I follow a lot of truly terrible people on Twitter — Manosphere bloggers, white supremacists, Fidelbogen — so it took me a moment to realize that this dopey, backwards tweet didn’t come from some obscure reactionary bigot but from none other than antifeminist celebrity academic Christina Hoff Sommers, inventor of “equity feminism” and the author of the bestselling The War Against Boys.
If "bossy" has to go because it is sexist, then shouldn't we stop using male-vilifying terms like "mansplaining" & "rape culture"? @banbossy
— Christina Hoff Sommers (@CHSommers) March 12, 2014
Oy.
Also, I think she meant to end that with #BanBossy, not @BanBossy.
Interesting that she doesn’t seem to understand hashtags any more than she understands rape culture.
Ignorance knows no gender.
Hoff Summers should consider pulling her head out of her ass.
That hashtag has been taken over by wankers so very quickly.
So, we’re not allowed to point out when men are being sexists or when anyone (male or female) is propping up rapists because that’s vilification? That must make it wrong to call someone a “racist” too, because then you’re just a big old meaniepants.
The best supportive reply she got:
Oh my.
The misters on r/mr were trying to start a campaign on Twitter for #kafala about a supposedly terrible labor practice. (I say supposedly just because (a) I haven’t looked into it at all, and (b) I generally don’t trust the misters, although they can accidentally be right about things on rare occasions.)
How many MRAs do you think are tweeting #kafala as opposed to #BanBossy, do you think? It might be hard to sort out which of the latter are MRAs, but I bet more of them have spent more time attacking a feminist campaign than they have supporting a pro-men campaign. At least that’s my hypothesis.
Oh, link to the #kafala post on r/mr:
http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/204exw/if_youre_on_twitter_please_help_us_get_kafala/
“Bossy” is often used in a way that targets women. “Mansplain” is only used for sexist, patronizing men, and “rape culture” is a concept that doesn’t rest on the assumption that all men are pro-rape. Even with the assumption that misandry exists, nothing Sommers said makes any sense.
Christina Hoff Summers just doesn’t like it when sexism is pointed out.
How is she a “feminist,” again?
Bell Hooks has started a #bossyandproud hashtag.
@trans_commie: Seconded.
@Willravel: True, though I’d go just a little further and say that it knows no bounds, period. Humans in general are flawed like that.
My grandma used to say: “even a broken clock is right twice a day”
Bell Hooks is on twitter??? *races off to log on & follow*
I didn’t know that rape culture vilified males. The only way that would work is if rape is an inherent part of manliness. But we all know that isn’t true, and only people who promote misandry would believe that… 😛
Seriously though, Christina Hoff Summers (and Warren Farrell, and Camille Paglia, and other misogynist “academics”) can fuck off.
Anti-feminist women flummox me. Do they honestly think life for women would be better if there had been no feminist movement? Eh, on second thought, I really don’t care what they think. I would like to know, however, if the misogynist cookies they receive are tastier than the average cookie.
trans_commie, and of course rape culture also contributes to the victimization of men. An enormous number of people (the overwhelming majority of them men) are raped in prison every year in the US and most people don’t give a shit, or think it’s funny, or think that’s fine. Why? Because a lot of people think that rape is an appropriate punishment for “people like that.” The notion of rape as appropriate punishment is part of rape culture.
Huh. And wouldn’t that make Hoff Sommers a misandrist, as well as a misogynist?
Apples and oranges. Rape culture and mansplaining are realities of life that serve to excuse some men’s illegal behavior at the expense of women’s safety and well-being, and to negate or demean women’s experiences and/or opinions. They don’t take on a positive meaning when applied to women like “bossy” is considered positive for men and boys, while it is negative when applied to women and girls for being too “uppity”.
I take it logic isn’t Christine’s strong suit.
Yes, “bossy” is used pejoratively for girls who display what, in boys, would be considered leadership qualities. Mansplaining is when a man tries to lecture a woman on a topic that is within her area of expertise (and sometimes outside of his own). I find it hard to imagine “womansplaining”, although that may be due to my limited experience.
Well, everyone beat me to the arguments I was going to make. Her “Rape Culture” whine strikes me as infuriatingly close to James Taranto’s “Prosecuting harassment is criminalizing male sexuality” argument.
But yeah, one more in a long line of libertarian “equalists”. “As long as the law says we’re all equal, then that’s all that matters! But don’t try and discrimination, that’s oppression. Redistribution is reverse racism. What you’re experiencing isn’t bigotry or sexism; it’s nature, or anecdotal, or you’re lying. You’re still not equal? You must just suck. Why are people mad at me for saying so?”
Speaking of Christina Hoff Sommers, I recently wrote a journal entry in which I criticized her oft-cited (by you know who) article about how rape culture doesn’t exist, and then I got a new troll in my comments. X_X
I suspect some anti-feminist women are that way because they are successful and have a “I’ve got mine. If you can’t too, it’s either because there is no problem and you’re just slack, or I am super awesome and an exception amongst women, and only super awesome people deserve nice things.”
So yes, without feminism she thinks *she* would be just fine, and who cares about anyone else?
Fauxminism…it’s a Hoff Sommers thing.
I’ve heard that the rules about foreign labor in most of the gulf states are terrible, so right now I am going to assume that this is probably a twice a day thing. Of course, I haven’t heard of a country that didn’t have problems with how they treat visiting workers, so this is one of those “ordinary claims, ordinary evidence cases” as far as I’m concerned.
Also, I am pretty sure that women get screwed over by labor laws as well.
If you want to be enraged, here’s a story about labor exploitation of mentally disabled men in the US:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/09/us/the-boys-in-the-bunkhouse.html?_r=0
(Trigger warning: ablism, abuse, exploitation.)
I’m actually glad to see some MRAs bringing attention to the #kafala tag. The working conditions for immigrant workers in the Middle East are absolutely appalling. One major Middle Eastern construction company, EMAAR, is notorious for depriving workers (even non-immigrant ones) of their basic rights and well-being.
When I was living in Dubai with my parents and my older siblings, we lived in an apartment overseeing a construction site in which all of the workers were toiling and suffering due to the intense heat combined with the work. So sometimes my siblings would go to the balcony and drop off water balloons just for fun, and the workers were laughing and smiling back at us. Their jobs under EMAAR were so miserable (even from a glance) that they welcomed anything that would temporarily distract them from their work.