Passion for feminism not helpful when selecting romantic partners?

by philg

“Eric Schneiderman, Accused by 4 Women, Quits as New York Attorney General” (nytimes):

Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general who rose to prominence as an antagonist of the Trump administration, abruptly resigned on Monday night hours after The New Yorker reported that four women had accused him of physically assaulting them.

Two of the women who spoke to the magazine, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam, said they had been choked and hit repeatedly by Mr. Schneiderman. Both said they had sought medical treatment. Another woman, a lawyer, said she was slapped violently across the face. A fourth woman said she had similar experiences.

Mr. Schneiderman has long been regarded as one of the state’s most progressive politicians, even before his 2013 lawsuit against Trump University and his subsequent suits against the Trump administration made him the darling of the political left.

One of the women, Tanya Selvaratnam, has “served on the board of The Third Wave Foundation, which is dedicated to youth activism and the feminist movement” and produced videos for the Women’s March. It does not seem unreasonable to describe her as a “feminist”. This New York Post article describes her relationship with the “progressive politician”:

Harvard-educated activist writer Tanya Selvaratnam told the New Yorker magazine that her yearlong affair with Schneiderman “was a fairytale that became a nightmare” — and quickly escalated into violence in the bedroom, even as he begged for threesomes.

“Sometimes, he’d tell me to call him Master, and he’d slap me until I did,” Selvaratnam said. … Soon, “we could rarely have sex without him beating me.”

I hope that we can all agree that this is a description of a below-average heterosexual relationship. The question then arises as to why an expert on feminism wouldn’t simply walk away from it. Can it be that years of studying feminism, marching, advocating, etc. have no practical value in this realm? If so, in what realm does being a feminist lead to a personal advantage?

[Separately, I know of a well-educated medium-income woman in her 20s. She was sufficiently passionate about feminism to go to the Women’s March in the off-the-charts-expensive city where she lives. She met a man in his mid-50s who owns a modest (i.e., $3+ million) house. She is now protesting the patriarchy by living in this man’s house.]

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26 thoughts on “Passion for feminism not helpful when selecting romantic partners?”

  1. Contemporary Feminism has devolved into a “MEN SUCKS, HATE THEM” movement. Yeah, of course that screws with your ability and chances finding romantic partners!

  2. Why wasn’t she comfortable with a threesome idea? It would certainly be liberating not to belong to that man only.

  3. I thought these four accusers were far more interesting than the usual ones. Most of the time the feminists seem to want a reverse Sharia where a Man’s testimony is worth 1/3 of a woman’s. These ladies, I believe all attorneys-at-law, have shown an unwavering and admirable commitment to Common Law. Memos, verifiable details, even Salman Rushdie as a witness!

  4. Phil G: I believe you and your co-authors missed a couple of assumptions in the rationale chapter:

    -That legislators should only think about the child once a divorce is already underway, not deterring divorce in the first place.
    -That they should only take into account what they should do about a specific divorce, ignoring the one-child policy size effects they’re having on the whole country.
    -That if they deter enough men from having children, we won’t have enough babies to replace our population, we will fall to the Muslims, and Sharia divorce is anti-feminist.

  5. As an American living in the foreign-occupied Democratic People’s Republic of New York, this is good news indeed. I let out a whoop of joy as I read it. Andrew Cuomo, an allegedly notorious cokehead in his younger days, must be sweating bullets.

    FWIW, the US District Attorney in the Showtime series Billions is also into rough sex, but he prefers to be on the receiving end. It’s a good show to watch as a couple, once the kids are put to sleep.

  6. >>“Sometimes, he’d tell me to call him Master, and he’d slap me until I did,” Selvaratnam said. … Soon, “we could rarely have sex without him beating me.”

    >I hope that we can all agree that this is a description of a below-average heterosexual relationship.

    Ya know, I can agree to that on my own personal level, but I am not certain that feminists would agree to this.

    I’ve read too much reddit, too many other semi-mainstream forums to believe that feminists would not consider sex with violence to be above average sex and what they need.

    I don’t understand it, but so many many stories of sex and how they grew up and how they were oppressed by daddy and other men have tons of feminists enjoying and proclaiming their devotion to BDSM and rough sex,

    If you show me a feminist who says *x* is feminist, I can find another feminist who says “x” is definitely not feminist. And vice versa. If you show me a feminist who says *x* is feminist, I say, well let’s wait on that a bit and see what else she says.

    So beats me, the snippet above is sort of par for the course. It was her feminist act of patriarchal subverting sex until it wasn’t. Perhaps this was another case of feminist consent being withdrawn post-facto.

    It’s actually rather linear and patriarchal to demand of feminists that alternate non linear fluid timelines not be used when establishing cause and effect.

  8. Harsh truth: Guys who describe themselves as “male feminists” or “sex positive” are invariably sleazy creeps. Source: Dating in college

  9. I’m with jerry (mostly). You can’t really say that a BDSM relationship is sub-par, it depends on the participants’ tastes. Was it consensual? Then it’s fine. Non-consensual? Unacceptable. The article says “the women … said the violence was not consensual.” That’s where the focus should be, not on the acts themselves.

  11. Consent, much like marriage, seems nowadays to be a fundamentally hazy, confused concept which can be withdrawn in retrospect at any temporal distance. So it’s not very useful to focus on that.

  12. Hey Phil, could you quantify that “well-educated medium-income woman”. What sort of income are you thinking there?

    Just wanted to clarify, a while back I was reading a NYT budgeting/money article that seemed somewhat off. It turned out in the comments the author admitting targeting people at $150K+ income, and didn’t really give a care about the 96% of Americans below that. Also implied that was standard practice for NYT.

  13. John: I think roughly $125,000 per year. Not enough that she could ever afford to purchase a home larger than a closet in any city where she would be willing to live.

  14. Is it feminist, that power is an aphrodisiac? Note this guy was one of the most powerful people in the state of NY, politically.

    If Schneiderman had been earning say $350K/year as a corporate drone (like a Solaris Unix programmer in the financial district), would he have had access to these women?

  16. A Cornell University senior delivered her honors thesis after stripping down to her bra and underwear in front of her teacher and classmates — at least two dozen of whom also undressed — in a bid to “stand against oppressive beliefs and discrimination,” Campus Reform reported Tuesday.

    “When I got up to start, my professor said: ‘Is that really what you would wear?’” Chai, who said she was “shook” and filled with “rage and disbelief” after the incident, wrote in a Facebook post that soon went viral. “She, a white woman, continued: ‘Your shorts are too short.’”

    Chai recalled wearing a “long-sleeve blue button-down shirt and denim cut-offs,” which she alleges her professor told her was “inviting the male gaze away from the content of my presentation and onto my body.” She says an international male student agreed with the professor.

    Chai said Maggor tried to justify her question by explaining she was addressing her from the point of view of a concerned mother, to which Chai replied, her mom “is a Feminist, Gender, Sexuality Studies professor” who would’ve been proud of her for her outfit.

    http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/05/09/ivy-league-senior-presents-her-thesis-in-bra-underwear-to-fight-oppressive-beliefs.html

  18. “And we have to pretend they’re not crazy.”

    And that makes us all complicit.

  20. Something I’ve noticed: we don’t see or hear gays charging their lovers with assault very often. I believe this incident and the scores like it that seem to now occur daily will perhaps drive more men to become gay.
    What are these feminists gonna do when they run out of men to charge with assault and abuse??
    Also, I’d like to know why these abused gals continued to have romantic meetings with the guy if he was always being so rough on them?

  22. Human progress

    epoch-1970: Men must listen to the complaints of women they were having sex with.

    1970-2016: Men must listen to the complaints of women they used to have sex with (in divorce court, with lawyers)

    2017-: Men must listen to the complaints of random women about the random guys they were having sex with.

  23. Historian: As a millennial, a shocking number of young people want to return to the pre-1970 era. The negotiations between tradition minded women and the newly traditionally minded men have broken down over pre-marital sex. I, as a negotiator for the men, have proposed a significant amount of premarital sex. The women have countered with no premarital sex. We should have a deal before Congress passes a budget!

    The young women, who call themselves #tradlife, seem to prefer hanging out with kids all day to being an office wage slave. What’s particularly shocking to their feminist overlords is that they prefer having 4-5 kids with a man they love to 1 kid with an anonymous sperm donor(even if they can get child support from him).

    The young men thought they were supporters of feminism until discovering that they actually supported the discredited equality feminism. One by one, we rediscovered the wisdom of the supposedly pointless rigidness of Victorian mores.

  24. Manning Barish says that even after she broke up with Schneiderman 3 times, she still kept going back to him for sex and beatings.

    We used to hear stories of a battered wife who put up with beatings for the sake of the marriage or the kids. But this woman had no ties to him at all, except that she liked what he did when she was in his bed.

  25. Roger: You inspired me to search for “Manning Barish”. https://nypost.com/2018/05/07/ex-girlfriend-says-schneiderman-beat-choked-her-after-night-of-drinking/ says “feminist Michelle Manning Barish”. (and then, just as you say, “Barish went back to him, and the pair stayed together, off and on, for nearly the next two years.”)

    http://www.ibtimes.com/who-michelle-manning-barish-eric-schneiderman-accused-ex-girlfriend-abuse-2678794

    says “Barish, aged 47, is a Florida native and studied English at Florida International University and Urban Humanitarian Emergency Crisis Management at Harvard University. She is a political activist and a divorced single mother.”

    So it is, thus far, at least two Harvard graduates who were also “feminists”.

    [Separately, in https://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-manning-barish/shout-out-to-the-dads-who_b_9857174.html the “single mom” Barish complains about the biological father’s “lack of contribution”. But if she is the “single mom” then he is paying her tax-free child support every month? Does that not count as a “contribution”?]

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