2012Aceman t1_j23rqja wrote
Ayn Rand was a confident, independent, sexually liberated atheist woman in the 1900's who felt that the government was corrupt and being corrupted (wasn't it, and isn't it?). She walked so that you could run.
gothiclg OP t1_j23wd4u wrote
I’m sorry but did we read the same book? The only sexually liberated thing in the book is Dagne sleeping with 3 men over the course of a lifetime. My aunt was born the same year and I’m pretty sure every single one of her kids is from a different one of her 4 husbands. Sexual liberation is not “I enjoyed 3 men who were in love with me”.
Corrupt government I’ll give her but at the same time barely. Again it was really really really clear she was afraid of specifically communist ideals here, not all government. The book literally only bashed communism and not every government. I’d argue the book was anti communism but not anti government
2012Aceman t1_j241bk6 wrote
Ayn Rand HERSELF was the confident, sexually liberated woman. Her marriage was an open relationship, and she bragged about how good the sex was.
gothiclg OP t1_j242bei wrote
Again I’m not seeing anything sexually liberated there either? Like do you see people before this book was published as super Christian “I only had sex in missionary and only in the confines of marriage” kind of deal? You realize we’ve had open marriages, cheating, sleeping around, and porn forever now right? Nothing about Rand was really new or spectacular and I’m not about to make her this weird new “women’s liberation” person. I have a grandmother, grandfather, great aunt, and great uncle who were all doing similar stuff but didn’t need to publicize it like she did to avoid scandal. The only credit anyone can give her is any amount of fame and money she had would have forced her hand into admitting having sex outside of her marriage in ways another woman of her era would not have had to.
2012Aceman t1_j244c4d wrote
Yea, and Darwin didn't really do much for evolution, he just formatted it to make it easier to read. All the pieces were already there, so why does he get so much credit?
And Columbus didn't discover America, it was already here! In fact, Vikings were here before him, and maybe Muslims (odd timing on that Reconquista and Discovery of America in the same year). So why would we give him so much credit, it isn't like his find changed anything. America was already there, some people already knew it, we would have eventually found it anyway....
gothiclg OP t1_j2454iu wrote
She honestly was offering 0 new for the time period, 0. I say this as someone who had that many people alive at the time doing the same stuff. Open marriage isn’t any more common but it’s there and it was there during her time. Everyone you listed gets credit for offering evidence of what they’d found making them concrete, nothing about Mrs Rand sharing her sex life would have been so scandalous at the time it would have costed her a social life. Had she been cheating it would have been different but when a good chunk of others are doing it it’s not new
Alternative_Effort t1_j27m977 wrote
>Ayn Rand was a confident, independent, sexually liberated atheist woman
Those are all traits from her Soviet upbringing.. They had sexual liberation and gender equality before American women could even vote.
Rand and her fetish for being raped by a fascist might count as a form of liberation, I suppose, but its a far cry from truly sexually liberated.
If Rand pioneered anything, it was probably her nonbinaryness. She rejected identification as a woman, preferring to be denoted man because she associated the term with strength. Its easy to imagine Rand prefering he/him in the world of today.
2012Aceman t1_j28brt6 wrote
When you say “raped by a fascist” I’m gonna need to hear, in your opinion, who that fascist was. When did Ayn Rand go pro-authoritarian government? When did Ayn Rand reject individual rights for collective benefit?
Alternative_Effort t1_j28emj0 wrote
Her works are replete with authoritarian strongmen who "take" women who want to be "taken". She obviously wasn't a fan of European or Soviet strongmen -- she got off on American wealth-o-supremacists
2012Aceman t1_j28glde wrote
Was Henry Reardon a person who “took women?” Was John Galt? Howard Roark “took” Dominique, but it was clear she wished to participate, and I won’t have you kinkshaming what turns out to be a popular sexual fantasy with women.
And do those men “take” like the government, or do they “deal” like businesspeople?
Alternative_Effort t1_j2azba5 wrote
>I won’t have you kinkshaming
That's an excellent statement, and if Rand were just a novelist we could leave it at that. But she became a political inspiration, so we have to talk about her hybristophilia, much as we have to talk about King Edward's kinks because they led him to fall under the spell of Nazism.
Rand worships her own version of the Ubermensch; Guido von List and the Hiterlites had the Aryans, L. Ron Hubbard had his Clear, and Rand believes the world belongs to her "Real Man" robber-barons who are inherently superior to the rest of us.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments