I have to admit that there are a lot of things that annoy me: people who are deliberately rude and disrespectful (especially out of prejudice), people who make noise in “quiet” areas, Amazon "customer service," supervisors who are tyrants and tell you “I don’t care” about anything you have to say, so you just try to avoid talking to them at all because all it does is frustrate you.
Another thing that is annoying are people like South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who is so full of herself that she recently appeared on the left-wing Daily Show; "fortunately" for the country, rather than finding this a useful media stunt to get herself some attention, she was merely the object of amusement when she claimed she saw no evidence of wrongdoing by Trump in the legal cases against, yet falsely insisted that investigations of Joe Biden had uncovered “evidence” of corruption. How can you take seriously anyone who is so hypocritical and treats you like a fool?
And then there are those people who don’t even try to get you on their “side,” instead doing their level best to alienate and anger you. Take for instance British barrister Charlotte Proudman, whose last name is one she made up for herself, in “honor” of her maternal grandmother, she says. It seems that Proudman doesn’t get along with those on the paternal side of the family, but we’ll get to that later. Proudman, who is less a “radical feminist" than just a monumentally egotistical narcissist whose main attribute is not as an “advocate” for the causes she allegedly believes in, but her “advocacy” for her own self above all else.
Proudman made news recently in the usual way, making an outrageously stupid statement that makes one question her mental state and judgment:
I admit that this might have been brought on by someone referring to her as a “cunt” in response to yet another misandrist excursion of this British version of Michele Dauber, who we haven’t heard from in a long time, probably because she was advised to keep low after suspicions that she took time off from threatening male students and contributing to the suicide of a female student-athlete at Stanford. However, it seems that Proudman actively courts this kind of thing; in this photo of undetermined date she is dressing up like she wants to be “noticed,” yet if anyone dares to she is ready to call them “sexist” and “misogynist”:
One wonders how she would take it if she was completely ignored or it was observed that she has been putting on a few kilograms in recent years; no doubt people now look at something like this and roll their eyes, knowing what lies behind the façade. In fact Proudman came to public notice in 2015 when she publicly shamed fellow barrister Alexander Carter-Silk for “demeaning her” by expressing admiration for the deliberately dolled-up image of herself on a LinkedIn page. Judith Woods wrote in the Telegraph soon afterwards “When did women become such whingers? Accepting compliments appears to be a woefully lost art.”
2015 also saw accusations that Proudman had brought her dying paternal grandmother to tears with a Facebook “rant” criticizing her father’s side of family and boasting about herself and her mother’s side of the family. The source of Proudman's anger was that when her father he left most of his estate to a cancer charity; what Proudman doesn’t acknowledge was that the will was challenged in court and she was ultimately left with a not insubstantial sum of money. Family members on her father’s side contend that Proudman’s hatred of men stems from this episode.
When media reports of Proudman’s behavior towards her dying grandmother, who she never attempted to reconcile with, were circulated she filed a complaint with the media watchdog organization IPSO. In a complaint filed by Proudman at the time
The complainant said that it was an intrusion into her privacy to publish information about the message between her and her grandmother. It had been a private message, the details of which had been relayed to the newspaper by a third party, and there was no public interest in publishing details of it. She also said that the fact that her family had challenged her father’s will and secured an amount of money to be left in trust for her was an intrusion into her privacy, and a breach of Clause 3.
Yes, Proudman would rather continue to portray herself as a “victim” of her deceased father (who she at least never accused of molesting her, for the moment) rather than let the truth interfere. While she “disputed” that she wrote that the paternal side of her family had “achieved nothing,” nevertheless
she did not dispute that she may have sent her grandmother a message which could have led to her being upset, and nor did she dispute that she may have told her grandmother that she wanted nothing to do with her father’s family. In this context, the Committee determined that the alleged inaccuracy identified by the complainant was not significant, and did not require correction under the terms of Clause 1.
It was also determined that while the article had reported that “family members believe that her strident feminism may be inspired by the fact that her wealthy father had left her out of his will before he died when she was aged four” may or may not be the motivation behind Proudman’s feminist beliefs, “the complainant was not in a position to dispute that family members believed this to be the case.”
IPSO thus found no “breach” of journalistic ethics in the complaint brought by Proudman.
More recently Proudman was known as an admirer of Amber Heard, and of course what she said about Johnny Depp only deepened the contempt for her complete absence of justice. Pravina Rudman observed in the New Statesman that Proudman’s behavior and words were in the end self-defeating for its hypocrisy:
One thing that becomes clear with Proudman: much of her life appears to exist only in relation to “white men”. Since writing about “white upper class men” in the Independent in 2015, she has spoken so frequently about white people that you might expect Proudman to acknowledge that she is… white. During the King’s coronation she tweeted, “What a beautiful photograph of white male privilege and entitlement. Sums up who rules our country.” Twitter users added a contextual note (this often happens with Proudman’s tweets), to explain that for 134 of the last 200 years the UK’s head of state had been a woman.
Rudman goes on to say that “Proudman’s forte is sensationalist, simplistic rhetoric. She wrote for the blog Left Foot Forward in 2015 about how men create a ‘repugnant world’ in the workplace. This week she declared everywhere from Good Morning Britain to LBC radio that mothers should make their babies take their surname because women do most of the child-rearing. I’m uncertain what this would achieve except perpetuating the cycle she fears, of babies being seen as a ‘woman thing.’”
As we saw in the above tweet, “Nuance is rarely on offer with Proudman. You constantly get the impression she is trying to appear the most progressive person in the room – to the extent people frequently ask on social media whether she’s a spoof…Upon seeing the Amazon Prime series The Power this month, Proudman praised the ‘unapologetic female violence’ tweeting: ‘This is quite possibly the most empowering feminist drama I’ve ever watched. Their feminist revolution brought me to tears.’ Worst of all, however, are the platitudes, frequently delivered in a mic drop fashion: ‘A not guilty verdict does not mean they are innocent’; ‘No woman deserves to be killed by a man.’ You want to slow clap.”
The Power, by the way, is about only women receiving some kind of absurd “electrical” jolt that gives them power over men. The show has been criticized by some feminists as suggesting that power is as corrupting in women as it is men—as if we don’t already see that in men being “canceled” on mere allegations because the power of even the lie is as dangerous as being electrocuted in this society.
Rudman also notes that being a barrister, Proudman should at least have respect for due process. But no, hypocrisy is the feminist way:
When interviewed by the journalist Nick Wallis about the US Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard defamation case last year, Proudman contradicted herself. She talked repeatedly about the case against Depp, but when asked about a recording of Heard allegedly taunting Depp, said: “I don’t want to comment on that at the moment because obviously it’s going through [this] trial”…It is on this legal standard that Proudman is most concerning.
Proudman, Rudman notes, “is one of the loudest representatives to the wider world of a profession which prides itself on “standards of proof,” yet what she accepts as “proof” or not is subject to her personal politics. The “flaw” of Proudman “is that she has made her activism about her, and this distracts from the cause she seeks to advance. On Depp vs Heard, the public didn’t hear ‘believe women’ any more, they heard ‘believe women at the expense of due process’ – from a barrister, no less. The problem with being a parody is that even when you do make a valid point, you can’t be taken seriously.”
Jan Moir in the Daily Mail suggested that Proudman had already become little more than a parody in 2015, and that is still true today:
Oh no, is she still here? Say what you like about lawyer Charlotte Proudman, but you have to admit she is making the most of her 15 minutes of fame. The 27-year-old who accused a senior lawyer of LinkedIn sexism has been busy, busy, busy. She has been on television, enjoyed uncritical interviews in various news programmes and magazines, written a self-serving article dutifully published in The Guardian and seems generally pleased with the situation to date. What next? Desert Island Discs, Celebrity Bake Off and mud-wrestling for charity with Amal Clooney? Nothing would surprise. And as she complains about yes, yawn, receiving death threats on Twitter, note that Charlotte’s cannonball trajectory through the media has followed the usual trope. Who, me? Why me? Look at me.
Harvey Mansfield, an American philosopher and retired professor at Harvard, once upset feminist fraudster Naomi Wolf by defending “manliness,” suggesting during a discussion with her that unlike women who seek the “easy way,” men are more risk-takers, and while this isn’t exclusive to them, “men are more abstract and tend not to let their personal biases and emotions obstruct an argument.”
Mansfield has written about how problematic is the feminist insistence that women are both “equal to” and yet “different” than men:
The demand to create implies that women have the freedom to create, and that such freedom is more suitable for women than is submissiveness. Suitable, however, means better suited to what? To women’s nature or essence. We are back to essentialism. To prevent this one must assert that women are right to make whatever they want of themselves without reference to what suits them. But if this is so, they could make themselves submissive to men as readily and justly as independent of them. If there is something wrong about this result, doesn’t it mean that women have an essential element of freedom in their nature, like men?
Mansfield also wonders of the contradiction in that
A woman can become independent of men by learning how to imitate them, thus making actual men dispensable while retaining the use of all their qualities. To prove that women can do everything men do, the most logical feminists find it necessary to practice their excesses, or at least boast of them—announcing with satisfaction that the murder rate by women is rising or discovering that rape is a gender-neutral crime that women too have the force and malice to commit. A strange independence of men that requires slavish imitation of their faults!
As seen with Proudman, it is a “drag” on a feminist's “freedom” to expect them to be more “moral” or "ethical" than men, at least in “aggressive” speech. Yet while
Women are no longer the weaker sex, but they remain the more vulnerable sex. The new-old essence of women is vulnerability. Their exciting new sense of risk must be made riskless, their sexual adventures free of misadventure, their newly-acquired manliness given the support of a wife. The trouble with feminist imitation-manliness is that, unlike men, feminist women have no wives. They do have sisterhood, in which they keep one another company, but often it is company in sharing complaints that reminds women of their vulnerability more than their independence.
Mansfield also points out the double standards by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) which today is less interested in race matters but white female sexual assault allegations at the college level, and cares even less about how its definition of “consent” ignores how males and females view that differently. Females enter into a sexual relationship not necessarily for “pleasure” but to confirm the existence of a relationship, while a male may only see it as a momentary opportunity for pleasure, which occasionally results in a female having “morning after” thoughts about "respect" as well as "consent." He also points out that it isn’t “easy” for a male to simply “walk away” from what is initially seen to be a consensual sexual encounter, because of the potential of shame and embarrassment if “word” got out that he couldn’t “perform.”
Mansfield notes that gender activists insist that responsibility is all on the male and none of it on the female—it is an “unspoken” assumption that pervades even by what appears to be “consensual” sexual interactions:
Shame works by getting its object to blame himself rather than being blamed by others. So the woman’s weapon must not be seen to be wielded by the woman. The whole policy and all its processes are wrapped in the language of gender neutrality. This is not women vs. men; it is complainant vs. respondent. A fog of make-believe legalistic formalism pervades the policy, its proceedings, and its advocates. Nowhere is it avowed that its true purpose is to punish men.
On the surface, as presented by
the mainstream media, there is no “question” who the “guilty” and “victim” is; there is no question of "context" or action and reaction--unless of course it benefits the female's story. But in the case of people like Proudman, there is a fine line about who
the “abuser” and the “abused” are. Many if not most people who are familiar
with her and her pronouncements just greet her latest statement with an
eye-roll, not to be taken seriously.
Whose fault is that? It’s a lose-lose situation for men; even if they claim to be “feminists” themselves they are accused of being disingenuous and perpetuating “misogyny” because they can’t possibly “understand” what it means to be a woman (the same can be said of women in regard to men). As Snaporaz found himself confronted with in front of female “judges” in City of Women, his status as a “man” was a crime in and of itself, and the impossibility of “explaining” himself left him no alternative but to react to it thus:
And who can blame him?
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