Once again, a look at some of the comments that people try to leave here, but which for assorted reasons don’t get past the rigorous We Hunted the Mammoth screening process.
I kid; the process is not rigorous at all. You just need to pass a minimal standard of basic human decency. Here’s an assortment of comments from people who, well, fell short. In each instance, I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to guess why.
I’ll take “Protocols of the Elders of [BLANK]” for $400, Alex!
This fellow, like a lot of manospherians, seems really, really obsessed with cuckolding.
This fellow tried to post a number of comments on the same theme. This is is most succinct:
I’ll take “I don’t condone violence but you feminists totally deserve it for making jokes” for $200, Alex.
tl;dr: This guy, not really a big fan of women. (Spot the “we hunted the mammoth” for bonus points.)
You thought that last one was the worst it gets? Unfortunately not. Whoever sent this one — from a dubious IP address — is either a giant douchebag of a troll, or the next Elliot Rodger. (Please be the former.)
I’m going to just stop now. This post turned out a bit darker than I expected.
Yeah, you definitely can’t just sit down and read the Qur’an. Among other things, the suras are organized by length rather than chronologically, and some of the suras are literally God answering a specific question Muhammad or the other early Muslims had…it’s pretty confusing if you don’t know what’s going on.
If one is interested, Karen Armstron’s Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet is a fantastic introduction as it provides a great deal of context for the Qur’an and early Islam, as well as the Shi’a/Sunni schism (which was a result of the Prophet’s death and the literal war over who was to succeed him). She also addresses the role of women and how Muhammad, while a man of his time and therefore still pretty sexist, would almost certainly not have stood for the way women are treated in the more extreme interpretations of Islam. It’s a good and quick read and you can get it for super cheap.
I’m felt sick after reading that last one. I think I might also need a break.
You are very welcome. <3 I have done some research on her and I think she is simply called the Spring Sprite.
http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Spring_Sprite
Fruitloopsie-Sorry, someone already mentioned that.
##She wants to reduce violence, by using violence##
Mra’s are still trash. No matter what crazy radical feminist will write, it is nothing compared to your little….errr…. ”movement”.
No excuse for this shitty ”movement”….its not even a fucking movement!!!
Shush, child. Grownups are talking.
I sat down and read the Koran during my teens, when I was grappling with my own religion. Compared to the Bible, my impression of the Koran was that it’s incredibly direct and to the point; which is at once refreshing (you don’t need to tease meaning out of opaque metaphors) and terrifying (because you then can’t indulge in comfortable hypocrisy to nearly the same extent). It must be such a reassuring religion to follow, since the path is laid out so clearly.
@Emilygoddess:
Armstrong’s book sounds really interesting. Thanks for the recommendation!
Is he really? Wow. My respect for him just grew by several orders of magnitude. (I nearly wrote “manginatude”, which is hilariously apt.)
Wish I could say I’m shocked at any of the comments that inspired the OP, but diluted concentrations of this stuff are all over the Internet. Misogyny is still all systems go in mainstream culture. They really *do* have such poor English usage and grammar skills though.
Dave for sure deserves a medal for sorting through the nuclear waste, and that gif up top is some A+ giffing.
On another note, having just finished reading through this great comment thread, I feel compelled to express my dismay at some of the notions surrounding what radical feminism is. The trolls/MRA’s have no clue of course, and it’d be pointless for me to engage with them, but it’s some of the more ostensibly thoughtful comments here that stopped in me in my tracks.
Radical feminists are not, in fact, “gender essentialists.” They are the opposite—they are gender abolitionists.
Gender and sex are not the same thing. Gender essentialism IS an incredibly conservative, homophobic, and misogynist concept that patriarchy/capitalism needs in order to thrive, but it’s certainly not one of the basic foundations of radical feminist theory, whether any portion of said theory is labeled “TERFism” or not.
Radical feminists are sometimes called “biological essentialists” because they have the temerity to observe that biological sex is the primary axis on which females the world over are oppressed and brutalized by males—via SEXual objectification and violence and all the attendant consequences—ergo biological sex matters. Oh, and before somebody starts in— #notallmen!
“Biological essentialism” is one of those Orwellian newspeak kind of terms which tries to conflate itself with “biological determinism,” a term feminists coined long ago to emphasize the fact that patriarchy does indeed oppress females on the axis of biology/sex and reproduction, as in “you have a uterus and a vagina so you should be giving us boners/having sex with us/having babies because God/some monkeys with red butts something something evo-psych/that’s what you’re for and no abortion or birth control for you because if you have control over your destiny we have less power over you because it’s a zero-sum game something something superior logic and how about some degrading porn and some rape to top it all off and make me a sandwich already.” Sound like any MRA or PUA you know?
So accusing a woman of “biological essentialism” is like telling her she’s hysterical and/or somehow an asshole when she points out that she is oppressed and often brutalized within patriarchy because of her biological sex. It’s a super nasty form of gas lighting that seeks to silence. MRA’s and right wingers do it all the time; they just don’t use that specific phrase. They prefer “words” like “misandry” and “victimhood.” What “biological essentialism,” “misandry” and “victimhood” have in common is that they appropriate and invert the language of the oppressed with made-up bullshit words for non things. Some folks call it dirty pool.
TL;DR: Radical feminists (whether associated with “TURFism” or not) are not beyond reproach (no feminist is), but radical feminism is a political theory that stands for something, and “gender essentialism,” ain’t it. Women would not have the rights we have today if it weren’t for radical/second wave feminists and it’s discouraging to see a critical movement described with half-baked understandings.
And hey, 16-year-old “bigboy”: Marxism and Nazism are not even remotely in the same ballpark. Geez Louise.
Have you … read any TERFs? Or any trans-exclusionary feminism? Gender essentialism is core to trans-exclusion.
I am the one who brought up gender essenialism, and you may or may not have noticed that I was defending radical feminism from the conflation with TERFism. Not only is radical feminism not innately trans-exclusionary, but trans-exclusion is not by any means restricted to radfems. It infects numerous liberal feminists as well, but they are safe from the TERF label because they aren’t radical.
But just as I’m not going to paint all radfems as TERFs, because that would be clearly wrong, I’m not going to paint all radfems as trans-embracing, because that is just as obviously wrong.
Hi Policy of Madness.
I am familiar with gender critical radical feminism (or what is also called trans exclusionary radical feminism). But again, gender essentialism is not core to that particular belief because gender critical feminists (aka TERFS) are just that—they are critical of gender and think it should be abolished, so they don’t think gender is essential at all. Gender for the purpose of this discussion and how radical feminism views it is the concept of masculinity and femininity and that “woman” or “man” is a feeling in the brain as opposed to a biological reality with real-world consequences. Gender critical feminism puts biological sex first, which I think may be what you are saying is gender essentialism? Gender critical feminists see gender (masculinity and femininity) as a social construct and biological sex (male or female) as immutable, since it cannot truly be changed. Queer theory espouses essentially the opposite of gender critical feminism—that sex is a social construct and gender is what you feel like. From what I can gather, however, gender critical feminists do believe that gender dysphoria is a real thing; they just do not agree that the way to address it is by surgery and/or hormones.
I did notice that you took care to defend radical feminism as not always being about gender critical feminism. But it is my understanding that at its core radical feminism would like to see a world without gender and gender roles, so it’s easy to see how it can seem villainous to those who believe that gender is the brain. I’m actually just now wondering if maybe by “gender essentialism” you may mean that “gender” is something they focus on?
Anyway, it is way past my bedtime and I probably shouldn’t keep talking about a sensitive subject when I am not cooking on all four burners. Thank you for your response and have a good evening.
I understand their anger completely. Having to take a massive shit while on the verge of being constipated can truly sour one’s day and drive them to post nasty comments about the opposite sex.
Need a solution? Take a god damned laxative already.
If gender-critical feminists really thought gender was a completely meaningless conflict, then they wouldn’t care what gender people identified as. If someone with a penis said “my gender is female,” they’d just be like “whatever, who cares.” Which they certainly are not.
And from a practical standpoint, someone saying “You can’t be a woman because Biotruths” because they think gender is the same as sex and someone saying “You can’t be a woman because Biotruths” because they think there’s no such thing as gender and there’s only sex are pretty much indistinguishable.
@Bette
Gender and sex are not separate. I completely understand why second-wave feminists made that argument, but there’s no longer a need for it, and it can be so harmful that I don’t think the use of it is defensible any longer.
The problem starts with basic definitions. What does “sex” mean? Does it mean a person’s genes? That doesn’t work – there are people who look like cis women and feel like women and identify as women but they have Y chromosomes.
Is it just the physical shape of a person’s phenotype, or the effects of the sex hormones that produce the two basic physical shapes? That’s obviously the common way to do it, but: David Reimer. David Reimer never accepted being a girl despite having no apparent reason to not identify as a girl. In case you’re unfamiliar with him, he was the victim of a botched infant circumcision, and as a result of some unethical medical decisions he was surgically transitioned to female as an infant. He was raised as a girl, told he was a girl, and at puberty he was administered estrogen to make his body develop like a girl’s would.
He never accepted himself as a girl. However, his case was originally mis-reported (purposefully, for ideological reasons) as proof that gender is a complete social construction, since they had taken a male baby and turned him into a girl just by telling him he was a girl and making his genitals look like a girl’s. That was false: he never accepted himself as a girl, and later in his life he had himself re-assigned back to male. His story is one tragedy after the other, none of them inevitable.
Even if one decides that trans people are just mad in some way and that they for some reason don’t count, we have a highly unethical experiment that shows that sex and gender are fundamentally joined.
So there’s good reason to think that sex and gender are not separate at all. Additionally, the promotion of the argument that sex is biological and immutable, and gender is changeable and constructed, is actively harmful to trans people. It therefore has a high hurdle to pass before it is okay to use it, and it hasn’t passed that hurdle. Before we can ethically use a premise that is harmful to some people, that premise has to be proven as rock-solid fact, and the total separation of sex and gender has not demonstrated itself to be factual.
Some of them do, but, first, why do they get to say what trans people are allowed to do with their bodies? TERFs who take this position are not being very radical, since they are placing themselves into a hierarchy with trans people and deciding that they are qualified to make that call for others. That’s not actually different from men deciding that they are qualified to make decisions for women, and the fact that women are on the top of the stack in this instance doesn’t make it okay.
Second, that fails to comport with the other tenets of radical feminism. Being disadvantaged as trans (even as a trans woman) is not the same as being disadvantaged as a cis woman. The experiences are different. It’s one thing to say that women are disadvantaged based on their perceived sex as a result of societal structures that privilege the male over the female. I would not argue that at all.
However, it’s another, much more expanded thing to then claim that a person’s sex is immutable and unchangeable. That chain of reasoning leads to the conclusion that there exists an essential feminine experience of oppression, that is shared by all women, and only by women, and that experience is defined as the one that cis women have. That’s gender essentialism, and trans-exclusion (of all kinds, radical and non-radical) is a necessary consequence of that philosophy.
But, again, there is nothing innate to radical feminism as a theoretical framework that requires this. It is a feature (or a bug, depending on one’s point of view) of some types of radical feminism, but certainly not all types.
Radical feminism is not just one thing. That’s one way for it to manifest – but there is good reason to think that gender will not, and cannot, go completely away, since it is linked with sex in some manner. However, note that a world without gender roles would not have a problem with trans individuals. Trans people are viewed as disruptive because they don’t fit into the gender roles assigned to them. If society does not require people to fit into gender roles, all disruption and perception of disruption evaporates.
“From what I can gather, however, gender critical feminists do believe that gender dysphoria is a real thing; they just do not agree that the way to address it is by surgery and/or hormones.” -Bette Hopper
Reparative therapy, then? Maybe you can use Aversion Therapy and torture us for having “wrong feelings.” Or if you play your cards right you can experiment on us as live subjects and cut into our brains until you get the desired results. All the horrors that homophobes have perpetrated upon same-sex-attracted people in the name of “treatment” of their “condition” are available to you in your desire to “address” this “real thing” called gender dysphoria.
Because radfem theorists know more about sex and gender than virtually all the PhD sexologists, endocrinologists, neurobiologists, and transgender people in the world combined do. Because their imaginings trump actual science and real-world lived experiences. Just ask them.
friday jones: It is really obvious to me that Bette is NOT saying ANYTHING like what you are suggesting. Did you just skate over all the stuff about radical changes in society and esp in regard to the perception of gender?
Saying things could be different is not at all like promoting the abuse or eradication of trans people.
@Bette
Then this discussion is useless because that’s not how gender functions on an individual level, in cultural interactions, as parts of institutional structures and in ideological discourse. Radical Feminism wouldn’t abolish gender willy-nilly, just as anarchy wouldn’t abolish all political social structures. Also, you can approach the physical body, including sex, as a social construct without undermining women’s right to bodily integrity.
Stop confusing what teenagers say on Tumblr with the variety of ways academics in numerous disciplines are currently approaching gender theory. You’re ignoring how feminist researchers have taken an active role in redefining epistemology. You’re framing everything in such a wildly broad simplistic way, I don’t see how it’s productive. I find this headachey.
I agree that there’s questions and debate to be had about how to medically treat people, particularly children, struggling with gender identity. I just don’t think this is the place to have it and I really, really don’t want to have it with you.
To all who have engaged with me:
I know that intent is not magic but I did not mean to offend anyone or imply that anyone should have a say about what another person can do with his or her own body. That idea is repugnant to me.
People spend decades studying and researching sex and gender and I have not done that. The implication that I’m hanging out on tumblr listening to teenagers, however, was kind of a low blow. I am nearing middle age and am trying very hard to understand and educate myself about this subject. Tumblr is not my go-to resource, and just because a person is critically questioning something does not always mean they’re not reading the “right” things. Academic elitism stinks.
But again, I like this space and I don’t want to upset anyone, so I apologize if I did. I think in the future I will stick to making fun of MRA’s.
And thank you Policy of Madness and Ellesar for your responses.
To clarify, I was using the rhetorical “you” to refer to gendercrit radfems who oppose medical or social transitioning for trans people, not to refer to Bette personally. It’s fairly obvious that Bette was just trying to define their arguments, not that she was making them herself. I’m sorry for not making that more clear at the time, but Ellesar’s response made me realize that I did not express myself with my usual stellar clarity and smooth rhetoric. 😉
@Bette
Talking about radical feminism requires care, because a lot of people see “radical feminist” and in their mind that becomes “TERF.” This is not irrational – TERFs are real and they are terrible. They get a lot of attention, because their position on trans issues is non-controversial in many circles, but strongly denounced in others. Whenever there is a situation where one group’s “common wisdom” is challenged by another, less-powerful group, a lot of sparks fly.
Therefore, teasing the “radical” apart from the “trans-exclusionary” is necessary, both in analyzing radical feminism and, just as importantly, in talking about it.
And throwing the “gender-critical” in there complicates matters even further; gender-critical radfems really, really don’t want to be lumped in with TERFs…but at least from where I’m standing, they really seem to be identical with TERFs except that they don’t want the negative connotations, so they made up a different name for themselves.
@katz
My god. They want the same ideology but none of the negative connotation of the TERFs brand?
THAT SOUND AWFULLY FAMILIAR.
@katz
That’s especially frustrating, because the term “gender critical” implies good things. There’s no reason why critiquing gender, as a concept, must be trans-exclusionary. A truly objective gender critique ought to be very inclusionary.
@PoM
Yeah, but “American Family Association,” “National Liberty Foundation,” “Patriot Movement” etc all imply good things as well. Ironic naming is one of the very few things that bigots are good at. =P
Scented Fucking Hard Chairs* – good point. There are wowsers online who argue that the Nazis were leftists because the name translates as National Socialist German Workers Party.
So they must believe that North Korea is a democratic republic.
*Great name, by the way. Conjures up some delightful imagery.