The top post on the Men’s Rights subreddit at the moment, with more than 300 600 700 net upvotes, is a link to this screenshot, posted as an example of radical feminism gone wild:
Naturally, the assembled Men’s Rights Redditors are outraged yet quiety affirmed in their beliefs by the quote. OuiCrudites responds with a slogan:
OsirisFox does a callback to that screenshotted lady we talked about the other day:
And DavidByron demonstrates a severe disconnection from reality:
There’s just one little problem with that rad-fem screenshot they’re all reacting to: it’s, uh, pretty freaking obviously not a quote from a real feminist. Not only is it ridiculously over-the-top — there’s no feminist alive who thinks women shouldn’t be responsible for any of their decisions — but there’s also that “supposed” in the final sentence, which makes it clear this isn’t a comment from a deluded feminist but a sarcastic comment from someone who is not exactly a fan of feminism.
The person who posted the screenshot to the Men’s Rights subreddit did not, alas, post a link to the source of the screenshot. But, making use of a little-known internet technology known as “Google,” I was able to trace it to its source: the comment section on Gawker. Specifically, right here.
Unlike the last screenshot from Gawker media that caused the Men’s Rights subreddit such embarrassment, this screenshot wasn’t doctored. But the screenshotter did leave out a bit of context: that is, if you look at GardeniaBlossom’s comment history, it’s clear that this pretty flower is no radical feminist.
Most of Gardenia’s comments are attacks on fat acceptance; there’s a snarky one insulting prostitutes and a followup suggesting that women dating PUAs shouldn’t be shocked when PUAs sexually harass them; and one, in the comments section to an article about feminism, setting forth the basic MRA talking points about circumcision and female genital mutilation. (You can find more analysis of Gardenia in the AgainstMensRights subreddit; there are also a few — a distinct minority — in the Men’s Rights discussion who suspect a troll.)
I’m guessing Gardinia is, at the very least, a Redditor, if not an active poster to the Men’s Rights subreddit.
MRAs love to claim that I take quotes “out of context,” but I quote liberally, and when I quote and/or post screenshots, I provide links to the quotes in their original contexts — as I have done here. I don’t generally quote comments by obvious trolls, or quotes that have been heavily criticized by others on the sites I find them on.
When I take comments from sites like Reddit or The Spearhead where readers can up- and downvote comments, I tend to quote comments that have received a substantial number of upvotes. When I quote outliers or unpopular comments, I mention this in my posts.
The Men’s Rights subreddit, by contrast, is happy to upvote completely unsourced screenshots without even doing the thirty seconds of Googling it would take to figure out where they come from in the first place. But that sort of makes sense. Given that Men’s Rights Redditors spend so much of their time fighting imaginary straw feminists — and that the entire Men’s Rights movement is in fact built upon fighting straw feminists — why does it matter if the screenshots of evil feminist quotes they like to circle-jerk over are real or forged, or, in this case, actually from a feminist at all?
Fighting imaginary enemies, all in a day’s work for the Men’s Rights Warriors of Reddit Dot Com.
EDIT: I reworked the paragraph starting “There’s just one little problem” to be a bit more blunt.
EDITED TO ADD: Some of the regulars in the Men’s Rights subreddit has discovered this post of mine. The regulars have recognized their folly, and have begun some serious soul-searching about their willingness to believe the literally unbelievable about feminists without even doing the most basic factchecking first.
Nah, just kidding, they still think the screenshot is real — though the subreddit’s mods (apparently having a teensy bit more sense than the subreddit regulars themselves) have finally labelled the screenshot a “fake.” Which isn’t exactly true. It wasn’t fake; it was simply some fairly obvious sarcasm that the regulars in the Men’s Rights were too obtuse to notice. Did none of them even read the comment all the way through to the end?
Also, turns out the TumblrInAction subreddit also had a giant circle-jerk over the screenshot as well, which garnered nearly 700 upvotes and more than 200 mostly outraged and not-in-the-slightest skeptical comments; they also discovered this post of mine and are also continuing to insist that the screenshot was a real feminist probably, honest.
The answer, invariably, is “whichever one you like/whichever one is not currently in use”. We don’t designate a “men’s” or “women’s” bathroom, because there’s no need, and we don’t care.
Single-person bathrooms restricted to use by one gender are, in my humble opinion, just about the silliest thing ever, and it’s amazing how often one runs across them. On the other hand, I do understand the utility of single-gender multiperson restrooms, at least when there are urinals involved. I spent a few months at a cheap hostel in Japan with gender-inclusive multiperson restrooms (I am relatively certain that this wasn’t any sort of political statement, just a money-saving measure). Whoever designed these restrooms had positioned the urinals such that anybody walking through the door was bound to get an eyeful of anybody using the urinal, and this made for a few awkward moments. I wasn’t exactly traumatized by catching the occasional glimpse of random male genitals, but I could happily have lived without it, and I’m fairly certain that the men whom I walked in on would have preferred to urinate without a female audience.
(Of course, none of this is an argument against allowing transfolk to use whichever restroom they feel most comfortable with; I’m just saying that single-gender multiperson restrooms are okay in my book, even though this is obviously a terrible betrayal of straw-feminist dogma.)
Shit, I didn’t know there were people claiming to be “trans-ethnic”. I’ve seen the term exactly once before, but thought it was some kind of joke.
I read the comment thread on Ozy’s post on zir blog about cultural appropriation, and didn’t comment… I felt eventually that the “embrace your OWN culture” thing became a bit exaggerated and ridiculous. Like, what’s even MY culture? I listen mostly to European bands with mostly white members and go to clubs playing that kind of music – does that mean that I, as a white European, embrace my own culture? Or is it wrong of me to dislike the specific kind of music, parties, dances and so on that are popular in the rural part of Sweden where I come from? Ought I to embrace the latter?
BUT I totally understand the problem with people exoticising marginalized groups, and I think one can criticize that without going into some exaggerated rants about how everyone ought to embrace the exact culture at the exact time and place where they happened to grow up. And if someone claims to not just be really interested in the culture of people X (I see no problem with that, it would be a pretty weird world of tiny isolated island groups of people if nobody took any interest whatsoever in anyone else’s culture) but claim to actually have much more in common with the culture of people X than the culture where zie grew up, that person is most likely being an idiot.
Qocheedy, I have no issue with single-gender multi-person restrooms, either, although personally I still don’t actually care one way or the other. Of course, the simple solution of putting privacy partitions on either side of a urinal – you don’t even need an entire stall – would, for the most part, take care of that.
I was once in a restroom that was a single large room with two freestanding walls splitting it lengthwise. One row was stalls and urinals, another row was stalls, and the middle row was sinks. This seemed to me to be an excellent use of space, but some other people were very irate about the lack of completely separate rooms.
OTOH, I’m the kind of person who has automatically burst out in laughter the couple of times I’ve been deliberately flashed by a man.
Re: shared bathrooms & seeing those at the urinals — check out these designs — http://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/2009/11/06/a-better-public-bathroom-by-design/
Seems good to me.
Looks like a nice bathroom to me, Argenti.
BTW, it’s a beautiful day here in Pittsburgh. The sun is shining, the sky is blue with thin fluffy clouds, it’s about 80 degrees, and the humidity is 58%.
I am definitely eating my lunch outside today.
@Cloudiah
That’s because confirmation bias is the entire basis of their movement.
@thread re: bathrooms
In general I don’t see the need for gendering single-person bathrooms, and it does leave some people out and/or make them uncomfortable, so as a rule I’m against it. That said, when there’s a “men’s” and a “women’s” bathroom, you stand a pretty good chance of guessing which one is cleaner (or at least, which has less urine on the floor).
For quite some time my husband and some friends ran a club at a place where the clientele spontaneously began the custom of just forming a single line to the two bathrooms (one marked male, the other marked female) and then the person at the front of the queue would enter whichever room got vacant first. I think that worked just fine.
“That said, when there’s a “men’s” and a “women’s” bathroom, you stand a pretty good chance of guessing which one is cleaner”
At my mother’s office (where I’m hanging out today) there’re single occupant gendered bathrooms, but nobody gives a fuck who uses which as long as it’s left as clean as you found it. Granted, the men’s room generally starts out a mess (not piss, it’s a repair shop, so grease and grime)
And yeah, I like the single line idea too. I totally use whichever opens first when I’m out with someone willing to watch the door, because single occupancy! Deal with it! (Only do it when not alone since it probably isn’t really totally safe, but fuck it, when you gotta go, you gotta go)
Xanthë, this:
…is hilarious and brilliant. Please accept one golden gift-wrapped internet with a side of freshly made upside-down cake.
To be fair, I don’t think there are many of them and they really don’t do much outside of tumblr (that I’m aware of, anyway). However, they are often held up as an example by people who oppose trans* rights, so they get wider recognition.
Re: cultural appropriation, I don’t think you have to limit yourself to just enjoying your own culture at all. I didn’t read what you’re referring to so I can’t comment, but most POC activists I know are actually fine with people respectfully appreciating other cultures. It just has to be done with respect and sensitivity, and it in a way that supports the culture (buy directly from an artist who is part of that culture rather than buying mass-produced crap from a catalog, for example) and doesn’t erase their actual existence. Basically, don’t be racist about it.
I am cis, but I use the gender neutral, single person bathrooms that a lot of stores build nowadays. They call them “family restrooms”, because they are handy for parents like me with children of a different gender. I can’t send my youngest son alone into the men’s room, because he is too small to wipe his own bottom or wash his own hands. But he doesn’t like the women’s room, because he knows he’s a boy and thinks its weird to use “the girl potty”. So family bathrooms are much easier for us, and I know dads with young daughters who like them, too. Another benefit is that some of them have tiny toilets the size of potty chairs, so toddlers don’t fall into adult sized toilets.
It also works out nice for any trans* people who don’t want to make a choice between just two restrooms. Of course if any trans* person prefers a men’s room or women’s room, that’s fine too, whichever they like best. All of the ones I’ve seen are also wheelchair accessible, too. So hurray for family restrooms!
Just FYI, they finally seem to have figured out that this is a fake story. But, predictably, there are many comments along the lines of, “Well it could have been real. DWORKIN!!!”
Re: cultural appropriation again, something that really rubs me the wrong way is white people going on about how white music suck, whites can’t make music, only black music is worth listening to and so on. Like, if you like hiphop and dislike pop music, say so. (And if that’s the case, you’re probably not gonna like, say, Block Party, typical british indie pop, just because the singer is black.) Don’t go on and on and on about how musical ability is located in skin pigmentation. I see this A LOT, by people I presume regard themselves as anti-rasist, but it really plays into old stereotypes about black people being more rythmic and, well, wild and crazy and exiting, and white people being more stiff. These are stupid stereotypes that we ought to get rid of.
I updated the post. There are threads in r/mr and r/tumblrinaction (which also had a big circlejerk over the thread) talking about my post here on the screenshot; the regulars in those threads refuse to acknowledge that the screenshot may not be real.
Apparently the mods are practically the only ones there who think the screenshot is “fake.”
Anyway, I think I need to do a sort of roundup post of the various times MRAs have made gigantic deals over things that are obviously and demonstrably fake.
I think it’s generally aight to point out that a huge amount of the modern American music industry involved stealing and repackaging the work of black musicians with white artists, because that’s just literally what happened. But yeah, serious side-eye to any white person who starts going on about how ~naturally musical~ black people are.
Totally racist about black people and totally ignorant of European musical history too, come to that. Hello, thousands of years of music, hello innumerable composers and musicians, famous names and anonymous!
Or do these idiots think music only started with ragtime or jazz?
Do you think it would be possible to be trans*ethnic if you were part of a particular community but for some reason, like one parent not part of the community, you didn’t look “right”. For eg, my cousin’s partner is aboriginal (as in identifies as aboriginal and is part of the community), but he’s so white he’s nicknamed Casper. They have 2 little girls who are blonde. I don’t know if they identify as aboriginal, but I can guarantee they won’t be believed by a lot of people if they do.
Or is that a whole different phenomenon with a different name, and trans*ethnic refers to when there are no external reasons?
Kim — I’d not call that trans* ethnic, as all the uses I’ve seen of it have specifically been about ethnicities the person is not. Not being acknowledged as an ethnicity you are sounds like a completely separate problem.
Um, isn’t that like all they do? /snark
@Kim, I agree with Argenti that what you described is a different situation. It’s also a pretty common one, but I’m not sure if it has an actual name. “Trans-ethnic” implies that you’re claiming a race that you don’t belong to, so if you actually are that race then it can’t really describe you (general “you” here, if that isn’t clear).
Yeah, this is obviously worth pointing out, over and over again, but I think this is a separate thing from going “I only listen to black music, white music is boring, whites can’t make music” and stuff, which I think is pretty common among white music journalists. I’m sure there are people who think this is an example of racism against whites because they’re saying that blacks are better, but I think it’s just the old racist stereotypes with a slightly different spin on them.
Would trans ethnic make any sense if you were one race but, say, raised by parents of another race so that was what you were always immersed in?
@Katz: I think that depends in part on what “ethnicity” means. Does it MEAN something like “race”? I’m not certain myself what it means… at least here in Sweden it’s sort of taboo to talk about “race” at all, as if you become racist as soon as you use the word “race”, so people tend to use the word “ethnicity” a lot when they actually mean skin colour. It’s very confusing.
I have a friend who’s adopted from an orphanage in India by white Swedes, and then grew up in a pretty much all-white middle-class suburb. Obviously her experiences will differ in important respects from white people growing up in the same area, because she’s of a different colour. But is the word “trans” really the right one to describe these experiences? Isn’t it better to just say that she belongs to a white, Swedish, middle-class culture, and she’s also been exposed to racism and sometimes alienated by other people because of her colour?
I could see “trans-ethnic” being used as an interesting metaphor for someone who has found out that their ethnic origins are not what they thought they were, and talking about the process of finding out more about that – say, someone who had assumed they were white, but found out that a parent they had had minimal contact with was non-white. But 1. That’s not how it’s actually used and 2. If it was, it would work way better as part of an essay or detailed blog post than as an identity.