Brianna Wu — game developer, #GamerGate target #3 — got a Tweet sent to her yesterday announcing that “respects is earn not shrilly demanded.”
Mangled grammar aside, this is an “argument” we hear a lot from misogynistic men as a way of explaining away their lack of respect for women as a gender. Wu thought this inadvertantly lollcatty version of this cliche was too good to let vanish in the internet ether, and suggested that the phrase “respects is earn” be immortalized in a meme.
Can someone make us a meme for, "Respects is earn?" pic.twitter.com/7aLGokbOwk
— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) November 17, 2014
And so it was. The cat above is @RobIsAWriter’s interpretation; here (after the bump) are a few more.
@Spacekatgal I can see u no have kitten. here is kitteh. pic.twitter.com/mczxui2QOq
— Christina (@cwodtke) November 17, 2014
@Spacekatgal pic.twitter.com/dvVCPV28F6
— Jonathan Hardesty (@movieguyjon) November 17, 2014
https://twitter.com/iateacat/status/534168547757268993
https://twitter.com/beforeyouknowit/status/534168901559390208
https://twitter.com/CaelynEllis/status/534169962328236032
@Spacekatgal pic.twitter.com/irpSO4vA26
— Jon Biles (@Redswipe) November 17, 2014
https://twitter.com/hoodieripper/status/534170518241284096
https://twitter.com/eddyapplesauce/status/534171231742730241
@Spacekatgal pic.twitter.com/H7IMTJ1uWY
— Peter Durfee (@Durf) November 17, 2014
https://twitter.com/hoodieripper/status/534181430419415040
https://twitter.com/themojowire/status/534185910779133953
https://twitter.com/chaicube/status/534176480801349632/photo/1
Obviously, Aretha Franklin needed to be a part of this:
@adamgoesto11 @spacekatgal pic.twitter.com/VTWVQgdIus
— Jennifer 🏳️‍⚧️ (@StingRay02) November 17, 2014
Even if we set aside the misogyny for a moment, it seems to me that “respect is earned” is a rather backward way of looking at it. Shouldn’t the default be respect instead of not respect? That is, shouldn’t we treat everyone with a basic level of respect to begin with, downgrading this only if the person in question says or does something that makes them less worthy of respect? And even then give them at least a minimal amount of respect for simply being human?
Oh, and before any #GGers get indignant about it, the @GGer who Tweeted “respects is earn” is clearly a native speaker of English; go through his timeline to see.(In some of his Tweets since this meme got going he’s deliberately using lolspeak.)
H/T — r/GamerGhazi
In related GamerGate news
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/hot-collar-and-cold-tea/
Since when does a person have to earn the right not to be disrespected?
@BarnBurner
Elam says “That pissed me off, but only long enough for me to reply to Salon with something nasty.” Come on, he’s gotta be making them look bad for our benefit at this point. In case we didn’t know that being nasty is his job and daily routine.
@Faint Praise
I like how the entire article burns down to Elam being angry that he’s been acting like a gamergater for years but no one really pays him any attention.
It makes a twisted sort of sense to their viewpoints. They treat nothing with respect and no one respects them for that so they have twisted it around to be that the default nature of human relationships is to show disrespect.
It’s totally wrong, but I see how they screwed up to get to that point.
@ snorkmaiden – They define “respect” like a lot of bullies do. That is to say, by “respect”, they mean “deference”. People who don’t give them respect get beaten down, people they can’t beat down earn their “respect”, and they believe that feminists are demanding that women be given deference without beating anyone down, which just doesn’t exist in their worldview.
Ahem: People who don’t give them “respect” get beaten down.
Paul Elam is such a dumbass I’m surprised he hasn’t grown donkey ears yet.
He forgets to mention that the only way to “earn” respect from ‘gaters is by being sufficiently male, straight and white and/or sufficiently misogynist.
That’s how he “earned” it.
@seraph
By “Deference” you mean “not threatening their lives” and by “beaten down” you mean “verbally censured”.
Good job.
idledillettante,
*snicker* That made me think of Elam as Bottom. But, I think he’d be better as the captain of the watch. He also decides who is a true man and who is not.
http://movieclips.com/2mWGb-much-ado-about-nothing-movie-the-night-watch/
@ ikanreed – No. Since “they” is the misogynistic men who insist “Respects is Earn”, “deference” (i.e., what they really mean when they say “respect”) has pretty much its standard definition, and while “beaten down” is usually limited to harassment and threats, those harassment and threats wouldn’t have nearly as much bite if literal violence wasn’t a distinct possibility, so I stand by it.
I’ve seen that attitude a lot (“Respect must be earned”) in STEMbro spheres. It’s pretty common as a response when raytheists get called out on being an asshole to religious people. Nice to see that it’s spread to the GG context as well.
Maybe they should re-read Neil Gaiman’s comments on “political correctness” and realize that they’re only being asked to meet minimum standards of polite human behavior.
http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/43087620460/i-was-reading-a-book-about-interjections-oddly
So what have these guys done to earn the respect they apparently believe is their right but no one else’s? Because they’ve been demanding it a lot, fairly shrilly.
@seraph4377 — You hit the nail right on the head. They think of “respect” only as deference. The idea that every human being on earth deserves some basic respect regardless of whether you like them or not is an alien one to them.
@Lea – thanks!
@drummosquito, @maistrechat – To the STEMbro manosphere types, women start out with 0 respect, and men start out with that entry-level common-decency type respect. Menz is earn the respects to be above other men; whereas women earns respects simply to be treated as a person.
These are wonderful!
Paul Elam needs to get a fucking grip. My mental image is him in footie pjs stamping his feet and whining because gamergate took all his candy. His self-image seems to be of some godfather of the MRA fantasy world where his minions have to bow down to him for approval. I think he’s afraid that the bad press gamergate is getting is rubbing off and making him more irrelevant. Boo fucking boo.
In better news, Anonymous has taken down many KKK accounts including twitter, FB and websites and doxxed over 20 members in MO for the KKK threatening violence in Ferguson. I’m not sure how I feel about doxxing in general but some of these are police officers, lawyers etc. That explains a lot. If you’re interested its #OpKKK.
@pendraegon – I don’t think it is an attention thing, though he does love attention, I think he is mad because he’s been acting like a gamergater for years and no one pays him for it. In other words, he saw gamergaters as new suckers to grift, so he’s pissed that they are trying to claim pre-eminence and grift the suckers he already has. It totally isn’t fair.
I think they might also define “respect” as “admire”. e.g. “Wow, so-and-so handled that situation really well; they have my respect.”
Which is a real enough definition, but it’s just not the *only* one. “Respect” easily applies to “Treating other people like human beings with autonomy, rights, and intrinsic value.”
So basically, I think it’s a form of dictionary trolling, akin to “NUH-UH, Webster’s defines sexism as ABC, and therefore women can be sexist, too, and the academic definition is wrong and bad and misandrist.”
Oops, I should clarify my above statement: The dudebro dictionary troll claim would be that women can be sexist *against men*.
People who want to say that respect must always and everywhere be “earned” forget a little something. That is — that respect is not the same as courtesy, even though the two tend to go together most of the time. The correct rendering is …
Courtesy is required.
Respect is earned.
Love is given.
I think this is a slightly different meaning of respect here, in the same way that admiration or praise must be earned and not given as a routine due.
But it’s a neat formulation. It doesn’t matter whether you do or don’t respect someone, you still have to conform to ordinary civilities in your dealings with them, because that’s the baseline requisite for all behaviour. What counts as a “civility” varies from group to group and place to place. But hurling threats and insults at someone you don’t know is generally not included.
@ zennurse – Generally speaking, I’d say that doxxing is a bad thing. But there are times when two wrongs make a right – exposing members of a terrorist group who’ve infiltrated the local power structure is just plain good citizenship.
The hypocrisy astounds me (as always). Men who speak like this expect wives and children to respect them simply because they are men … they don’t feel they have to do anything to earn that respect. Yet they refuse to respect women in pretty much every case.
I agree. People (and that includes women) should be afforded a certain level of respect from jump (that respect should then be adjusted for behavior).
The real question is, who gets to decide when someone has “earned” respect.
@Seraph, I get what you mean. Somehow in order to be respected you meet some arbitrary challenge on their terms.
@mildlymagnificent, I agree, people often do mix up being respected with simply being shown courtesy, which everyone is entitled to. I think that’s what I mean by earning the to right not to be disrespected, I mean that everyone has a right to expect a bit of courtesy.