure known as “wimmin- worsting.”

I find this feminist obsession very strange, and I think it puts a bad look on feminism. At the same time, I find that non-feminist people tend to be more even-handed. Unlike feminists, who demand an extra security layer for a class which suffers the least violence (women), most non-feminists are in no special hurry to add that layer to a class which suffers the most violence (men). I’m not saying this is right or wrong; I am saying it is interesting. Nonfems do not uniformly single out “violence against men” as a paramount concern.

Say what you will about non-feminist people generally, you must admit that most of us have no special bias in favor of men. This plays interestingly against the feminist position, which is so clearly biased in favor of women.

“They are literally saying that its all mens fault just because it was done by a man. Next minute they will increase the brainwashing at schools and keep telling our young men ‘you are bad!’ when they havent done anything!” Michelle Andrews quotes Nolch with disapproval here, as she makes plain. This hardly surprises me, yet make no mistake: she is entitled to her opinion about Andrew Nolch or anything else. I defend to the death her right to say it.

However, Nolch has laid some damning charges against feminism, and unlike Michelle (who quotes Nolch only to ignore him), I am curious to take a deeper look. I would hate to think those charges might be true, so just on principle I think we should study this and turn it into a public conversation – possibly even an academic one! But Michelle Andrews and her feminist peers seem hell-bent on strangling such conversation, and blocking any non-feminist political discourse from rising to the surface of public awareness.

Nolch is absolutely right, of course. I know exactly what he is saying. I have monitored these ratcheting social trends for many years and yes, they really are happening. (Although feminist Clementine Ford got a rude surprise when she tried to brainwash some school kids!)

It’s a pity, because I guarantee these things won’t end well. In particular, they won’t end well for women, which is ironic because women are thought to be feminism’s special clients. Let me lay the scene somewhat differently: demonizing men will only provoke demonic behavior from men – clearly an example of self- fulfilling prophecy. When you demonize people, they will start to act demonic. That’s common sense – after all, you are shoving them into a box and nailing the lid shut! So is it a clever idea to convert half the human race into demons, or potential demons, or putative demons? Would any sane person want to live in such a world?

Word to the wise: hate bounces! Women will not benefit from any of this, and whatever shape the resulting evils might assume, feminism will have been the chief architect. Any critical thinker who has a moral conscience, and is not a feminist, will crack this mystery easily enough.

“There is plenty of time to talk about men’s struggles. This is not it.” You know what? I agree! This is not the time to talk about men’s struggles, and since I (unlike Andrew Nolch) am not a men’s activist, I have not done that here. Mind you, I think it’s fine if certain people do talk about such things at such times – I mean, that’s their choice. But as for me, I simply allude to such things in fly-by mode. Overall, my mission is not to help men (at least not directly), but to poke a stick at feminism in order to deflate its cultural hauteur.

“We can rarely, if ever, have a conversation that is quarantined to women and their respective battles, because the chorus of “but men!” from those like Andrew Nolch is impossible to escape.” That statement is unmitigated garbage. Feminism is the ruling cultural force in most parts of the world – it dominates academia, the media, the entertainment industry, the mental health professions, the United Nations, and a whole lot more. “Women and their respective battles” is practically the only chorus we ever hear, and isolated freaks like Andrew Nolch are eminently escapable. Feminists have very little to whine about in this world, yet whine they do! I can’t help wondering which rock Michelle Andrews is living under.

Do Michelle Andrews and her peers wish to have MORE conversations that are “quarantined to women?” Well in that case they are just plain greedy, because they’ve got an abundance of those conversations happening already.

“. . . Men [like Andrew Nolch] who are so incensed and intimidated by the voices of millions of women, they will do anything they can to deflect and distract.” To clarify, Michelle speaks here of certain (male) people whom she has privately depicted to herself. She is vague on who these people are, save that they are “like Andrew Nolch” (whatever that means). She is vaguer still on why we should believe her story about their state of mind. In other words, she makes unsupported claims about unspecified people – and that is a whisker’s breadth removed from saying nothing at all. Furthermore, which “millions of women” does Michelle mean? And where’s the proof that these supposed millions have riled those mysterious, unspecified “men”? Feminist Michelle dispenses vacuities as a way of deflecting and distracting.

Michelle Andrews might not like what non-feminist people are saying, but the ongoing political context vindicates those people, i.e. feminism’s long history of downplaying male misery and demonizing men in general. That long history is why people who speak under color of feminism haven’t got enough moral high ground to be acting preachy. We who are not feminist can spot this clearly because we haven’t got feminist filters in front of our eyes. We know the rest of the story, and that is why we don’t sit still for feminist sermons.

“Eurydice Dixon’s rape and murder is not an avenue for sympathetic conversations about men. To hijack such a depraved crime against a woman, and flip it into a fantasy where men are somehow the victims, is disgraceful.” And why should it not be an avenue for sympathetic conversations about men? I haven’t done that here since “men” is not my political focus, but as far as I’m concerned, whoever does want to converse within that focus is more than welcome. These non-feminist intrusions into the feminist bubble are bound to happen, and to escalate, until feminism cleans up its act.

So is feminist Michelle suggesting that the Dixon case should be an avenue for unsympathetic conversations about men? Is she? Tell you what, Michelle: if you just make it an avenue for zero conversations about men what-so-ever, good, bad or indifferent, I would be more than happy to settle. I think that is reasonable. Then you could decently mourn your slain friend as a crime victim, without using her victimhood as a launching point for anti-male propaganda.

Bottom line: omit the feminist messaging. These are clarion words, are they not? The meaning is unmistakable, and the margin for misunderstanding is slim. As a critically-thinking non-feminist with the good of the human race in mind, these words are my prime directive to the entire feminist sector.

But feminist Michelle doesn’t know when to quit. Look, nobody “fantasized” about a damned thing; get that straight! And nobody ever said that men were the victims of Eurydice Dixon’s murder. As we can plainly see, the only victim was Eurydice Dixon. Are we clear about that? A responsible journalist would have reported it this way, but feminist Michelle wanted to be something more: a mind reader. Otherwise, she’d have shown us the passage where Andrew Nolch literally states that “men” are the victims of Eurydice Dixon’s murder. But she couldn’t do that, because Nolch never said any such thing.

Nor did Nolch ever specify in which order he wanted the stories told. Feminist Michelle invented that one too, out of thin air, and projected it into Nolch’s brain. She could have interviewed Nolch and learned what he was actually thinking, but I reckon that just wouldn’t be the feminist way. Besides, it would interfere with feminist messaging.

Michelle Andrews with her lying behavior does feminism no favors in the public relations department – and her behavior is typical of feminists everywhere. So is it any mystery that feminism has become so widely despised? That is the ongoing political context, and they had best get “woke” to it.

“Andrew Nolch is scared,” Michelle writes. This does not advance any argument. Furthermore, Michelle makes fear sound like a shameful thing – in other words, her statement is ad hominem ridicule. But fear has nothing inherently shameful about it. All humans will experience fear at some point in their lives, and often quite rationally. (Did Eurydice Dixon experience fear in her last moments? Be honest, Michelle!) Many things can inspire fear: alligators, crocodiles, bubonic plague, fire, flying bullets, defective parachutes, and the list goes on. So is Andrew Nolch genuinely scared? I won’t presume to say, but if he is, I don’t hold it against him. I hope he’ll be able someday to live less fearfully, and I wish him godspeed in that endeavor.

That reminds me: since his case became public in the Australian media, Andrew Nolch has gotten numerous death threats.

Enough.

Oh by the way, if you happen to be interested, Eurydice Dixon’s final comedy gig is on video, here. De mortius nil nisi bonum.