The crude and binary question

Sigrid, who is almost, but not quite, credentialed, tries to get an early start on waving her credentials around at Susan's place:

Your argument(s) (and I use “argument” loosely) about female promiscuity and its correlation to a litany of negative individual/societal outcomes notwithstanding, I find your tacit (0r perhaps not so tacit) support of “slut shaming” deeply disturbing. As a PhD student at a large university with two two nieces and one nephew in their first years of college (representative of your primary audience), I cringe that their earnest navigation (whatever that may look like) through the inevitably disorienting and murky terrain of their sexuality and sociality should be so crudely measured on a loaded and psychologically damaging binary of shame vs. exaltation. And I would posit that, indeed, it is the rhetoric and discourse emanating from that binary that exacts the profound negative toll on all of us. To “shame” anyone (although in your case you have a particular penchant for females, it seems) is cruel and counterproductive....

Maybe if I include a photo, you can size me up and further illuminate me on my “spinster” status with some added commentary based on my haircut, fashion sense, posture, or general appearance, in the same way you did my colleague, Extragiraffe, who, far from a “douchebag” or “frat boy,” is a kind and incredibly decent human being, a respected and decorated academic-in-training who is well-read in feminist theory/praxis, and a thoughtful discussant on a range of issues pertaining to gender and sexuality. If I wasn’t already put off by your crude category-building and your amateur sociology, your sophomoric, evasive, and baseless response to my friend solidifies that I will discourage everyone I know (but particularly my nieces and nephew and their peers) from ever taking your web site or its logics seriously.

To which I commented: You’re a maleducated twit, Sigrid. Slinging around that half-baked academy-speak suffices only to demonstrate you don’t understand supply and demand or the burden of debt. It certainly doesn’t cut any ice here. Babbling about “feminist theory/praxis” on this or any Game blog is about as impressive as asserting one’s Keynesian credentials at the Mises Institute. Perhaps if you weren’t so intently posturing on the basis of credentials you don’t even possess yet, you wouldn’t have missed Susan’s core point, which is that due to a surfeit of women being unwilling to man the sexual gates they are biologically charged with keeping, all women are negatively affected by the consequent changes in the sexual marketplace regardless of their behavior.

Your status as a spinster is obviously the result of a combination of your own decisions and your environment since everyone’s status always has been. Susan has merely provided the service of pointing out the potential consequences of the former while commenting upon the observable changes in the latter. And it’s worth pointing out that “the earnest navigation” of your nieces and nephews, as well as your own, will be judged in the same crude and binary manner as everyone else’s. To fuck or to not fuck, that is the initial question, followed eventually, in some cases, by commit or not commit. And no appeal to “the inevitably disorienting and murky terrain of their sexuality and sociality” is ever going to change that stark reality.

The herpes simplex virus doesn’t give a damn about the earnestness of one’s navigation. Nor does a future prospective husband or wife. And absolutely no one gives a damn about your almost-degree. As a kind and incredibly decent human being, I will, out of the angelic goodness of my astonishingly generous heart, favor you with a suggestion that may help prevent you from being perceived as the usual academic ass: anytime you begin writing a sentence with the word “As” that refers to yourself in any way, shape, or form, stop immediately and write something that might at least have a remote chance of being relevant instead.

Sweet Oxford and Cambridge, but how I despise academics in the larval stage. Not that I'm loath to kick around the odd professor here and there, when necessary, but as a general rule, even the most obnoxious academics can't compete with the pretentious poses being struck by the useless grubs still in the process of working on their PhDs.