With #GamerGate floundering, the Internet Douchebag Squad whips up a #Shirtstorm

Just out of curiosity, Kat, why are you so determined to pick a fight with me? It’s not going to happen no matter how much you try, just FYI, and I’m far from the only person disagreeing with you or telling you that your teal deers are boring, so your constant “but she said/did!!!” is a bit weird.

Also, what Sparky. Puddleglum, and Katz said. If anyone is really interested in what makes women like Sommers tick, I recommend Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin. It can be hard to find print copies, but there’s a free PDF available.

http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Right-Wing-Women-The-Politics-of-Domesticated-Females-19831.pdf

Thanks for the link, cassandrakitty! I’ve bookmarked it 🙂

I think I was a libfem for about a year around the age of 20, but it wore off.

Lol, that’s good to know!

@ WWTH

I wish Mako was the main protagonist instead. She was the far more interesting character and contrary to what studio execs think, that would not have driven away the vast majority of male audiences.

Seconding. I would’ve liked it more if Mako were the main character. Raleigh was a bland white guy. Mixed him up with Chuck at some points.

@ kirbywarp

I was really disappointed that the whole mind-meld thing of Pacific Rim didn’t seem to be fleshed out.

True! One of the writers posted a lot of extra stuff on his Tumblr about the side-effects of the neural handshake and I was like, “Why was this not in the movie???” The ghost-drifting thing was kind of in the movie—when Chuck and Raleigh were beating up one another—but it was pretty easy to miss.

I could have lived with the implied relationship at the end of Pacific Rim, it was the fact that they made her pass out at just the right moment so that the bland white dude had to go defeat the monsters by himself and get all the glory that really annoyed me. From a storytelling POV it should have been her who landed the final bomb, in order to complete her narrative arc.

Narrative arcs are misandry.

Like in Tomorrow Never Dies. It totally ruined the movie.

Whenever dudes make those jokes all I hear is “I am terrible in bed and terrified that she’ll notice if she has anything to compare me to”.

My understanding was that believing that women should be equal under the law — a belief that Sommers has expressed, not necessarily sincerely — is a feminist belief.

Yeah, see, actually this is the root of the problem.

Once upon a time, being a woman in a public space was a radical feminist act. Find some of those editorial cartoons regarding first-wave feminism conventions. Just being a woman, in a public space, was a radical feminist act.

It’s not a radical feminist act anymore. If we judge contemporary feminism by past standards, literally every woman who says a thing in public is a radical feminist. That’s obviously a ludicrous conclusion. So is trying to claim that CHS is a feminist because she thinks it’s okay if women go to college (but only to study the warm fluffy subjects like art history). Once upon a time that would have been a radical belief, but it isn’t today. If you want to set standards by the past, go all the hell the way back to the early 1800s and make every woman who talks in public a radical feminist, too.

Here’s the thing: feminists don’t want stuff, like the vote, and an education, and the right to exist without being sexually harassed, just so that they can say they have it. Feminists want women to have these things instrumentally, because having these things enables the attainment of The Good Life. No two people agree on precisely what The Good Life really is, but whatever your view of it, not having artificial barriers to your attainment of it is a positive thing.

CHS is in favor of re-erecting, or maintaining, barriers to women achieving The Good Life. Feminism is about dismantling these barriers. CHS is about using that dismantling to achieve her own version of The Good Life and then re-erecting them behind her so that nobody else can spoil her experience by sharing it. That’s the opposite of feminism.

Because I always read lib as liberal, i.e. pro abortion rights, pro intersectionality, etc. I think I am going to get lost in terminology.

I use libfem for liberal feminists. While there are a lot of points that I agree on with libfems, like those you mentioned, there are others I don’t, like the definition of feminism and stances on pornography.

While CHS might generally support the causes championed by first-wave feminists (and pretty much no other feminist causes since then, except women being allowed more career opportunities), I can’t help but think that actual first-wave feminists would be disgusted with the way that she frequently promotes ideas that men are superior and devotes much of her academic work to trying to debunk rape studies. After all, the idea that enslaved women and married women had no legal control over their own bodies because the law gave their bodies to their masters and their husbands respectively was a major issue that early feminist abolitionists took on. These women were horrified by and protested against the repeated sexual victimization of enslaved women in order to promote abolition, and they ended up seeing parallels between the enslaved women’s lack of sexual autonomy and the married woman’s lack of sexual autonomy.

Plus, given the harmful ideas that she puts out (i.e. “Don’t speak out if you’re a victim of some form of sexist abuse or try to protect other women from victimization because that means that you’re weak and not independent and that you think that all women are weak”) I’m pretty sure that she’s consciously using the feminist label in an attempt to undermine the actual feminist movement. She’s limiting the push to legal equality of the sexes to an extent that would’ve likely pissed off actual first-wave feminist. Not to mention that with her…er…scholarship on domestic violence and rape, she’s undermining lots of legal efforts to secure gender equality by promoting laws that combat physical and sexual abuse. But then again, “equity feminism,” much like men’s rights activism, seems to promote equal suffering, if it promotes equal anything, before it promotes any desirable form of equality.