There are many, many things in the world which can be changed and many others which cannot, and those who learn to tell the difference are a lot better-adjusted and fundamentally happier. – “That Is So Hot!”
In the first week of this month, my blog was discovered by the men’s rights community and linked at a rate I had never before seen; my total traffic for the month was one and a half times what it was in March, and my average per day was almost as high as my total traffic for the previous August. Unfortunately, that also meant an influx of new commenters who were used to the ruder, more trollish, less civilized atmosphere which characterizes much of the internet outside of my walled garden here. Two columns grew directly out of that; in “Pendulum” I made it clear to the new arrivals what my views on feminism and men’s rights actually are, and in “House Rules”
I laid down a clear set of behavioral standards for commenters. Even so, it took some time for things to settle down, and “That Is So Hot!” – a simple meditation on why men find certain things attractive in women – had the most active comment thread of all time until it was finally surpassed last August. “What the Hell Were You Thinking?” and “Neither Cold nor Hot” touched on similar subjects, attacking poorly-considered feminist thought in the process.
Since statistical columns had proven popular, I turned out several of them this month: “A Tale That Grew in the Telling” introduced the awful Estes & Weiner study and the plethora of prohibitionist garbage which has sprung from it; “Out of Context” demonstrated how other such numbers are derived from similarly poor and inapplicable studies; “Who Watches the Watchmen?” exposed the truth about “child abduction” statistics; “The Pro-Rape Coalition” showed statistical evidence of the positive effects of porn; “By the Numbers” examined a way of verifying my American sex worker estimate; and “A Narrow View” introduced the John Jay study’s findings on underage streetwalkers. Of course, there were also the usual monthly features: an updates column, a two-part miscellanea column, a Q & A, a fictional interlude (“Faerie Tale”), and a harlotography (“Valeria Messalina”). And I did both a serious column for Easter and a hoax (which almost nobody caught) for April Fool’s Day.
By April, we were nearing the end of a feature that had existed since the beginning, monthly biographies of people I knew personally; this month’s installment was “Lost Friends”. Another profile-type column was “The Coffee Klatsch”, describing three bloggers I often chatted with in those days who have since retired; one of them, Brandy Devereux, is discussed at length in “Feminine Pragmatism” and provided me a lot of material back then. But we also had a few firsts: “Subtle Pimping” was the first appearance of AHF’s crusade to turn porn into condom commercials, “Creeping Rot” documented the introduction of the Swedish model into France, and “Real Men Support Sex Worker Rights” was my first discussion of how hard it is for men to openly do that of late. Rounding out the month were “An Island of Sanity” (an anti-sex law is defeated); “They Just Don’t Get It” (police attempt to make ordinary business practices look sinister); Their Lips are Moving (cops try to pin the Long Island murders on “hobbyists”); “…And Don’t Forget To Wash Behind Your Ears” (the nanny state invades online dating); and “Dr. Schrödinger and His Amazing Pussycat” (which defies simple explanation). 
Sometimes I’ll check out back articles you’ve written for updated news.
While looking for updated info on the implementation of the Swedish Model in France …
Found this …
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/nordic-model-prostitution-approved-by-european-parliament-1438009
Have you commented on this yet? Maybe I missed it.
Eh … sorry … TW3 #412.
Maybe someone in Europe can explain to me what the dynamic between the European parliament and the EU member states is. It seems to me I’ve seen stories where the EU parliament passes legislation that is immediately adopted by all – and then other legislation that just kind of hangs out like a bad smell … and few states (or none) adopt it.
It’s pretty damned confusing.
The EU’s real governing body is the Council of Europe, an appointed body. Once they enact something, it is introduced in the European Parliament (an elected but toothless group) for “consultation”.
I’m about convinced that our own country is run in a similar, indirect way except that the real governing group is secret.
In reading your article about “What the Hell Were You Thinking?” I found myself thinking that the reason that feminists (and others) are so fast to jump on someone whose asks “What were you thinking?” when a woman is careless and gets raped or beaten is that there are so many people who will use ANY excuse to blame the victim. Women who want to believe that they won’t be raped or beaten by men because they are different than those women who are raped and beaten, socially conservative moralists who want to impose a strict code upon the behavior of women, and men who don’t want to be held responsible for sexual aggression against women.
And while the points you and Camille Paglia make are common sense that no one can reasonably dispute, the problem is that every such point will be repeatedly used by the groups I cited above as evidence that it is all the woman’s fault when she is raped or beaten. The groups I’ve cited have an agenda, the specific incidents of carelessness are just playing cards for them, to be used to advance their agenda.
It’s very much like the neofeminists who use any incidence of pimping or human trafficking, however rare, as evidence that prostitutes are hapless victims of males and must be protected against their will. Any admission on your part that any woman has ever been trafficked for sexual purposes, even within the context that human trafficking is extremely rare and routinely overestimated, will be used by those neofeminists as a playing card: “Look, even Maggie McNeil admits that trafficking of women as sex slaves exists!”
You and I both know that neofeminists are merely USING a common sense statement to advance their agenda, they aren’t really examining your statement within its context because doing so would tend to destroy their arguments, not support them, and they have no interest in common sense where it does not support their agenda.
The neofeminists who respond so aggressively with cries of “blaming the victim” when people ask ‘What were you thinking?” of women who have been careless are responding to that same kind of pressure: they know that many many people who ask “What were you thinking?” have an agenda, and they’re reacting to it.