Reclusive Leftist had an excellent response to James Carville’s incredibly stupid comments on CNN in her It’s the System, Stupid post:

Sexism is a deeply learned behavior with a thousand manifestations. You can’t quarantine the big pieces of it — rape, legal discrimination — as if they exist in a vacuum apart from the rest of society’s values. From frat boy joke to date rape, from gangsta rap to domestic violence, from pink housework toys at Wal-Mart to the boss who won’t promote a woman into top management, from “Math is hard” Barbie to the physics lab where men harass their female colleagues relentlessly, from Girls Gone Wild videos to the jury that acquits a rapist because the victim was wearing a short skirt — it’s a system. A giant, all-encompassing, self-reinforcing system.

No one thinks that Jon Favreau is personally responsible for crimes against women. What we think — what we know — is that his frat-boy grope is one lurid thread in a larger pattern. It’s symptomatic of a culture in which women are routinely sexualized, diminished, and harassed; a culture in which violence against women is normalized as mainstream fun; a culture in which powerful, accomplished women are ridiculed as b**ches and c**ts who just need a good f***ing.

In comments, Lucy had this to say:

I am so angry about this, I just can’t stop shaking. I’ve been groped hundreds of times, date-raped, and I worked for years in a hostile corporate environment long before the term “sexual harrasment” had any legal meaning — for a boss who used to take us gals to lingerie shows and pick out something for the best of us.

As for Carville suggesting women who are upset by this need shrinks: well, I spent years in therapy specifically because of the trauma visited on me by men. How dare he. How goddamn dare he.

This frat-boy mentality is just disgusting and I’m beginning to think the only way to combat it is to get militant. A commenter over at Heart’s place said that one reason men don’t get it is that women don’t assault men, don’t rape them.

Maybe it’s time we do.

Why, after all, can girls not have the same “fun” that boys do?

While I’m generally not a fan of violence, I couldn’t help but sympathize with that sentiment. After 8 years of trench warfare against the aggressive attacks on women’s rights by the Republican Party, watching women being so egregiously betrayed by the so-called “progressive” party this year, their traditional “allies“, disheartened by the capitulation of increasingly toothless feminist establishments such as NARAL and NOW, and the general overall atmosphere of seething male resentment has clearly accelerated my path towards rad-fem status.

Which is why, after reading this, I was not quite as horrified and sickened as I once would have been, but rather… coldly pleased.

Ameneh Bahrami refused to accept “blood money.” She insisted instead that her attacker suffer a fate similar to her own “so people like him would realize they do not have the right to throw acid in girls’ faces,” she told the Tehran Provincial Court.

If that’s what it takes, that’s what it fucking takes.