Here’s the entirety of a recent post by an MRA who calls himself Snark:
Uh, dude, I think you’ve confused “feminists” with “Daleks.”
Our new friend Fidelbogen thought this was such a brilliant idea he devoted a post to it himself, declaring:
Such economy, such concision. …
Really now, we wouldn’t go far wrong to make our rhetoric revolve around this above all, and very little more. The saying is deceptively simple, for it goes deep and reaches into many corners.
It puts them on the spot, and nails them there.
I knew Fidelbogen was a bit of a pompous doofus, but this is a whole new level of stupidity for him. I don’t even know what to say about something this idiotic.
Also, check out the comments to Snark’s piece. There’s something about potatoes you kind of have to see to believe.
Well, that was a poorly edited post. “Convert people to the exact opposite of that belief and [make them] become atheists.”
“The stated position of feminism is anti-abuse, which is what Bagelsan said in the first place.”
I’m not sure, but I think darksidecat might agree, I know Toysoldier would, but feminism doesn’t really state a position of anti-abuse. Nor does what darksidecat describes as the “woman’s sphere,” but he blames the patriarchy for that. I call female silence about maternal child abuse the inherent fascisim of the Matriarchy.
That is idiotic. Things can affect people directionally you know; systems of belief or ideologies usually influence people towards particular behaviors and away from others. I argue that feminism influences people away from sexually abusing children because it explicitly condemns both sexual abuse and harming children. Just because your aunt rationalized her abuse to you with a false stereotype of feminism does not mean that feminism caused her thinking — if she had claimed to abuse you because of solar flares that wouldn’t mean they caused the abuse either, it would just mean she’d picked a different brand of bullshit to excuse her inexcusable behavior.
Hmm, what part of “treat people equally no matter what” and “don’t ever rape” sound like they don’t mean that you shouldn’t abuse children? Do you really think that there needs to be a more specific statement that “yes, we mean ‘equally’ like totally equal, and ‘no rape’ like really no rape, and this also means you shouldn’t rape little kids in case that wasn’t obvious.” …Do you think feminist ideas somehow exclude children from “people” or freedom from abuse from “equal treatment”? ‘Cause they don’t. We mean equal equal EQUAL.
Fixed that for ya’.
Seriously dude, you don’t seem familiar with even the most basic tenets of feminism (“is raping children considered a bad thing?”) or gender studies. Go read a damn book.
Bagelsan: Please leave darksidecat’s opinion about my statement out of your quasi-censorship. We see some common ground and I value darksidecat’s opinion.
Also, you quoted me…
“about anything so I should probably learn what things like “patriarchy” and “woman’s sphere” and “statistics” are before I continue blabbering barely coherent things about “Matriarchies” and fascism.”
Don’t put your fallacious words in other people’s mouths as their own quotation. I think it’s illegal.
And FYI my mother really was a fascist matriarch. That’s my reality. Just like Toysoldier’s aunt, and Demond Reed’s aunt and Oprah’s mom.
By the way Bagelsan, how do YOU think Carla Poole’s behavior affected her children in the Demond Reed murder? Where are her kids now?
Man-Up and answer the question.
Oh no, I dun goofed! Now you’re gonna call the cyberpolice and backtrace me!
While you’re reading up on feminism and basic social theory and fascism maybe google how FTFY works, too. 😀
Censorship is generally done by governments (or other groups with power). Someone ‘fixing’ a quote is a standard internet meme. If you can’t keep the two separate, how exactly are we supposed to take you or your arguments seriously?
Privilege is NOT ABOUT INDIVIDUALS but about classes of people.
You’re the stupid one who made it; I merely extended it along other axes.
Considering she is not in danger of going hungry this month, yeah. And in the immediate aftermath, her superior resources and social status are going to make damn sure that poor dude is going to suffer, even if he doesn’t go to jail (Which is highly unlikely unless she’s a PoC)…. yeah, she does after that too.
And not to belabor the point, but you are not being raped right now, presumably.
You really don’t know how power or privilege work. Power doesn’t mean you always get your way, it means you are substantially more likely to over someone who doesn’t. Privilege doesn’t mean NOTHING BAD HAPPENS.
Do you believe that white women are beaten to the death by the police almost as often as black men? You are the one who proposed that it is only as easy as getting raped to lose your privilege. There are nearly as many white women who are survivors as there are black men total. According to you, privilege is lost this easily; Therefore, they should have lost their white privilege. Except if you knew a fucking thing about anything, you’d know that they DON’T lose their privileges. Even if white women are less likely to be survivors than black women, even if they are raped, they are much more likely to be believed by a jury, than a WoC, and much more likely to see justice done.
Intersectionality, motherfucker. Learn it.
Seriously, you’re arguing over what is at best 30 year old understandings of these concepts. All else being equal (Class, Race, disability, etc), men will do better. That’s why the Civil Rights Movement, for color, has some rather infamous bullshit said about women (My favorite is ‘The position of women int he movement is prone’, because it’s also fail). I’d argue a rich woman has it better off than a poor man, because Class is such an amazingly strong privilege, but even Class won’t prevent him from having ANY privileges over her. He isn’t really going to be judged for his gender, for instance.
But evend espite privilege, some individuals will gain power over others. Are you seriously going to argue white people aren’t privileged? Even though we have a black president?
Are you stupid? Because it doesn’t happen broadly. Whether it could or couldn’t is immaterial; we don’t pull discussions about who’s privileged out of a hat. It wasn’t randomly decided it’d be white people, the rich, the cis, heteros, the able-bodied, and men. The statistics indicate that these groups gain substantial advantages over the alternatives. We have clear evidence that things that might suck to happen to individuals do not still remove privilege from them or their groups.
Ditto what comrade svilova said.
@toysoldier, I think one of the issues here is that “liberal feminists” (used here to describe a branch of theory, not people who are by happenstance both “liberals” and “feminists”) overfocus on how privilege-oppression dynamics are expressed in interpersonal relationships (rad fems do this on occasion as well by with more narrow issues, not as broadly). But that is not what privilege is. Privilege and Oppression properly describe social classes and institutionalized power dynamics. Those privilege lists, for example, do not describe properly what privilege is, they describe some ways that privilege is expressed in certain social settings. So, to answer your question, yes, a rich woman has class privilege even if she is the victim of crimes and a poor man has male privilege even if he were to be the victim of crimes. Being privileged in one ways does not mean that nothing bad can ever happen to you ever. A person can even be simultaneously privileged on one axis of oppression and oppressed on another, for example, a disabled white person has white privilege, but is oppressed on the grounds of disability status. The intersections of these privilege-oppression dynamics can create differences in the ways that both are expressed in the interpersonal day to day as well.
@RevSpinnaker and Bagelsan, I think there are two distinct ways of looking at this. One could limit feminism to only things involved in gendered oppression (or perhaps that and intersections of gendered oppressions with other oppressions to some extent). If one did this, it would be proper to say that feminism does not per se have a position on non-gendered violence, any more than the Theory of Evolution has a position about the Big Bang. That position would be to say that feminism is not per se pro-abuse or anti-abuse, except insofar as abuse is gendered. But, there is another way of looking at feminism, a broader way. Women are not an extremely narrow class, women, and gender oppression issues, span across a number of axis of oppression. And, oppression is fed by a social dynamic that supports dominance by coercion and force. This view would say that, for a truly feminist society, one would have to eliminate all forms of oppression and the social dynamics of dominance behind them. Under this view, feminism would be anti-abuse per se, as abuse is clearly dominance by coercion and force.
NO. Single or violent women acting in a patriarchy are not matriarchs. Women expressing coercive domination are not even matriarchies with in a patriarchal system. The social system does not allow for such a thing. Matriarchy and Patriarchy involve gendered class social power dynamics. We do not suddenly live in, say, a disabled dominance society suddenly whenever a disabled person does something bad to an abled person either. That’s not how it works. Also, self identified political fascists are damned rare, so it is difficult for you to know that every random abuser is amongst them. In fact, taking this position actually undermines the reality that people of all political positions can abuse. An anarchist parent could abuse a child as well. Though, arguably, fascism is especially prone to this due to its tacit endorsement of coercive dominance regimes, just asserting that abusers are “fascists” is unhelpful. As is the scapegoating of women’s attempts to gain equal socio-political power by asserting that abuse by women is per se matriarchal. It is worth noting that there is no evidence to suggest that women with less internalized sexism abuse more than women with more internalized sexism. “Matriarchal”, “feminist”, and “fascist” are terms with their own distinct meanings, they are not all purpose insults.
Sidenote: I am genderqueer, my preferred pronouns are ze and hir, or the singular they.
Sure. And I generally do think of feminism as necessarily having a gender or sex component, even if it is minor or heavily intersectional, but even in the case where child abuse is not gendered I think that some principles of feminism would really easily apply: children are usually physically smaller than adults and have less legal and social power than adults, oppressions they share with women (when compared to men.) Both situations are informed by a model of “ownership” where the family patriarch (or parent) is encouraged to control the other family members. Also, the methods and effects of child abuse can play out differently depending on the kid’s gender and/or sex, so I don’t think that a gendered analysis can be completely excluded (and so we sneak in some feminism!)
More specifically to this discussion, the child abuse aspect was kicked off by an account of sexual abuse of a boy reportedly targeted due to his gender, so feminism definitely has something to say about that both on the rape issue as well as the gendered targeting. So yeah, perhaps in the abstract there can be non-gendered and totally-inapplicable-to-feminism child abuse, but in practice there always seems to be an aspect of sex or gender (if only to a minor extent.)
And, well, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a feminist defense of child abuse but I’ve heard plenty of feminist condemnation. So even if the movement doesn’t strictly include the issue of abuse I think it’s been pretty well adopted — the feminist position on child abuse may be unofficial but it’s definitely not “pro.” :p
VoiP: It makes perfect sense. For example, if Mormonism can affect people’s behavior, it can cause people value their families and also cause them to devalue certain ethnic groups. To my knowledge, Mormonism is anti-discrimination, yet clearly the ideology caused some of its adherents to discriminate. But for the sake of clarity, are you arguing that feminism in no way affects how people treat women?
Bagelsan: My argument is that if feminism can influence a person’s behavior for the better it can also influence it for the worst, and it is easy to show that feminism does lead some feminists to discriminate against, fear, hate, and even harm boys and men. Even other feminists acknowledge the capacity for the ideology to cause or perpetuate inequality and hatred, despite its purported doctrine. And who said my aunt rationalized her actions with feminism?
RevSpinnaker: I would argue that feminism in theory possesses a general anti-abuse position, but in practice possess an anti-abuse against women position. Abuse against males typically gets ignored or a casual mention, usually with some “women have it worst” caveat.
comrade svilova: If it is about classes of people, why do feminists tell individual men to “check your privilege”? Would that not imply that men as individual possess power and privilege? Again, you cannot have it both ways.
Rutee Katreya: Thank you for demonstrating the flaw in the feminist privilege doctrine. Power means one has the ability to get what one wants. If one cannot do that despite one’s power, technically one does not have power, or more accurately, the power is as not extensive as one believes. The same with privilege. Feminists argue that male privilege prevents or protects men against bad things happening to them. If it does not actually do that (and it does not), technically men do not have possess universal privilege. At best they would possess it only in certain circumstances. At any rate, I do not agree with the privilege doctrine. What many call privilege is actually disprivilege, i.e. people receiving less than they deserve (such as your police brutality against black people example). Yes, I am aware the feminist concept of “intersectionality”. It is just an attempt to dodge the obvious flaw in the feminist privilege doctrine, and typically fails because the majority of men and women fall into some special “intersectionality” class.
darksidecat: The individual-level privilege-oppression dynamic is so common among feminists that it is taught Women’s Studies courses. It is clearly not limited to “liberal feminists”. See my response to Rutee regarding the feminist privilege doctrine and “intersectionality”. On a related note, the problem with the feminist privilege doctrine is that it treats a group of people as a monolith. Feminists created “intersectionality” to try to weasel around that, but the inherent problem remains: there are members of the group who simply do not possess power or privilege.
You know, I wasn’t going to get insulting in this thread. But really, Toysoldier, you are not the intelligent. In fact, you are just lacking in much knowledge. You claim intersectionality is a “dodge” but you demonstrate in NO MANNER how it is such. Sorry, but your pitiful ignorance does not dismiss scholarship for the past 40 years. Claiming it fails because many people are intersected along different aspects of privilege is not actually failure. That is fact, part of intersectionality. There is no way a “failure” here.
The fact that you believe it as a “dodge” or “weasel” truly indicates just how ignorant you are of the epistemological background of feminism. Not only do you fail to demonstrate how it is such, but you are so stupid that you claim that the existence of individuals who have no power or privilege discredits the entire system. Think about that for a moment. Now think back to what privilege and intersectionality is. If you are having disconnect, I assure you, it is due to your own ignorance.
For example, if Mormonism can affect people’s behavior, it can cause people value their families and also cause them to devalue certain ethnic groups. To my knowledge, Mormonism is anti-discrimination, yet clearly the ideology caused some of its adherents to discriminate.
Ugh, no. My point is that, like Rutee said, it doesn’t make sense for an organization to influence people in ways contrary to its stated beliefs. That was why — and I’ll go slowly, I remember that you are not super big on that thing we in the real world call “logic” — my example was of Mormonism making people into atheists, not of Mormonism spreading racism. ATHEISTS. THE PEOPLE WHO DON’T BELIEVE IN A GOD. WHICH IS THE OPPOSITE OF (most) RELIGION(s).
What many call privilege is actually disprivilege, i.e. people receiving less than they deserve (such as your police brutality against black people example).
Who here has been saying that black people have privilege, and that being subject to police brutality is an example of it?
My point is that, like Rutee said, it doesn’t make sense for an organization to influence people in ways contrary to its stated beliefs.
For that read ‘deliberately influence;” I know that ideologies are complex and murky things, but a Mormon missionary coming to your door with a copy of “The God Delusion,” while hilarious, is not gonna happen.
Toy Soldier, you’re not actually engaging with the factual underpinnings of privilege at any point in your blog post. The simple fact is that you don’t disprove privilege by talking. It is not an ‘opinion’. It is in fact a documented sociological fact. You said you don’t like the theory, more or less, because you apparently don’t understand it. No. Your opinion is worthless in the face of the facts. Privilege is part of a theory with predictive power; that is, an actual, scientific theory. It is supported by the facts on the ground, and although I think you’re too stupid for me to teach, were I inclined to, I could demonstrate this, and have repeatedly to others.
Frankly, it’s well established that there are particular classes and factors that are strongly indicative of future success. Your blog post is more or less so much whiny drivel, like Owlslave’s rants about evolution; it has no validity, no factual basis with which to attack a theory and its components when that theory and its components are supported by the evidence. And frankly, you don’t even understand that theory, despite a number of 101s that would teach you. You are motherfucking stupid, and apparently have nothing worthwhile to add to this conversation. I’m not going to keep wasting my time on you. Read a fucking book; you might learn something. Hell, read a god damn website, this time for content. You might learn something. But don’t waste our time and frankly, your own, and that of your readers, with this uneducated, wannabe-intellectual vomit. If you want to talk about facts, use facts, not “I wish it were so”s.
Like the Jehovah’s Witness who became a Unitarian and went door to door for no particular reason.
Now there’s a joke you don’t get to use in context very often.
And yet you still haven’t actually shown that. At all.
I think Flib called it; you aren’t particularly bright or well-informed on this issue, so talking about this much more with you is probably just a waste of time.
@toysoldier
“To my knowledge, Mormonism is anti-discrimination,” That is so wrong it is hilarious.
On “intersectionality”, that is a term created by Kimberle Crenshaw, a black women, in the course of her criticisms of certain upperclass white second wave feminists notions. Did you skip basically every black feminist theorist ever, including the one who created this specific theory, when coming up with this conclusion of yours? While I grant that there are some white feminists who pay lip service to intersectionality but in practice suck at it, intersectionality was created by marginalized women in critique of certain second wave narratives about “women” and “women’s needs”. Intersectionality was not created to silence black feminist critiques, it was created as a black feminist critique. It is worth noting that a lot of the terms and phrases I used in my description are pulled directly for feminist theorist works that have been around for decades. Did you just read Dworkin and Greer and skip Hooks and Collins?
As to liberal feminism and the academy, I would argue that liberal feminism has a large, large amount of prominence in many third wave feminist circles. Feministing and Feministe, for example, are solidly liberal feminist spaces. This theoretical error is confined to liberal feminist theories (many radical feminist theories have other theoretical problems around conceptions of class, but not this one), liberal feminists are just damned common these days, in part because liberal feminism is far less threatening to patriarchal social institutions and mindsets than socialist feminsm/well developed class feminisms, making it an easier sell. Liberal feminist often use terms from class feminisms/socialist feminism improperly. For example, the leftist phrase “raising consciousness”. Liberal feminists often use the term to mean “informing people about current events/issues”, but the phrase is actually a Marxism derived phrase. Raising consciousness in the traditional Marxist sense means providing tools against or combating “false consciousness” (what might be known as “internalized oppression” in some theoretical contexts). While it is not always the case, too often when liberal feminist talk about privilege and oppression, they are not really talking about those issues at all, they are talking about the old liberal feminist stalwart-“discrimination”. Which does tend to confuse the issue (though the original privilege list piece does not in fact do this, the list is meant to be examples of how white privilege has daily lived effects, not a definition of what white privilege is).
@RevSpinnaker, I wanted to discuss the legislation you support a bit further, because it occurred to me that it likely would not even pass constitutional scrutiny as proposed. You do know that the federal government is not allowed under the US political system to just pass widestretching criminal law that is not within the scope of one of its delegated powers/jurisdictions, right? You mention VAWA, but the civil provisions, and every criminal provision not dealing directly with interstate commerce was thrown out by the Supreme Court. With the current conservative Court, it is very unlikely that the court would accept either a commerce clause or fourteenth amendment justification for such criminal legislation. So, beyond the question of whether or not such a law would be a good idea, as a practical matter it is not likely to actually be deemed constitutional.
“and every criminal provision not dealing directly with interstate commerce was thrown out by the Supreme Court.”
Interesting. What’s the difference between the VAWA and the Mann Act?
Still no responses to how Carla Poole’s behavior effected her children. Or whatever happened to those children. Keep in mind her’s is not an isolated instance.
And feminists do defend female child abusers, literally. The N.O.W. Legal Defense Team has defended maternal abusers. In fact one example is posted in other manboobz comments, “N.O.W. defends woman accused of stabbing child.” I searched it and found pages of “woman stabs child” articles. I stopped at page 18.
As I recall, SCUM (Society to Cut Up Men) Manifesto author Valerie Solaris shot Andy Warhol. Isn’t that an example of feminist incited violence? She’s still a hero among some feminists.
I don’t really have time right now, and possibly not hte inclination, to deal with most of your bullshit, Rev, but can you be less stone cold stupid? Even the most cursory reading about Solanas attempting to murder Warhol will show you that it has nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with a perception that Warhol was stealing her work as an artist. So no, actually, Solanas’ attempted murder is not really feminist-inspired violence. I mean, it could have been, if she did it to make some misguided attempt at ending patriarchy, I guess, but in this case it’s really just one author trying to kill another out of a possibly misguided belief that the other was stealing her work.
Really, that sort of idiotic misunderstanding is at the core of every single fucking post you’ve written. You’re a moron, and you don’t deserve any time.
Bollocks to you Rutee. You’re the biggest name caller in these posts.
“You’re a moron, and you don’t deserve any time.”
So there.