Interviewing Kathy Shaidle About Her New Ebook, “Confessions of A Failed Slut”

Interviewing Kathy Shaidle About Her New Ebook, “Confessions of A Failed Slut”

Kathy Shaidle’s Confessions of A Failed Slut was a short, but excellent read that I’d highly recommend. After reading it, I just had to interview her. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

233x350xconfessions2-333x500.jpg.pagespeed.ic.d--T1yrOIs I found your take on Glenn Close’s famous character from Fatal Attraction to be fascinating because I’d never thought of it before. Here’s your quote from the book, “Look at Glenn Close’s character Alex in Fatal Attraction. Except like Nurse Ratchet she’s one of the most misunderstood females on film. In her murderous rage, Alex is actually clawing backwards towards a sanity of sorts.” Explain what you mean.

Well, what I mean is that, you know, a long time ago, before I don’t know, the 60s, …you didn’t take advantage of a woman and then run off on her. If you did, you were a cad, especially if you’re a married man. And you know the thing about Alex is she’s torn between two worlds. She’s in that world of I can have sex like a man and I’ve read Cosmo and I’m a liberated woman. So she sleeps with this married guy and she’s all like, “Oh, I know it’s just casual, it’s just casual.”

But here’s the thing, human nature has a funny way of biting you on the ass. I believe that most women cannot actually have sex like a man and just sleep around with hundreds of guys and treat it like, as I always call it, a roller coaster — but make it like no biggy, no moral consequences, no nothing. I think women are mostly wired so that they bond with people they have sex with and this is why so many women have broken hearts and they pine for people they secretly want — I don’t care what they say — they secretly want to be with one guy and settle down and get out of this game of sleeping around all the time.

So, really what seems crazy in the film, her insane clingy behavior, trying to get him back, feeling kind of outraged that she’s been dumped, once upon a time that actually would have been considered the normal reaction…. what she did to what happened to her. She would be outraged that this man, especially if he pretended he wasn’t married, I mean…. she did go into this knowing what she was getting into.

But in a way still, I stand by the fact that what struck modern audiences is this frightening and scary…. and they call her, you know, rabbit boiler and people always say, you know, you don’t want to end up in this “fatal attraction” thing. Well,: you know in a way she was just instinctively reacting in a very female way like, “How dare you use me like a piece of Kleenex and throw me away.”

That used to be considered the same way to think and her way of thinking and many modern women’s way of thinking “Oh, I can just sleep around with everybody.” I mean you could’ve ended up in the nuthouse for being what was called a nymphomaniac. So everything has sort of been turned upside down and I would argue that well, sure, there are some women who live like that and it’s great, they’re not hurting anybody except themselves, I hope.

I really do believe that most women aren’t set up that way and that’s one of the reasons why that movie had such a resonance. I mean there were hundreds of essays written about it when it came out. It really divided people. And so that’s what I was getting at in, in that particular column……… that I ended up putting in the book was there are a lot of women on screen who I think are mis-characterized. : they get a raw deal mostly because a lot of reviewers are guys and they don’t know what it’s like to be inside a woman’s skin; so they get it wrong.

Now I am actually one of the few men who has seen Sex in the City. I actually watched the first three seasons of the show …

Oh, my God.

… and honestly I sort of liked it up until that point because it was a funny show about 30-something women dating. After that, it started focusing more on the relationships and I thought it got really boring because the women in the show I think are really shallow and fundamentally unlikable — : which I’m sure is not the take most women took away from the show.

Well, I always felt that way.

However, it’s, I was going to say, it does sound like you have seen this show and I wanted to get your take on it.

I hated it from the minute I saw it. I have never liked that show and I was basically their demographic, a single woman in the city, da, da, da. …I think there’s something about seeing it on the screen at least for me that went, “Oh, that’s kind of holding up a mirror to the way me and my friends think we are and, wow, it’s pretty unattractive isn’t it?”

And I really didn’t like how unlikable they were. I really didn’t like how shallow they were. And by the way, the show was written by gay men and it really shows because all the female characters have a very gay male view of sex which is casual sex, it’s fun, and what’s really more fun is we go out for brunch and we drink cute cocktails and we have nice outfits and stuff like that.

If it had been an all male cast it would’ve been even more true to life, but I don’t think that would’ve gotten off the ground in those days. So, yes, I just, I really have, cannot stand it and like I said in the book, there was one part where I was working at a typical, you know, almost all female cubicle job, and between talking about what they had for breakfast, what they had for lunch and what they had for dinner, and whose birthday it was going to be next week, somebody said something about Sex in the City.

And I just screamed out, “Those women are whores” because it just pushes all my buttons. I couldn’t, I couldn’t deal with it. …I kind of want to forget that I ever thought I wanted to be that person. I mean, so a lot of my reaction is just me, it’s my issue, it’s my problem. But, you know I, it just didn’t grab me. Plus frankly, I’m a girly girl, but I hate heels. And 90 percent of Sex in the City seemed to be something about shoes….I’m amazed it lasted as long as it did, to be honest with you.

This is another quote from your book, “In my day all sex is rape was the prevailing radical feminist wisdom. Now it seems to be drunk sex is rape or not?” Talk about that.

Yes, I, I remember the days when Susan Brownmiller’s book about rape came out. And that sort of fed the notion that all sexual intercourse with a man was rape because ideally if you’re a really radical feminist you’re not having sex with men and that it’s just, by its sort of nature….. is an intrusive act and I think if you spend a lot of time in your own head in feminist circles, this kind of stuff can make a weird sort of sense to you.

Female separatism was really big when I was on the Left, too, and women are going to start their own, you know they’re all going to live together and we don’t need men and we’re going to have to learn how to be mechanics and stuff like that. It’s just one of those trends that comes and goes. And, of course, it never happens. But now it seems to have gotten so bad, you know, like the Left has to keep moving the goalpost because they win stuff and they hate winning because that puts them out of business and then they have to get a real job.

So they have to keep pushing. First it’s gay rights and now its transsexual rights or whatever the word is this week for transsexuals and then I believe it’s going to be pedophile rights, if it’s not already. Certainly it’s going to be S&M, BDSM rights and things like that because once they get what they want, they want something new because it’s all about shocking the boudoir scene.

So there seems to be this newish thing that drunk sex is rape. So if you ever have sex and you’re drunk at the time, well, you were raped because you couldn’t consent. But as I said, I quoted the guest on the Adam Carolla Show, the youngish woman who said, “Well, if that’s true, I’ve only ever been raped.” I mean, booze and sex is a historical pairing, you know, and I don’t know if it’s realistic to expect it to be otherwise.

Can women get really drunk and not be able to consent? Of course, that’s absolutely true. But I get the feeling that women are trying to have more and more outs so that they can cry rape more often than they should because being a victim is cool now. I’m a survivor of sexual assault, blah, blah. It becomes this thing, it’s like a conversation stopper. It gets you special status and it feeds your ego a little bit. So, yes, it’s too bad, I wish they wouldn’t come up with these trendy goofy fads and I think this is a fad. But a lot of it speaks to people who haven’t had a lot of experience in the world and maybe don’t get out much….

Now see, I would have a little bit of a different take. I don’t think most women think that way. I think there’s like these far left wing college students who like you say are probably 18 years old and they don’t know much about sex anyway and it’s like, “Well, drinking, that’s obviously… that’s rape!” They don’t know that, hell, half the people out there — that’s probably the only way they’ve had sex until they met the person they married……. was after getting drunk in some bar.

I know, but one of the problems is that this stuff filters down from academia into the mainstream. There was a time when gay marriage was a crazy idea that a bunch of academics had and they started pushing it not because they actually wanted to get married, but because — and they will admit this — they wanted to undermine the meaning of the word “marriage.” They wanted to undermine family — family has been the enemy since Marx.

So stuff that starts off being a crazy idea on college campuses almost inevitably becomes public policy in about 10 to 15 years and probably faster now that we can communicate and pass around these ideas so much more easily than we used to. I mean the idea of gender, you know, “Oh, gender is fluid.” That was again something that you would hear in a women’s studies course in the 80s or 90s. Now again, it’s public policy that we should let transsexuals use whatever bathroom they want to use because gender is fluid. So, it’s being voted on in Parliament, whereas it started off as six people trying out a theory in a dorm room. So we have to be kind of on guard and making ….

Yes, gender is fluid. (Laughing) I can’t wait until they start deciding, well, if you think you’re a waffle, then you’re a waffle.

Transsexuals are only people who we consider sane for wanting to have a healthy bodily organ removed surgically.

I don’t consider them sane.

No, exactly.

I consider that to be a mental illness.

No, it is a mental illness and there was a time when we would’ve treated people like that and rightly so. There are people who I don’t have the word handy, but there is a word for people who are convinced that they need to have — say, an arm or a leg removed. It’s a very rare mental illness and everybody agrees with that. But they don’t agree when for some reason it’s genitalia and then suddenly this person needs to have special rights, they need to have to be able to use the women’s changing room at the Y and things like this that are causing a lot of problems.

And, yes, I agree that it’s a mental illness. Partly because of having lived in Boys Town in Toronto for almost 15 years at one point, I can assure you that unfortunately I can only think of one person I know with a “gender” identity problem who was a sane, kind, decent person and most of them are extremely angry, extremely neurotic, unstable people which I think speaks to the fact that this is a symptom of another mental illness. They aren’t happy and they aren’t happy not because they really want to be girls. They have a problem and sometimes for other people it would manifest itself in like shoplifting or alcoholism or animal abuse or something. This is just how it happens to manifest itself and because it lends itself to amusing Broadway musicals, it has a legitimacy that other pathologies don’t have. I’m hoping we will snap out of this. I don’t have a lot of confidence that we will. This is a very powerful lobby and it’s very weird to me, but I think we’re unfortunately stuck with the idea that these people are not only sane, but they’re saints, and they can never be denied or criticized in any way.

Now I as I mentioned to you before we started doing the interview, I used to run a humor site called Brass Knuckles Webzine and I was familiar with a site called Something Awful that covered a lot of weird sexual fetishes because it made fun of them — it was a humor website. However, you came up with some I have never heard of from Reddit, stuff like Otherkin and the Headmates and weird stuff that almost goes beyond human belief. Talk about that a little bit.

Well, knowing that I collect these things so that I can write about them for Taki’s, one of my old friends, a former blogger, said, “You’ll like this.” He e-mailed me this link to a Reddit room where everybody is chatting about these really weird people. Now we’ve all heard about a man trapped in a woman’s body and so forth. Well, like I said earlier, there are people who feel the need to just keep pushing this sort of thing because the thrill of that has worn off socially. So there are people who believe that they’re — : say, a black, disabled women in white male bodies or they believe that they are a planet or they believe that they are an alien. Now I met some of the, “I think I’m an alien” people years ago.

Hey, wait a second. What bathroom do those people get?

Well, that’s just it; they’re going to have to put a little picture of like a gray alien on one of the doors or something like that. ..They all get together and some people think they’re animals. And I don’t mean furries which we’ve seen on CSI or whatever. These are people who don’t necessarily dress up as animals. They think, “I am a fox” and, “I know I look like a person, but I am a fox.” So they all must get together and talk about this amongst themselves, but luckily this Reddit site was about making fun of them. And I have to say I laughed. It was cruel and mean and nasty and it was really, really, really funny and you know what? I was just about to say I can’t imagine anything weirder. You know what? There’s, there’s going to be stuff, I mean I guess they’re going to be people who are going to think that they’re machines because we’re running out of stuff like that, like they’re really a robot. And then they’re all going to want rights, John, they’re all going to want stuff in the Constitution that they’re reading into it for sure. I feel sorry for the Founding Fathers who I’m glad are not around to see what’s happening.

…That’s one of those weird little things about the Internet. There have probably always been people who thought they were a giraffe. But now they can all get together on the Internet and tell each other how right they are.

Multiplied by thousands and those kinds of mass delusions, it’s never great for society. It’s one thing to be a harmless eccentric like you say. There’ve always been nutty people, but I mean these are people who are not only commiserating which is fine, but they are demanding special rights. They want to be called a certain name up until next week when they change the name just to piss you off. Now they want new names — a lot of this is just a weird pathology. I hate the word “antisocial” because I’m kind of antisocial, but this is antisocial stuff. I don’t know whether we should be overly concerned, but it’s symptomatic of a lot of stuff that’s wrong with society today, that’s for sure.

And Kathy, our last question. Your quote on metrosexuals in the book echoes comments I’ve heard from a lot of conservative women lately. I have a lot of female conservative friends and they say this kind of thing all the time, although they’re not quite so colorful in their language. Here’s what you had to say, “We started mocking this personal style of metrosexual almost 20 years ago but that word was always problematic. The metro prefix is utterly apt; it’s the sexual part that’s off. These nominal heteros are consciously, or subconsciously mimicking gay Twinks and those fellows usually want to get laid. They’re fragile straight counterparts in contrast don’t look like they could manage it or even want to.” Why do you think men are becoming less manly?

A friend of mine years ago who looked like Renee Zellwager — blonde, natural platinum blonde, cute girl, really smart, very educated, very talented, made a fantastic living. Her fiancé broke up with her because “being married would leave him with less time to play video games.” This is kind of a problem.

I don’t know if people are serious or not because it does sound a bit crankish to me, but you will often hear people say that this is being caused by the fact that women have been taking the birth control pill for so long that the water supply has been tainted with estrogen. And this is why you see so many men up there who are these weird, spindly, hollow chested skinny, anemic, strange looking — are they guys? Are they androgynous? What are they?

And it’s baffling to me. I mean in the big cities like Toronto, it’s probably more prevalent, but you know I, on the rare occasions I leave the house, I will see these guys and they’re with their wife or whatever and they’re pushing a baby carriage or whatever and you think, is that really your child? Because they look like a 12 year old I know, they kind of look like men in their 30s now look like 12 year old boys.

…I assume men are gay now until I have some kind of evidence otherwise because there’s something going on. … I have noticed it as now you’re showing other people have noticed it too. …I really do think though, if you look at them, there is something biological about it. This isn’t really even an affectation. It isn’t about, oh, hippies, they have long hair. I mean, you know, they look at Woodstock…. if the guys with their shirts off still look more or less like guys with their shirts off. And like these almost skeletal ectomorph people with no muscles on them or anything, with their little bicycle helmets, it’s just kind of, it’s really off-putting and they don’t ….

That last shot seemed a little bit too close for comfort to our President there. The little bicycle helmet.

Well, with the mom jeans, Yes ….

See, now, I’ve always thought this was more of a social thing. Standards have changed. There are a lot of guys out there who don’t feel like they can compete for a woman at all and so it’s just a lot more fun to just stay home and play video games. They’ve never done anything manly in their lives and they’re just like, “I’ll sit home and play Call of Duty all day long. I’ll play that for 12 hours a day and I’ll have a decent little life. I’ll never chase women or anything, but it’s easy. I don’t even have to do anything manly anyway. ”

Right. And I mean porn is at your fingertips — no pun intended. And as many guys in the manosphere will tell you, just the divorce laws alone in the court system are so in favor of women it’s reached the point where rational guys are opting out of this. We used to make fun of the guy sitting in the basement, playing video games. But when you look at how men have so much stacked against them, that if they look at a woman sideways, they’re going to get fired for sexual harassment, it gets to the point where you think, well, they’re making the sensible, rational decision to opt out of this. I mean, frankly I get it.

More women for the rest of us.

Well, there you go. I mean that’s, that’s certainly one way of looking at it, but women are kind of to blame for this, too, because they’ve always been really picky and a lot of them are “educated, more educated than men” although I don’t think those pieces of paper really mean anything. But it can intimidate a guy. She’s got a Masters and he’s got a BA. Increasingly that’s the case and so on and so forth. It’s a mess. But, I still maintain that there’s more to this than that. There’s something in the water, John.

I’m going to end because that’s perfect. Thanks so much for doing the interview, Kathy! Your book was really good!

Well, that, that makes my day.

Once again, Kathy Shaidle’s new ebook is called, Confessions of A Failed Slut.

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