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Well, discussions about my second Scott Adams piece over on Feministe (which was basically identical to my post here) have now been completely derailed by a number of commenters who’ve decided I’m “ableist” because I used the word … “idiot.” That word, they have decided, is offensive to the “cognitively impaired.” If you want to wade into the mess, here’s the comment that, while polite in itself, started the long slide down this particular rabbit hole. You can see my responses in blue further down in the comments.
I consider this kind of language policing to the EXTREME! to be bad for feminism (and frankly insulting to people with disabilities), and I’m glad a number of others have stood up against it in the comments there. I don’t think that the language police are in the majority at Feministe, much less in feminism at large. But these debates are so frustrating that many feminists who disagree with the language police end up biting their tongues and/or just walking away. At some point I may post more about this fraught topic here.
In the meantime, I’m am conducting a little poll about cats. Please click the appropriate button in the graphic above. Clicking it won’t actually do anything, but I’m pretty sure what the results are going to be anyway. Go kitties!
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>kave, as has already been explained the panic attack was over the term butthurt. Butthurt reminded that particular poster of anal rape and she had a triggered episode. She also went on to explain that the reason that when she is at feministe she isn't prepared to deal with that bullshit. She prepares herself to go out into the rest of the world. That was her problem. You need to be a bit more sensitive to the trauma that rape victims go through here.
>Ginmar I can't believe an MRA just compared whiny rich white assholes to the Holocaust. Jesus wept, get over your little stubbed toe.People in the mra feed my brothers delusions enough that he tried to kill my niece. I've spent 10 years following him on mra blogs, I'd rather my time was spent elsewhere. You called me a mra, and a whiny rich asshole. Why?
>LOL@ pull a NickWhich is making me wonder what happened to our other good friend, Richard (AKA Random Brother). I am missing the lulz he gave us!!
>kave, as has already been explained the panic attack was over the term butthurt. Butthurt reminded that particular poster of anal rape and she had a triggered episode. She also went on to explain that the reason that when she is at feministe she isn't prepared to deal with that bullshit. She prepares herself to go out into the rest of the world. That was her problem. You need to be a bit more sensitive to the trauma that rape victims go through here.I've never heard the term buthurt before.. Perhaps Ginmar should be a little more sensitive about calling me a whiny rich asshole? No I do not need to be a little more sensitive, not does Ginmar.
>YOu whined about how you were rich, blah blah blah and how you'd love to change places with the middle class. Then you coyly referenced people getting their property confiscated in'Eastern Europe'. YOu really want to change places with the middle class? Well, here's your big fuckin' chance. Email me and hand over the check book. You can switch places wtih me, see how that goes.
>ginmarWhy do you feel the need to misquote me?Why is it ok in your mind to call me a whiny rich white asshole?
>But it's not ok to use the word idiot.
>Funny how envy works. There were a lot of people just like my family in the early 1940's in Europe. People perceived them as having more then they did. We all know what happened.That same type of motivation also spurred on a lot of the accusations during the periods of witch hunts and witch trials.
>When I posted the comment about how Kave "just became an irrelevant non-person" I really thought I was using hyperbole, but apparently not. The response was, basically, "yea, so what?". I swear, with this and the feministe comments about 'idiocy', you can't even make a parody of this style of thinking because it already is one. This is part of what the MRN is reacting against.Sure, you can cherry-pick the most absurd, offensive, egregious comments from dozens of sites and paint a pretty dark picture, but I could do this with feminist sites as well. And I don't even mind it, I regularly get a good laugh from this site, I'm glad it is here – helps to keep a sense of humor about things and to temper the tendency to extremist thinking. A lot of the guys over at the MRM sites are damaged, hurt people who have been totally screwed over – they are venting their anger and pain in what they think is a safe space to do so, and some get carried away and do it in unproductive/offensive ways. Again, I'm pretty sure you can see the same thing on many feminist sites. My guess is that if they weren't men, the same people who attack them and mock them would be sympathetic and outraged on their behalf.I'm glad commentators here feel confident enough in their opinions to pretty much openly say that injustice, if it happens to a man because he is a man, is ok, apparently we deserve it. Thank you for your honesty. But this is exactly why an MRN is necessary.
>Belated thanks to Johnny Pez for doing the chronological "evil feminist possibly made-up quote" list. Kave, your arguments would have been a lot more persuasie if you left the Holocaust out of it.On the issue of whether "protecting" people from nasty bigoted language is patronizing and ineffective (because in the real world they're going to run into it anyway), I would like to say, it really isn't quite that simple. There is a certain logic to making some spaces "safe spaceds," or at least relatively safe spaces, to give the people in them some respite from the sort of abuse they might run into in the real world. I do very little moderation of comments here, but I will delete those in which people use really nasty slurs directed at other commenters. Yeah, people do run into that shit in the real world, but, you know, there's no reason to let these sorts of bullies run wild in the comments here.But as the Feministe discussion shows, trying to make a space completely "safe" is really quite tricky indeed, and can lead to endless derailed discussions over what words might possibly offend someone. It can also lead to manipulative bullying on the part of the people who are ostensibly trying to keep the space safe. Given that the type of misogynistic stuff I write about and quote from on this blog is already going to be "triggering" to some people, there doesn't seem to be much reason to keep all of that sort of stuff out of the comments. In order to promote some kind of real discussion I leave the comments open to people who are misogynists and/or assholes, and so they're going to sometimes say misogynistic and/or assholish things. (And yes, people on "my side" here are also free to say assholish things, and they sometimes do.) Unfortunately, that means that some people who do get "triggered" by this kind of stuff aren't going to feel comfortable here. And that does trouble me, but there is simply no way to arrive at a solution that works for everyone. Leave things open, and people will have their feelings hurt (and that is a real problem; I don't want to dismiss that). Crack down and people feel they can't really express themselves freely (and that's a problem too). Though the discussion on Feministe infuriated me at times, it has made me think a bit about my reflexive use of some language (like "crazy") that might be unnecessarily hurtful to some people. I'm not giving up the term "idiot," and I'm not going to ban "crazy" here either, but, I dunno, the word "obtuse" is a pretty good word. Maybe I'll start using it a lot more often than some words I've used in the past.
>Victor-we have asked again and again and again for the same kind of commentary to be shown to us that reflect what the MRAs routinely post on their blogs and websites. To date zero has been posted.And no one has said they affirmatively support injustice. Ignoring your comments is not saying they support injustice-nor have you paid attention to someone defending that so called "irrelevant non-person." Ginmar-Kave is not an MRA. He has personal reasons for having to deal with those people over the years and thanks to his family's wealth he has been able to protect some of his relatives from the type of crap that MRAs can cause to happen.
>Um, Kave, I quoted you word for word.
>"And no one has said they affirmatively support injustice."No, they didn't affirmatively support it, they just implied that it was deserved."we have asked again and again and again for the same kind of commentary to be shown to us that reflect what the MRAs routinely post on their blogs and websites."I don't understand what you are saying here – for real, would you restate?
>I dunno about anyone else, but I enjoy reading Kave's comments and have ever since I first read his comments at Spearhead, where he didn't pull any punches calling them on their bullshit. And I am glad that he discovered and joined our "community" here, as he calls the non-feminists who post here on their bullshit, too. But because he's doing so in a feminist space, does that mean that he has to turn hypocrite and not call self-proclaimed feminists, myself included, on their bullshit when he thinks they're pulling it?ginmar, you posted in the comments on another article here, "It's not the language issue at Feministe that's the problem: it's that they assume bad faith from allies". I agree. But how do we know who our allies are? Are they only our allies if not wealthy, not white or not male or not any combination of the three?
>Kave is not the enemy here. Summing up someone's post as 'blah blah blah' is not quoting them word for word. The Holocaust reference was probably an unnecessary manifestation of Godwin's Law, but he's not the enemy just because he's wealthy. If anything, I remember Kave writing about how his wife's homeless shelter project directly helped more men than the entirety of men 'helped' by the MRM.
>Victor-MRA peeps come on here, claim that feminists say the same kind of thing about men that David posts that MRAs say about women and then never provide examples despite being asked to do so. Sally pointed out that you should think of the fact that women have had to put up with being thought of an "irrelevant nonperson" for centuries. That does not mean she supports making Kave into such a thing-it means "think about this. Now you see what we are talking about?" Ginmar, well that one I addressed him or her directly.Clearer now?
>victor, MRAS here and elsewhere have said it's unfair to focus on hateful posts and comments from MRAs, because feminist blogs are similarly filled with hateful comments against men. And so I and others here have asked some of the MRAs who have said that here to provide some examples from feminist blogs — say, for example, some of those in my sidebar here. And the MRAs have never been able to provide any examples (except for one 4-year-old post on Jezebel which was admittedly pretty awful).But I challenge anyone to look at any of feminist blogs in my sidebar — lets say over the past six months — and show me examples of hateful anti-male speech similar to the hateful anti-female speech I find so often and so easily on the biggest and most popular MRM/MGTOW websites.
>Shit, I called this blog a feminist space when its not my privilege to call it anything as I'm not the "owner" of the blog. Please accept my apologies.
>Also, I second these comments about Kave. Yeah, the Holocaust comparison was a bit much, but Kave =/= bad guy.
>It did let me make a Monty Python reference so it was not all bad David and Lady V.We need more Monty in our lives.
>DavidNot at all, one of the main reasons why Jews were so easily targeted in the 1930's within the depression was because they were considered to be the bankers. We forget that the Germans were in a state of panic to the point of food shortages and even starvation when the Nazi's came in to give them something to blame for their plight. People like to have someone else to blame, I hope I didn't come off as whining. (I'm being sarcastic) The point I was trying to make was two point. One: Everyone can claim victim status if they try hard enough. Two It's not a contest. Or at least it shouldn't be.
>We need more Monty in our lives.AND more POPCORN!!!
>Pam, no problem. I'm not sure what kind of place this place is, actually.
>BACON flavored popcorn!!!And David-it is obviously a bacon flavored popcorn Monty Python repository.
>And if I can interject a bit into the 'Finding Hateful Feminist Quotes on Blogs' project by re-quoting victor:"A lot of the [women] over at the [feminist] sites are damaged, hurt people who have been totally screwed over – they are venting their anger and pain in what they think is a safe space to do so, and some get carried away and do it in unproductive/offensive ways."So if you can excuse misogyny with the justification that these men are hurt and lashing out, then you have to also accept that a woman who makes a comment disparaging men may also be hurt and lashing out, and give her the same leeway you give the misogynists in the MRM.