An Outsider's blog review of tSW (1975)

[dale coba]

A few days back, my Stepford-sense (actually, Google Alerts)
informed me that a blogger was engaged in critical analysis of my movie.

For my comment, I was complimented, amply.

- Dale Coba

[Keizo]

And so the vicious cycle perpetuates. I found that rant by the feminist pretty unfortunate. "Misogynist" is a word thrown at us constantly, yet we don't actually hurt anyone (although in the context of TSW they actually get killed). Her rant didn't focus on that. It makes me wonder what hateful way she views men other than her ignorant arguments in categorizing all of us under the same evil. She says what she believe we see them as but never what she sees us as. I'm sure it is somewhere near the spectrum of lazy, stupid, tasteless, childish, etc, etc. I'm sure most of her audience feels the same.

Basically, all it does is make people more divisive but offers no solutions. She obviously can't see that her negative, criticizing, cynical, superiority complex can be a major turn off... but I'm sure any man that thinks so will instantly be dismissed under her presumptions. It's a shame; I thought she was kind of cute in a nerdy girl way

As with The Stepford Wives, I remember very well growing up under the height of the Women's Lib movement. I remember how horrible they told me I should feel for being born a boy. Pounded and pounded into our heads in the classroom and on television and in song. I remember their hatred of all things masculine and all the while they tried to emulate some of those traits. I remember their hatred of the women who WANTED to be feminine and "traditional." This was the context under which the movie was made. For people that didn't live through that to make such definitive observations only shows their lack of perspective.

In the end it doesn't matter. I may one day have my fembot while they can live with their bitterness and feeling of justification. But they don't help their cause by pushing men away and towards a more compatible choice. No, we are not all saints, but neither are they.

[dale coba]

On House,
Amber Tamblyn get paid the big bucks,
to make the same youthful, naive, ignorant, moralistic, incorrect, passive-aggressive smirk
as that vlogger wears.

The trick is to watch her micro-expressions when she looks off-camera to her prompter. Staring at the camera, she is who she wants us to see. When briefly unguarded, you can witness many flashes of a snarky teenager who betrays her immaturity, and a root for the motivations she does not understand, behind her thinking.

Feministfreqvency lives in a land of "Should Be".
That is why she can not see you. or me.

Ms. Tamblyn teaches us to doubt professed wisdom,
should we spot anyone acting as thus.

Keizo - petty envies can clash between gender philosophies, using the naive thought that all are ready, able, and driven to be the same ideal woman. All the valid observation of gender aside, it sounds like you were victim to a particularly high amount of this friction - but the rhetoric was beside the point, like getting a co-worker fired for being gay, or a smoker, so you can get their job.

Unexamined, simplistic thinking allowed a debate about empowerment to turn into a weapon. This is clear, the more specific you are about the needless emasculation, about the whiplash times in social politics, when the topics were novel and everyone involved was naive and passionate beyond their capacity to divorce themselves personally from their analysis.

Still, you caught what seems like the hardest of the flak - San Francisco, 1968; or perhaps Texas.

Remember, many of your readers probably haven't been burned by the same degree of concentrated pride-as-sin. I can believe in your tone, though my experiences growing up in a Philly suburb in the 1970s were far more on the civilized side.

Regardless of the topic, petty hens of all genders will peck at the weakest until half the feathers have been plucked. Elements of self-loathing and fear, though buried, will manifest in otherwise constructive, well-meaning rhetoric.

- Dale Coba