Please don’t take “The Yeti” at face value.
Max Karson, writer of “The Yeti,” doesn’t believe that girls can’t have orgasms. He doesn’t believe that anorexia is a good thing. He doesn’t want to ship all the minority students from CU to a segregated campus at Greeley. Karson is just a clever guy who attacks backwards-thinking people at CU by pretending to be one.
The first Yeti article I read was “Three,” where Karson argued that girls faked their orgasms because they were physically unable to have them. Based off of his own ineptitude in pleasuring girls and his understanding that even male porn-stars could only prompt fake orgasms from their ladies, Karson reasoned that the female orgasm was a myth, going so far as to say that the clitoris was just an “appendage” with “no function at all.”
Karson’s article was so absurd and over-the-top that I didn’t even consider for a second that it could be serious. It never occurred to me that someone reading it could interpret it as harmful misogynistic literature until one of my friends told me he didn’t understand how the writer of the “The Yeti” could get away with so blatantly talking about how much he hated women, homosexuals and minorities. I told him he was missing the point.
Have you ever stuck your hand in water so freezing that it feels burning hot? Even if you haven’t, just pretend you have, and apply that logic to “The Yeti.”
Karson attacks ignorant people in the same way that Stephen Colbert attacks Bill O’Reilly and hardcore conservatives: He draws an overblown caricature of them with hopes it will show how ridiculous their viewpoints and opinions are. Karson makes himself sound so uninformed and hateful to a point where he hopes that no one could mistake his rants for serious discourse.
In “Eight,” (http://www.yetipaper.com/YETI8.pdf), Karson isn’t taking a stab at fat girls, but the guys who help encourage, inadvertently or directly, girls to develop eating disorders. In “Three,” (http://www.yetipaper.com/YETI3.pdf) Karson isn’t making a scientific claim that girls are physically unable to have orgasms. He’s attacking those who look at girls only as the receiving ends of their sex drives. In “Seven”, (http://www.yetipaper.com/YETI7.pdf), Karson is attacking homophobes, not gays themselves.
Still, some people are having trouble understanding where Karson is trying to go with “The Yeti.” I’ve heard people around campus criticize the paper for taking cheap shots at minorities or for just using gross-out shock-value to attract readers. Others have trouble distinguishing Karson’s writing from that of bona-fide racists.
People in the first group need to understand that “The Yeti” isn’t a print version of “South Park,” a show that relies on gags like a statue of the Virgin Mary having her period or a fat fourth-grader fighting a midget for laughs. Though the subject matter of “The Yeti” is often times as offensive as that of “South Park,” Karson uses his material to prove a point, whether it be about homophobia or the treatment of women as sex objects, while “South Park” often pushes the envelope just for shock-value.
As for comparing Karson to Joshua McNair, who wrote a prize-winning paper on white power for the white-supremacist organization Stormfront, the two writers could not be more unlike. McNair calls for “whites to take society back,” and urges the country to restore its sense of white patriotism. Any allusion Karson makes to white supremacy in his paper, however, is obviously overblown in attempt to show the absurdity of such a notion. In fact, if you took McNair’s controversial essay and sprinkled in a little more personal commentary and offensive material, it wouldn’t look out of place in “The Yeti.”
Max Karson writes funny, intelligent, thought-provoking material that addresses a lot of issues that largely go ignored at CU. Don’t mistake him for the people he’s speaking out against.
