I second the ban! While I listen to more Pixies…

If Frothy was banned one could potentially see that as doing a favor to any pro dommes who live near him, since he’d have to go get his being told off by women fix elsewhere. Support local businesses!

All right, thirding it, then! :P

:)

And that’s before we get to Dude A says “women should have long straight hair”, Dude B says “women should have long curly hair”, Dude C says “women should wear makeup,” Dude D says “women shouldn’t wear makeup”… and so on. What is one to do to conform to all these strangers’ personal preferences unbreakable social minimal hygiene norms?

I love how Frothy stuck “unwashed” in there too, like it’s impossible for a woman to bathe without shaving at the same time.

If your hair responds to humidity by getting curlier that’s a sign of your innate misandry. Unless the dude next to you prefers curly hair, in which case your hair being straighter in dry weather is also a sign of misandry.

Is pecunium Eastern Orthodox? Or Russian? Hmmmmmmmmm.

timetraveler

Not trying to rile anyone up. Honest. You think I’m that overt?

pseudo

I have 2 sisters, so I have an idea of what it takes after a childhood of kicking the bathroom door because my sister couldn’t wax in her room, and I needed to pee. Or having to share very limited bathroom counter space. Or how long it took us to get ready for a family function.

As to what I said to you at first; it would be hypocritical for me to expect certain standards while not maintaining commensurate ones myself. But then again, I go to the gym regularly, eat healthy, dress well, and smell nice. So I think its ok to have my expectations. If however, I was a fat slob, then yeah, I see where the anger would come from.

There’s a Hebrew phrase that comes to mind in this. “Ani ledodi, v’ledodi lee.”

Shiraz, you’re really good at defeating strawmen arguments, and reframing what other people think totally outside of their context.

That takes talent.

::sigh:: I know, I know. I’m obviously not trying hard enough. How Mr K copes with the disappointment I don’t know.

*Waves* I unlurked a few hours ago and have been trying to catch up on this thread but I gave up like half-way through. Don’t know what I missed but I wanted to say wish I’d had this blog a year ago when my (now ex-)BF pulled a big guilt trip on me for shaving my armpits…..

Oh, he kept insisting that sure, it was my body and all, but shouldn’t I have taken his feelings into consideration?

My armpit hair.

Not as if his controlling, entitled behavior ended there…. The more I read, the more I realize what a borderline NiceGuy™, MRA, truly manipulative, narcissistic person he was. I thought it was just him. I thought I was going crazy.

Btw, thanks to those of you who wondered about the fedoras; they’re one of my favorite hats too and it was pissing me off that NiceGuys™ had put the taint *cough* on them.

Also I like tea.

Shut up, Cynic.

NiceGuys™ had put the taint *cough* on them.

*snortle*

Also, @Diogenes? Sorry, I also won’t be not shaving just to prove I refuse to cater to your idea of “perfect sex”, either.

*My* armpit hairs. Yeah, I’m selfish that way.

Thanks for the welcome!

@viscaria, yeah, I’m still in recovery lol! And is there another bee poster here? I’m still trying to keep the regulars straight.

@kitteh’sunpaidhelp, finding decent tea in grocery stores is kind of a challenge : / And Lipton’s is the dregs : P Tazo’s and Republic of Tea are usually good, but spendy. Loose teas are best if you find you actually like the stuff.

I thought it was a new word coined in the past few years, but I guess it’s just started to migrate.

Hi AliasC, welcome! :)

I first “heard” spendy from an online friend who’s from Calgary. I like it, it sounds less whiny than “too expensive”. I’m good with plebe-tea, though! I hope you find the tea of your dreams, Kitteh, preferably in bags.

And “Hi!” Fellow Unlurkers! What’s crazy to me about this and a few other sites on the blogroll, is I grew up during oldschool feminism, but by the time I got to college, it seemed history had moved on (in a positive way), and I used to say “I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist.” Because, yeah, I had gotten tired of feminism being associated with Bitter Old Man-Haterz. Now, watching the way gender-politics has been going the last few years, I’m really upset that feminism has been associated with Bitter Old Man-Haterz, and I want it back, dammit! Along with my fedora!

What’s really thrown me lately was my recent relationship experience, because there was nothing in my personality that would have drawn me to the passive-aggressive misogynistic crap I’m seeing more and more of lately, yet I got sucked into it anyways. He put up a very good front of being “feminist”, and everything was couched in terms of his *personal* entitlement rather than his masculine entitlement, his *personal* victimization, rather than his masculine victimization. But when I started informing him of my boundaries, and challenging his constant controlling demands, and informing him of his abusive behavior, he claimed that I was couching everything in feminist terms, which was unfair “because he was a feminist”, and that really I was just being selfish, and that *he* was the one being abused.

Can you say Mind Fuck? Anyways, as I say I’m in recovery, and I read all your comments and those on a couple of other blogs, and go “Dammit, he did that too!! Argghhhh!!!!”

Gah, that really is mind fuck material! Not only a manipulative douchebag but one who liked to pretend he was a feminist. Brain bleach time.

That’s a bummer about your computer not playing the videos. Do you know why?

I fancy Reclaim the Fedora as a slogan. It goes nicely with Cushions Not Crucifixions. Kim came up with that one during a thread where religion got into it and (naturally) we had to talk about Ceiling Cat.

Catechism indeed!

Try again

OT but any ladygeeks will probably want to read this.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/11/nerds-stop-hating-women-please

And the comments too, if you feel like banging your head against a wall for a while might be a fun thing to do.

(It’s probably because had-a-Star-Wars-themed-bedroom as a child me has been dealing with shit like this since I was about 8 years old that I have so little patience for some of our more whiny-entitlement-monster trolls.)

I’ve encountered the following ideas many times – you can’t be a geek unless you look classically nerdy, having decent social skills means you’re not a geek, attractive people are by definition not geeks (and probably out to give the real geeks a swirlie), women who say they’re into geeky things are just faking it for attention.

I’ve also found that, on average (there are of course some lovely exceptions) the geek community is far more prone to misogyny than the culture as a whole. By which I mean, take people of the same age, social class, geographical point of origin, etc, and compare them, and the geeks will on average have far nastier ideas about women than the non-geeks, and a whole lot more anger towards us.

I used to hang out with a lot of people who could broadly be considered (less-than-stereotypically-shitty) “geeks”, and it seems to be a sort of geek machismo. Lots of quoting of Stephen Fry bits on choosing to be offended, which you don’t do, unlike women/minorites/whatever, because you’re that much more logical. Data from Star Trek is cool but not a fantastic role model, dudes… faux-sociopathy/libertarianism seems to come with this.

@CassandraSays

I have a friend who is quite the Star Wars fan but gets that sort of crap in her R2-D2 swimsuit because she’s non-white and conventionally hot. It’s ridiculous – I’m white and beardy and slightly awkward and no-one would doubt me at all if I were to say I liked Star Wars and sociology, but it attracts a great amount of disbelief when she says it.

That’s why I find the conversation so frustrating. I’m into a lot of geek stuff like fantasy and sci-fi, I even played D&D for a while in my tweener/teen years, but dorky or awkward? Nope.

If I tell people that I love, say, punk, they go “oh, OK”. If I tell them that I love science fiction they give me a WTF look (non-geek) or immediately assume that I’m lying (stereotypical geek). It’s weird.

The whole idea of identifying who you are as a person via what you’re into has always seemed a bit odd to me though. I do it too sometimes, usually as a lazy verbal shortcut (“I’m a goth” is more succinct than “I wear a lot of black and red and purple and love horror and dark fairy tales and classic Goth bands like Bauhaus, and I used to have my hair dyed wine red, then dark purple, and I own way too much silver jewelry but won’t wear gold, and if there’s a movie about vampires or werewolves that isn’t total crap, I’m there”). But to choose just one of those verbal shortcuts and go “yep, that’s me, that totally tells you who I am as a person” seems almost guaranteed to lead to all kinds of the sort of obnoxious behavior that you see from some of the people commenting on that article (and that you saw in, say, the responses to Sarkesian).

Question for geeks: what do you think of the remark about these guys having internalised the message that geeks are miserable losers and so on? Do you think that’s likely, or that the misogynist creeps in geekdom would have been misogynist creeps anywhere – it’s not like misogyny is something alien to the rest of our cultures. Is it young (I presume) men absorbing mindless objectification of women from geekdom, or bringing it with them and having it intensified because it’s approved of by too many there? It reads like entitled young white cis men whining about being such victims, yet again, to me, but I don’t know the scene past what I’ve read about on the net.

I’m quite ready to believe it’s a case of internalising the message. I’m one of them, it took me at least until I was 24 to break out of the conviction that I was doomed to never have attention from a woman I thought of as physically attractive. The later years of school and a few years after that convinced me that popular, attractive women ignored me and my ilk. I’m fortunate in that although I went as far as the butthurt nice guy “why don’t they like meeee can’t they see that I’m awesome” line of thought, I never fell into the trap of thinking it was because of shallow materialism or the evolutionary pop psych shit.

Geekery has a number of features which make it exacerbate the problem of misogyny. It’s viewed as ‘for losers’ (or certainly was when I was a kid) which reinforces the mindset of geeky kids that they’re socially inept. It encourages the geeky kids to stay there and not interact outside of their circle meaning that their social skills stagnate. It’s viewed as inherently male losers, meaning that girls/women feel condemned by society in general for showing an interest, and this is accepted by those already in the group so women remain ‘other’ for them even if a woman wants to join in.

I expect that many of the geeks with poor attitudes towards women would have had them without being part of geek culture, but I think the way geek culture has been set up means that it heavily encourages the attitude. Without this I think that at least some of the misogynists would actually be reasonable, and others would be less rabid.

Or, to put it more clearly – if the subculture didn’t spend so much time convincing its members that their geekery means that they’re destined to be scorned by real-life women then maybe they wouldn’t feel like they needed the pixellated kind so much.

In which case I can see how it must be a bit of a shock to be informed that it’s their attachment to the pixellated boobs and everything associated with them that’s likely to make many women scorn them, rather then their love of blowing the heads of imaginary enemies off with really big imaginary guns.