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Roderick

Feminism

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Well it's nice to hear that other people find value in the Sarkeesian videos. Like I said, sometimes I think she overreaches on her analysis, but most of the critiques she makes are worth considering. Nerd culture does not lack for terrible examples of sexism (hi Dead Island torso lady) and it's nice that there are people who aren't afraid to point out how terrible that stuff can be. That said, Sarkessian isn't the end all be all of feminist pop culture criticism, but she certainly is one of the better known figures, largely because of the harassment she received. It's weirdly encouraging that someone can go through all that grossness and actually come out ahead, makes me less afraid of talking about feminist issues on the internet.

I think this is a few pages ago in the thread, but I find many of her views a bit extreme but I'm curious of what someone on her side of the fence thinks, so I'll probably watch all of her new videos anyway. I think there's value for sure even if one disagrees with her.

Just quoting this so no one misses it and gets into a debate with Luftmensch without realising his opinions are 'artificially heightened'.

This is like when you smoke those banana peels. :getmecoat

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This is super common and poisonous. Dissenters are labeled "shrill" or "strident," as if it's a crime to state an opinion with any strength or commitment.

The privileged are accustomed to being handled with kid gloves.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone labelled "shrill" or "strident" anywhere on the internet ;), but I've certainly encountered problems for impolitely stating an opinion on this very forum.

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Oh wait, you know that mild optimist I was just expressing? Well now it's gone because I read this:

"And women no longer need to be beautiful in order to express their talent. Lena Dunham and Adele and Lady Gaga and Amy Adams are all perfectly plain, and they are all at the top of their field."

http://www.theawl.co...ly-says-esquire

Good job everyone!

That Esquire article is gross, obviously, but the AWL item on it is pretty flawed too. It misleadingly paraphrases Esquire in its title. One of its problems with the article is why Amy Adams is included in the list, which is surely joining in with Esquire's game of rating women in terms of looks. It then makes a crack about Adele beating them to death, which I can't help but see as singling her out for her size (unless there's some aspect of Adele's persona that is 'fighty' which I'm not aware of and can't find with a quick Google - perhaps it's that she's working class). Then the rest of the item is cheap shots at the SEO and bad writing, until an unfair comparison with a straight interview (ie just a transcript, rather than an article) with Paul Giamatti during which Esquire didn't ask him about how ugly AWL imply he is.

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Fair enough. I generally really like the writing on the Awl, so I didn't have a problem with this article --I thought the author was leaning more towards being humorous than actually trying to make a judgement on one woman's attractiveness vs. the others-- but I can see where you're coming from. At least we all agree that the Esquire thing was dumb beyond belief.

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Ok, Luftmensch, I'll bite seeing as everyone around here is too nice.

I'm glad there's attention being brought to women empowerment in games, comics, films, &c. Great stuff. Now that it's something that's being studied and recorded, even if the goals and standards are fragmented, everyone's seeing improvement. Yippee.

I still don't buy the idea of the Patriarchy. As far as I can tell, the Patriarchy essentially refers to a state of culture where there's an imbalance of power skewed in favor of men. Its anthropological definition is more niche and defined, but as a catch-all explanation for feminist frustrations, it's fair. You can look at the public data and see that, worldwide, women hold relatively little public power. So in that sense it's valid.

Where my beef comes in is where people use "The Patriarchy" to refer to a huge amorphous evil that's responsible for all the problems in the world. The most telling thing, for me, is when people throw out slogans like "Misandry is just The Patriarchy biting men back!" That's absurd. It's come to a point where The Patriarchy doesn't represent anything that can be defined, and without definition it's just a meaningless rallying cry.

To give some examples of what I mean, here's some quotes pulled from Tumblr searching for Patriarchy:

...

The first two are just vapid slogans that don't make any sense. The third says that the very existence of cultural gender norms, the existence of sexism, the existence of misconceptions based on sex, is the fault of men. It makes the bald-faced assumption that because stereotypes are harmful, and because men apparently benefit, that they created it and its their fault. Hell, the first two quotes basically say "I don't like this thing and it's all men's fault".

Encouragingly, I'm not alone in thinking it's all bullshit.

You are on these forums.

Also, did I see something in your blog about how hitler was really a misunderstood nice guy? Hmm.

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Interesting bit of research you did there on the Hitler bit. It was a fascinating discussion, I'd recommend giving it a read. The point isn't to sympathize and agree with Hitler, only to be able to look back and acknowledge that he was in fact a very charismatic person whom people stood behind because he promised, and gave, his people what they thought they want. Good and Evil can only exist when you strip off a person's humanity. The holocaust was pretty terrible though. Would not recommend. Lots of homosexuals and gypsies and minorities and priests and Seventh Day Adventists and political dissidents and lots of Jews got killed. Problem is when you strip Hitler down to the number of people he ordered dead, it's a lot harder to be able to spot Hitlers in the future. Hard to go into a shopping mall and say Oh there's one! The fellow fencing in all those children and shooting them! Yeah, he must be a bad fellow. Better avoid that one!

But yeah, you'll have to elaborate on that first comment. It's lost on me.

Edit: Dammit how did I end up on the top of the page twice in a row?

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You are alone on these forums in thinking this is bullshit, I think he means?

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I thought this was pretty amazing.

http://feministing.c...-her-underwear/

Oh jeez, I didn't even realize the cover was a 'controversy.'

I love feminism, I really do, but sometimes people can get carried away and end up doing more harm than good. A similar imbroglio happens any time Olivia Munn is in the public spot light. Certain feminist writers really need to learn that attacking or shaming other women is not the best way to get people to want to listen to what you're saying. Even I get tired of it.

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Yeah, that's my beef with a lot of activists. My sister goes to an all-girls school, and she's underweight. Not unhealthy by any means, but she has a very straight figure; not a twig, but relatively light and skinny.

Anyway, her school has special class mascots: Even years are the Pink Panthers, odd years are the Red Devils. My sister is a Red Devil, which means this is her mascot:

reddevilb.jpg

Then recently, the school decided they wanted to change things, since that mascot's never been very popular (because it's butt-ugly), and they introduced this replacement:

roxiesidebyside.jpg

About half the class got in an uproar about the change, ostensibly because they thought the cartoon lady represented an oversexualization of women. My sister was actually really upset by the debate, because the rhetoric among the students turned to attacking the mascot's figure: "She's too skinny!" or "Real women have curves!" or "Nobody really looks like that!" Inadvertently, a well-intentioned campaign aimed at being more open and accepting regardless of appearance turned into a shaming campaign targeted against women who are skinny.

So yeah. I'm not cool with that. I don't think it's the fault of feminism or activism, more like, I think that activists are just as prone to the same thoughtlessness and prejudice as anyone else, which is unfortunate.

Edit: Note, it's also way uncool how the authors of the Feministing post have to make it a racialist thing. Blaming shit you don't like on "White Privilege" is just as much shaming as calling someone uppity. The folks at Guardian make a flawed point about Beyonce undermining feminism. You want to criticize that, that's fine. Saying "lul no ur white stfu" isn't.

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This article on how women are portrayed in the sci-fi and fantasy genres is pretty great: http://www.bbc.co.uk...gazine-21033708

"People think that if you give the girl a gun, suddenly she's a strong woman," said Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a fantasy writer.

"But maybe she's still a sex object. We forget that the pose, the cropping, the way it's painted [all] tell a story. So if you have one element that says strength - like a gun - but everything else doesn't follow that, that's not the narrative you think you have."

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"A letter to the guy who harassed me outside the bar" by Emily Heist Moss on Role / Reboot

"You don’t get it because in your world, this is just you being clever and hilarious, just a little light-hearted late-night banter! Where's my sense of humor? Dude, you are the third, or fifth, or ninth man this week to be rude to me, to think that what you want [...] is more important than my comfort or safety."

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Yeah street harassment is completely mind-boggling to me. I have never actually known the type of guy who has no problem yelling things at random women in a public space, yeah I've been yelled at enough times to know how frequent and almost mundane these kind of harassment is. Guaranteed that every woman has there one 'great' street harassment story (Mine happened when I was riding my bike in the middle of the afternoon when a Jeep filled with college aged guys slowed down so they were keeping pace with me. I tried to ignore them, but when I finally gave in and glanced over, I saw that one of them was trying to take a picture of me. So I flipped him the finger. They yelled somethings at me, gave me the finger, and then drove off, presumably with my picture. It's funny to me now, how stupid these guys were, but at the time, I remember feeling so embarrassed and ashamed).

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Well that basically sounds like my experience riding a bicycle anywhere. Except I assume it's drivers wanting to be intimidating douchebags and scare cyclists off the road. Also I'm not a woman.

Relating back to that article, it might be worth taking that same gender-switching app and applying it to the same page:

"Emile Heist Moss is sick and tired of the women who harass him and make him feel unsafe in public spaces."

Whatever the point is they were trying to make, I reckon the bias goes both ways. Not sure I'm trying to prove any point, that just caught my eye and I thought I'd make a note.

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That's kind of the whole point of the app though, isn't it? That sentence sounds silly, which makes it pretty clear that it's not the norm for it to happen to guys. That it sounds normal for it to be about a woman and weird for it to be about a guy just underscores that the harassment and anxiety happens to women far more often than men. I don't see how that does anything other than strengthen her point? The only guys I know who this would apply to are openly and obviously queer. (I am intentionally choosing to say "queer", not gay, as this also applies to transvestite friends of mine with no interest in same-sex relations)

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Yes it turns out if you swap the genders around it would be just as bad, I suppose it's pretty fantastic that women don't harass men in the street and make them constantly feel unsafe, isn't it?

I hate the whole "if you swap the genders it's still bad" point that people bring up in sexism debates because it ignores the fact that in real life the genders aren't swapped. Shit happens to women that doesn't happen to men.

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I'll say yes, you're probably right, because I don't know. Like I said, I get harassed for being a cyclist too, so to a certain extent it's not so much bros be sexist and a little more some people are assholes. Maybe predominately dudes, cause whenever I get harassed by drivers it's usually a guy driving. But purely based on two anecdotes about riding on bicycles, we can say that sometimes when dudes are assholes they're sexist. So yeah, for now the most I'll commit to is sure, maybe.

I think more to the point of swapping pronoun genders in news stories, you can see somewhat of a bias of what is acceptable. Take the example given in the article:

"Try it with pop stars and imagine a world where a teenaged girl could, without being pilloried, comfortably talk about her sexuality using the same language as 18-year-old One Direction singer Harry Styles."

It's a good point, a certain segment of media would probably lash out at her. But for the sake of mixing up nouns (because there's not enough pronouns), try it with writers and imagine a world where a young man could, without being pilloried, comfortably talk about being sexually harassed using the same language as a Jezebel writer.

The point in both cases isn't that teenage girls aren't sexually active and that men don't get sexually harassed, but there is a media bias, albeit from different sides of the media, on which of these is okay to talk about and how. I think simply ending the discussion with saying one side or the other has it worse period doesn't really help anyone.

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It's actually quite recently that I decided that life's too short to discuss feminism, sexism, and other topics on the Internet, which is not to say I never do it (I'm in this thread, aren't I?), but it is to say that my energy levels and enthusiasm for explaining this sort of stuff to people who aren't well-versed in the issues and who therefore, through a perfectly understandable and not at all malicious place of ignorance, constantly spout unhelpful, patently misogynystic stuff at every turn under the guise of simply trying to understand why anyone would ever be really serious about feminism, is... diminished. It certainly doesn't help that I'm teaching an English class and my students are reading the Bible right now, and part of the reading we're discussing tomorrow is a part where a woman gets gang raped then chopped into 12 pieces and Fed Ex-ed to various parts of Israel, and then I look at the headlines and the best we've managed to do is make it to the point where gang rape victims aren't also dismembered. So when 2000+ years of "progress" isn't enough to stop this shit, my energy levels for trying to solve it with Internet posts is miniscule.

So instead of writing out a big long response, I'm just going to say that if you think the distinction between being harassed for riding a bicycle and being harassed for being a woman isn't about sexism but is instead about dudes being assholes then you don't know what the word "sexism" means and you haven't even the slightest clue what kind of connotations it has and what it means that our society today is sexist.

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Not sure I'm trying to prove any point

yeah

my energy levels and enthusiasm for explaining this sort of stuff to people who aren't well-versed in the issues and who therefore, through a perfectly understandable and not at all malicious place of ignorance, constantly spout unhelpful, patently misogynystic stuff at every turn under the guise of simply trying to understand why anyone would ever be really serious about feminism, is... diminished.

Mh, sadly yeah!

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Yeah Luftmensch, you're kind of stretching here. Saying that something happens for specific contextual reasons does not discount it from happening for general systemic reasons.

For instance, I was denied funding the first year of my grad program because I was coming in with an English degree and therefore wasn't a safe bet, so I had to prove myself first. A female colleague was denied funding because she was coming in with a pair of ovaries and therefore wasn't a safe bet, so she had to prove herself first. Those aren't the same thing.

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Hey, look, everyone:

I think getting a reaction is pretty interesting. Frankly, I will try to be a little controversial if I think I can learn something. Not a fan of flame wars, but I don't mind magnifying my opinion if I think it'll get a thoughtful response.

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