Feminism

[Argobot]

I agree with Doyle that the predictable Internet reaction has extended the reach and lifespan of Chait's article, but it comes of as less of a condemnation of Chait and more of a condemnation of how the Internet reacts to everything. You could make the same social media free labor argument about an old Doyle piece where she goes after the A Song of Ice and Fire books. When that article was written a few years ago, it also spawned endless response pieces (many were from feminists). I doubt that Doyle wrote her piece with the intention of exploiting social media, and I give her as much benefit of the doubt as I give Chait. I'm not really sure how or why those two scenarios are different.

[sclpls]

The experience of every opinion writer I am familiar with is you never know what piece of writing is going to end up striking a chord with people.

[Bjorn]

On the PC discussion, this is an interesting NPR piece about a study that looked at creativity and work in mixed gender groups where PC was brought up, and where it wasn't, found that PC groups actually performed better (which flies in the face of people who decry the destructive force of political corectness).  As noted, it's a small, controlled study, but interesting nonetheless.  This comment at the end though is probably the truest comment on it.
 

Chait's certainly right about one thing: The culture wars play out differently in the age of social media. But the rancor we see on Twitter may not be an indication that having an opinion is making is harder to talk to each other. It may be simply be a byproduct of where the debate is taking place. The rules of engagement on social media platforms are in their infancy; after all, Twitter only introduced a "report abuse" button in 2013. And Twitter, famously, magnifies voices, meaning a few dedicated, sufficiently loud dissenters in a conversation can sometimes feel like an angry, critical mass. It's much harder to encourage — or trick — the thousands of people fighting across a given Twitter hashtag into norms of politeness than a controlled group of study participants.

 
 
 
Okay, and on a different subject, has anyone else been watching the Nightly Show? For now it's replaced my lunchtime Daily Show watching, as I'm appreciating having something new to watch. And by and large I've thought it's been a fabulous first couple of weeks to the show. But I just watched last night's, and came away super frustrated.  It was about Deflategate, and lying in sports in general.  Then towards the end of the second segment, the panel somewhat bizarrely turns to the question "Do women lie more than men Who lies more, men or women?" and that almost immediately becomes a question about women lying about orgasms.  It was a weird turn for the panel to take, particularly when you've got 4 dudes and one woman talking about this.  No one ever asks a guy about men faking orgasms (and that does happen).  The whole thing was doubly compounded in the next segment when a dude objected to the question he was asked, and Wilmore dropped it saying maybe it was a bad question (even though it was a good question that just made the guy really uncomfortable because it was about his employer).  It just showed a deference to a man getting uncomfortable directly following a segment which likely made at least some viewers uncomfortable (the woman on the panel was a pro and rolled with it, but still).
 
Hopefully it was just a bad segment and not indicative of how future panels will go.  But still rubbed me the wrong way.

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, because questions like that are not really honest or neutral at all. Asking "Do women lie more than men" supposes that men and women have equal perceptions of lying, reasons why they'd lie and that all of those things have no impacting forces. 

[Bjorn]

Actually, I'll correct myself, I *think* was asked more neutrally than that (like who lies more, men or women?) and I botched it when bashing that out unthinkingly.  But the whole segment was still bad, with one male panelist declaring women definitely lie more, the woman saying she didn't want to be answering as the token woman speaking for all women, and then it was about women lying about orgasms.  The whole thing was just unlike any other exchange I've seen in the last two weeks.
 
The episode is here, this whole part takes place in the back half of the second segment.

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, even if phrased neutral, I just mean that the answer is never going to BE neutral given power dynamics. 

[Merus]

So Anita Sarkeesian is going to be speaking in Sydney (at the Opera House, no less) next month, as well as on a panel with other feminists discussing How To Be A Feminist, which promises to be interesting mostly because I'm expecting Germaine Greer to start a fight.

[tberton]

We seem to have moved away from the Chait discussion, but at the risk of having it flare up again, I wanted to link to Mattie Brice's latest piece. It's not a direct response to Chait's argument, but it does get to something that I was complaining about with Chait's article.  The opening of the last paragraph sums it up nicely:

 

Freedom of speech and nonviolence are central to liberal progressivism, and they are utilized in a way that completely disarms the marginalized and gives those already in power the majority influence of what and how to change. The problem is in progressivism itself, because it has already decided where our future is going to be, and it was without the input of the peoples trampled over to achieve it.

 

That, to me, is the central problem with argument's like Chait's that postulate a universally accepted "liberal progressivism" that is self-evidently the correct worldview. That's not necessarily to say that that Mattie's right here (although I do lean her way more than Chait's), but that this is an argument one needs to address when thinking about "pc culture."

[Bjorn]

So apparently "meninists" are a thing, and #likeaboy started trending last night as a reaction to the #likeagirl commercial. 

 

[Apple Cider]

They are as much of a thing as Gamergaters are, honestly. All it is is another loony extension of MRA politics. 

[Twig]

I thought meninist was a joke until I realized it wasn't.

 

That's pretty much my experience with a lot of things like this...

[itsamoose]

I thought meninist was a joke until I realized it wasn't.

 

That's pretty much my experience with a lot of things like this...

 

hear, hear.

[Deadpan]

Truly, if only there was a movement that challenged conventional notions of masculinity and examined gender roles critically.

 

In this hypothetical scenario, we might even devote a 235 page discussion to it.

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, that's the sad part - it's a sharp left turn on logic that doesn't analyse what feminists are fighting against because we're not immediately JUST focused on men and therefore, we're clearly the problem and all that shit about patriarchy is made up. 

[Bjorn]

I thought meninist was a joke until I realized it wasn't.

 

I just saw it used for the first time in the last week, and was really, really hoping it was a joke. And then I looked at #likeaboy hoping it was a joke, and while there are joke tweets, sadly there are plenty of serious ones too.

[Reyturner]

We seem to have moved away from the Chait discussion, but at the risk of having it flare up again, I wanted to link to Mattie Brice's latest piece. It's not a direct response to Chait's argument, but it does get to something that I was complaining about with Chait's article.  The opening of the last paragraph sums it up nicely:

 

 

That, to me, is the central problem with argument's like Chait's that postulate a universally accepted "liberal progressivism" that is self-evidently the correct worldview. That's not necessarily to say that that Mattie's right here (although I do lean her way more than Chait's), but that this is an argument one needs to address when thinking about "pc culture."

 

I have feelings that relate to this that probably fit better over here. 

[Synnah]

There's a BuzzFeed article about the Meninist hashtag, and I honestly have no idea how many of the tweets in it are joke tweets. All of them, bar a couple of the most egregious ones, look like moderately clever satire of things people opposed to Feminism would say; If GamerGate has taught me anything, however, it's that if something looks like satire, someone somewhere is almost certainly saying it in earnest.

 

I always had an irrational hatred of BuzzFeed (as a staunch opponent of the 'listicle'), but stuff like this makes me glad they exist.

[Deadpan]

Poe's Law is always in full effect with MRAs, Meninists and gaters.

[Gormongous]

Yeah, that's the sad part - it's a sharp left turn on logic that doesn't analyse what feminists are fighting against because we're not immediately JUST focused on men and therefore, we're clearly the problem and all that shit about patriarchy is made up. 

 

I don't doubt that there are more than a few men out there who want feminism to die so that they can create and be a part of the exact same ideology, just with male leadership and "men" in the title. It's misogyny in its most obvious and ridiculous form.

[twmac]

So, my mum sent me this link

 

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/02/what-happened-confronted-cruellest-troll-lindy-west?CMP=fb_gu

[Apple Cider]

I am really happy (and I truly mean this) that the situation with Lindy West went alright. I hate that all these people get labelled trolls when I've always seen trolling as the non-offensive, time wasting sort of shit that goes online as shits and giggles, like Ken M. or whatever. Harassment is when you are out to hurt someone else.  Hiding it behind some idea that it's just innocuous is really harmful.

 

I can also get behind the idea that some of these people are doing this because they themselves are really awful people or hate themselves. It is just hard for me to sometimes because I was literally stalked and harassed online for four years by ONE guy (we're talking 100s of Tweets and messages a day, often incredibly violent and sexual in nature) and it destroyed me mentally. One day, out of the blue, not because of the restraining order or the repeated visits from the cops, it just stopped. I suspect it's because my harasser got out of whatever situation he was in at home (he used to live with his parents afaik) and probably started living his own life. 

 

I'd love to reach out and ask him for my own curiousity but then I remember that if he did that, he probably still might be the kind of person to take that as an invitation back into my life. So I don't ask. I know vaguely where he is online because he plays the same video game I met him in, so I just avoid that place (thankfully it's already a cesspool). But other than that, I  try to forget he exists most days, but try as I might, that's never, ever going to completely go away.

 

I don't know what the point of this post was, I guess.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I heard that story on a podcast recently and thought it was a nice anecdote that tells you about a possible view of a problem but it is not very useful or safe advice.

[Bjorn]

I don't know what the point of this post was, I guess.

 

Point or not, thank you for posting it. You've mentioned before about harassment, but never in that detail. It's something that is increasingly on my mind. We will hopefully be shutting down our current business and opening a new one by the end of the year, and my partner and I's roles are going to reverse. I'm currently the owner and face of the company, and in the new business she's going to be the owner and face of it, and the nature of this business and its social media presence is almost guaranteed to invite harassment of her. I'm trying to think now of what to do months in advance to minimize potential harm as much as possible (getting all of our accounts as secured as possible, trying to scrub certain old screen names from the 'net as much as possible, deleting old accounts she no longer uses, locking in common screen names she has used across multiple services to keep people from using them, etc.).

Your post was a kick in the pants that it's something we need to prioritize over the coming months before going public, because it's easy to forget about with all the other work that needs done.  Sadly it can't be stopped, but at least we limit the harm (of course I'm sure we'll miss some vector anyways). 

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, that's definitely a good idea. I know that my experience of an isolated harasser that went over years is on the more isolated end of things, but low-level radiation of harassment is sort of a typical thing for marginalized people, particularly women online. :/ 

 

I wrote about this in 2012 which was after four years of sustained harassment at that point, when I was enrolled in therapy: http://www.applecidermage.com/2012/03/07/learned-helplessness-harassment/

[Ben X]

Fucking hell, Apple, that's sickening. Well done for surviving and writing about it.