Feminism

[James]

Yeah, I can't even imagine how I'd cope with that.

[Apple Cider]

I almost threw in the towel, admittedly. I really did. I got really low. 

 

But now I've been through two years of therapy, most of my anxiety is gone, I have a wonderful boyfriend of 6 years who's supported me and a wonderful therapy cat who helps me every day. I also have stable employment now and enjoy life a lot more. 

[Bjorn]

Holy shit, I really didn't have a frame of reference for what you've mentioned in passing before.  I'm really glad you made it through it, and are in a much better place now.  Also kitties are the best

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, he's a really good cat, though his meowing sometimes makes my teeth grind because repetitive noises freak me out. But other than that, he's been a real positive force in my life, same with my boyfriend.

 

But needless to say, I have an incredibly in-depth awareness and understanding of what long-term harassment is and does and sadly, the GG playbook is eerily similar (like downright word for word) to my stalkers. It is almost like misogyny is an incredibly easy tent to assemble, but the level of similarity is actually kinda off-putting. 

[twmac]

Yeah, after sending me the link (and before I posted it here) my mum asked me whether I thought that was the answer: to confront the harrassers and let them know how you are making them feel. I answered that I didn't know but that I hoped that it would.

 

The problem is that I am also reading that Lundy Bancroft book and his message is pretty clear - real abusers do not empathise with their victims and quite clearly see themselves as superior. Obviously, I don't want to say that to my mother as she has already read enough internet horror stories to truly despair with where we are heading. Also, in tandem, I am reading the Thomas Ligotti book 'Conspiracy against the Human Race', I might need to read something cheery after this.

[Mawd]

The Lundy Bancroft book has been a really great read btw. I'm about 200 pages in and its hard to put down.

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, I can't really say enough good things about that book - aside from my harasser, I also dealt with a lot of abuse in my family and it really made me see it for what it is, same with former relationships. The intersection with Lundy's book and the troll problem is that it's hard to know who is who when they all use the same language, you know? I think a lot of people on the internet maybe aren't abusive in quite the same way as an intimate relationship but rather have a more superior feeling or wish they felt superior to the person they are harassing in question, just like Lindy's harasser. That's the problem, you just never know who is really doing it. My harasser appeared pretty "normal" before he spent 4 years of trying to message me every single day. Sometimes I wonder if that mask was hard to keep up or he literally COULD just waste that time pretty easily because the Internet allowed him to do so. Remember that Reddit post about the wife who found out her husband said shitty things to people online? I wonder how many people can keep up that kind of thing without actually being a sociopath, but rather that the Internet is this liminal space where people don't feel like other people are humans. 

[Mawd]

Isn't one of the main points of the book that a very minimal amount of these men are sociopaths or even many other mental illnesses.

What I'm taking from this is that the main issue is a mixture of conceit and socialisation.

I mean another point is that they trivialise their actions and optimise their damage/time cost. Eventually it becomes so habitual that you feel like you're the one acting bizarre when you point their behaviour out to them.

I think it's quite easy to turn any behaviour into something you do in autopilot.

[Apple Cider]

Oh I absolutely agree. In that way, you get into that groove and I think the online space allows you more distance to not recognize that you're harming another human being - it is after all "JUST WORDS" but at the same time, a cognitively dissonant action that specifically intends for those words to hurt someone else.

[Mawd]

Yeah its a specific tone and set of words that when well practice are taken up with the comfort of an old glove.

In a way the reaction from all abusers whether they're intimate or impersonal is an extension of a reaction found in schools. I think that in most people's life there's been someone that has called other's to task for their assumptions. An obvious example of this would be Hermione in HP. She's often presented as the conscience of the group but most times the characters and the peers in the audience I knew (myself included) brushed what she said aside because it greatly affected the momentum of the story.

When people take their actions as unquestionable they deploy the same tactics to anyone who asks them to stop and make them think. Usually by using any kind of nastiness to brush them aside/minimise them so they can get back to carrying out their action at hand. The people that question their values meld in to some type of vague meta person they've met all their lives who despite being an individual shares all of the qualities of those that came before.

So its easy for an abusive person to say "oh shut up already, quit being so emotional" because they've been on message to the same interchangeable cast of people over their whole lives and those people really should have the 'logic' to deal with it already.

Might be repeating myself here but it's a case of "you're so wrong literally everyone you've ever known has rubbed your nose in it so please shut the fuck up already; hell I shouldn't even have to explain to you why by now".

[Bjorn]

Oh, hey, Twitter finally acknowledges that the cesspool of abusers it has facilitated for years is actually making people leave the service, so they should probably do something about it.

Isn't this like, the third time in as many years that Twitter has shamefully acknowledged the harassment on it, only to do jack and shit about it? The language seems a bit more forceful and contrite, but fool me once, and all that jazz.

[Bjorn]

Wilmore and the Nightly Show is making it a bit of an uphill battle for me to look forward to watching it. The show needs some tweaking, and they are working on that. They tried eliminating the opening monologue for one episode, which I think made for a much better panel discussion. But after being criticized for making fat jokes, he basically doubled down on them in another episode, having a string of jokes about apologizing for offending people. Then, on Wednesday's show, which had been one of my favorites, he wrapped up a panel with 5 black men answering the question, "Are black women too bossy? On a scale of 1-10, how bossy are they? And you can't answer below a 5." (quote may not be perfect, but is close)

What's bugging me about these is that they are lazy, stereotypical humor. Bossy black women. Hilarious. Women fake orgasms. Hilarious. Fat people are lazy and big. Hilarious. But Wilmore wants y'all to know, it's just jokes people, he's just trying to be funny! And he apologized for the Bossy Black Woman segment, but given his mockery of the fat joke apology, it's hard to take an on air apology from him seriously.

Like, 90 percent of it is either good or shows potential to become really good. But when it falls flat, it falls flat on its face into a pile of dogshit. And it's only 12 episodes in. But it also bugs me that it's only 12 episodes in, and its already stumbled this many times. Like there's no one in the writing room suggesting, "Hey, this is actually just lazy and mean, we can do better."

Edited to add: One great shoutout to Rachel Feinstein in last night's show though, who cracked an abortion joke that made Wilmore look like he had shit himself once he realized what she had said.

[Twig]

That's okay, John Oliver's back in two days!!!

[Gwardinen]

I must admit I have already fallen off the Nightly Show. It doesn't help that I have to proxy into Hulu to watch it, or that American adverts are atrocious (I say this not to belittle, but with deep sympathy - there's no reason you guys should be subjected to this crap and every time I'm in the US I can't believe the commercials remain so terrible), but even without those annoyances I doubt I'd have kept watching it.

 

I may have bought a little too much into the idea that this show was going to be the great champion of equality or whatever, but I definitely felt let down by it. A lot of it is pretty dumb, and as Bjorn said, some of it is actually downright mean. The exclusionary attitude perpetrated by a group that is traditionally so excluded is exactly the kind of shit I hate about geek culture sometimes.

[Ninety-Three]

I must admit I have already fallen off the Nightly Show. It doesn't help that I have to proxy into Hulu to watch it, or that American adverts are atrocious

 

If you proxy to cc.com you can get it along with some other Comedy Network stuff ad-free (at least while running adblock, I've no idea what happens if you turn that off).

 

Fat people are lazy and big. Hilarious. But Wilmore wants y'all to know, it's just jokes people, he's just trying to be funny! And he apologized for the Bossy Black Woman segment, but given his mockery of the fat joke apology, it's hard to take an on air apology from him seriously.

 

I found the fat episode really weird. In the same minute, he oscillated between making fat jokes and saying "The way we treat fat people, that's not right." He's clearly decided that while some things society does to fat people are bad, making jokes at their expense is just fine. It looked especially bad that earlier in the program he was reduced to regretful laughter, calling his football joke "horrible". I can't figure out the worldview he has that makes that okay, it can't just be "It's just jokes people!" because I can't picture him making jokes which mock, say, gay people.

 

Overall I feel like the show is in this weird place where it's straddling the line between being a show about issues, and being comedy. The comedy suffers when they stop making jokes because for these two minutes they've decided to be serious, and the issues suffer when they start cracking jokes in the middle of serious discussion. I think that might be why the show isn't working, at least for me. Unlike a Jon Stewart or John Oliver who have decided "We're doing comedy about news/issues", the Nightly Show doesn't seem to have a clear goal.

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, that's also the feeling I got from the first episode I watched, which is sad because I think John Oliver does a much better job blending serious reporting and humor. 

[tberton]

That's really too bad, because the first couple episodes of The Nightly Job did a really good job of dealing with an issue in depth, I thought. It sucks that it's gone of the rails.

[itsamoose]

I get the sense that the Nightly show hasn't quite found it's voice yet.  Wilmore's impetus seems to be to get people to laugh when talking about serious topics, if only to make them more approachable or encourage people to speak their minds.  At this point the show is only a couple weeks old so I don't think it's fair to say it's gone off the rails or anything, but it's at a point where it could be a great show or just another comedy central flop.  I personally give Wilmore the benefit of the doubt if only because he is being compared against some incredible talent, and is using a format none have them have ever tried before.

[Bjorn]

Quiet, Wadhwa

 

Any time women in tech are being discussed, he's there bursting in like the Kookl-Aid man, bursting in "I have opinions!"

[Ben X]

Wrong link?

[twmac]

This came up in my facebook feed:

http://injusticestories.com/i-aborted-my-baby-because-it-was-a-boy/

 

Most of the people in thread below the link are calling it hate speech/action.

[twmac]

There is another website - so that you don't have to 'like' to read more.

 

http://www.infowars.com/feminist-i-aborted-my-baby-because-he-was-male/

 

Of course that site is pretty objectionable too. I just get the feeling that 'Lana' might be in need of mental help.

[Griddlelol]

This diabolical “us vs. them” mentality pushed by today’s so-called feminists highlights how feminism has transformed from a genuine women’s rights movement in the late 19th century into a top-down tool of social control steered by the CIA and other powerful interests to make women more dependent on the government while breaking up the traditional family model.

 

Wow, I stopped reading right here.

[Apple Cider]

Sorry, but the blog post and the source it links to feels like "shitthatdidn'thappen.txt" including the sidebar that reads like a dime store pulp novel - "My liberal parents disowned me!"

Abortion needs to be safe for literally everyone, regardless. But I really do not buy the idea that a feminist aborted a child because it was solely a boy. Furthermore, you can find out the gender of your kid between 16-20 weeks into your pregnancy, which is squarely into the second trimester. Waiting ALL that time, just to find out the gender and then aborting it THEN because it's a boy is like, yeah no, I don't buy that. 

 

This reads like made up "see how feminists are mentally ill MONSTERS" which is offensive on every level, including reducing them to "baby killers" - like why is this even in this thread or being taken seriously.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I'm surprised you could read passed that title.