On Alisa Rosenbaum and ‘legitimate rape’

Susan McWilliams, writing for the Front Porch Republic, has an article which very deftly handles the turgid bodice-ripping prose of Ms Alisa Rosenbaum (better known under her pseudonym Ayn Rand), and points out precisely why it should be considered an unworthy inspiration for any decent human being, let alone any politician. Ms Rosenbaum’s fetishistic (to put it politely) view of human sexuality comes, apparently, from her fascination with serial killer William Edward Hickman (as uncovered in the Michael Prescott article), whom she described as having ‘[t]he best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology [she had] heard’: namely, the idea that ‘what is good for me is right’ (including, apparently, armed robbery, forgery, and the kidnapping, murder and dismemberment of a twelve-year-old girl), and her indignation not at the hideous and heinous crimes that Hickman had committed against a defenceless young girl, but against the public outrage against him! From there, it follows that all of the heroes in her body of published works are one long extended exercise in putting leather pants on Draco (before having him take them off again in her rape scenes). To say that her philosophy suffers from a certain degree of inherent misogyny would be something of an understatement.

As I remarked earlier, all one really needs to understand about Ms Rosenbaum’s philosophy, political or otherwise, is pretty much encapsulated in her attempts at fiction (and, for that matter, tracts, though she herself seems to have had some significant difficulty distinguishing between the two). And all one really needs to understand about her fandom as well.