#alanrickman pic.twitter.com/4WXwnoUtM7
— Emma Watson (@EmmaWatson) January 14, 2016
Earlier today, as you no doubt have heard, legendary British actor Alan Rickman passed away, at age 69, from cancer. Actress and activist Emma Watson, who had worked with Rickman on numerous Harry Potter films over the years, paid tribute to a man she had considered a friend, writing on Facebook that she felt
lucky to have worked and spent time with such a special man and actor. I’ll really miss our conversations. RIP Alan. We love you.
Watson followed up her tribute by posting a number of quotes from Rickman on Twitter, including the one above.
And that was all it took to rouse the vast internet antifeminist troll army, who took to Twitter to attack Watson for supposedly “exploiting” Rickman’s death to push her evil man-hating agenda. They called her a bitch, a feminazi, a whore, a tw*t, and of course an SJW; they dropped the c-word so many times I fear it might be permanently broken.
Never mind that the “agenda” she was supposedly pushing was in fact Rickman’s agenda too. She didn’t make up the quote; they were his actual words, from an interview he gave to Australian chat show One Plus One. Watson was remembering Rickman as the feminist he was proud to be.
Perhaps the most offensive Tweet of the day came from the unlovely and untalented “journalist” Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart. Several days ago, you may recall, Milo attempted to use David Bowie’s death as a way to get some cheap publicity for himself; he rather outdid himself in this department today with this insensate Tweet:
I told you feminism was cancer pic.twitter.com/syKFBkF3cG
— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) January 14, 2016
Congratulations, Milo; you’ve won today’s Worst Person on the Internet award.
Delete your account.
@Jo, regardless, it’s part of the comments policy to not speculate on mental health, regardless of whether or not it’s being used as an insult or slur.
OK, but it is a description of behaviours, not a mental health slur. We all have these traits, the issue is how extremely they express themselves.
I’ll try to avoid touching any more raw nerves, but it’s difficult to defeat an opponent if you don’t understand what makes them tick. *shrug*
Why, oh why, can’t we just call everyone the c word?*
Why this horrible pushback?
Jo is making every effort to be scrupulously, exquisitely polite!
*Yes! This post is 100 percent, pure, unadulterated sarcasm.
@nparker
Not trying to try to tarnish a lovely sentiment, but as more of a conversational tangent, I’ve lately found the idea of “dressing as a man/woman” or “men’s/women’s clothes” to be a bit of a conflicting point. On the one hand, being agender and trying to experiment with my presentation, I always find it weird when people refer to things I’m wearing as having a gender. They’re just clothes! But on the other hand, on a practical level people do perceive jeans and t-shirts differently than skirts and blouses, and it’s a convenient short hand without any great alternatives (“traditionally masculine/feminine clothing” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue).
@Jo, allow me to quote myself.
If you don’t agree with or don’t understand the comments policy, feel free to email David. Otherwise, kindly respect our community’s rules.
Jo, if you had said something like “they certainly have a lot of narcisstic behaviour,” I’d say you had a defensible point. Narcissism has been a point of contention here, and it might be simpler to avoid it, but personally I feel that narcissism is a personality trait first, a mode of thinking or behavior (that anyone could lapse into temporarily) second, and a diagnostic category third.
However, you said “They are certainly at the extreme end of the narcissist/psychopath range.” Placing people on “ranges” and joining words with a “/” are affectations associated with adademics and scientists. Also, where I come from, the word “psychopathy” is primarily associated with a diagnostic category and at best secondarily associated with a personality type or a type of behavior.
I used to read the alt.feminism newsgroup on Usenet back in the late 1990s, before broadband. It mostly wasn’t as bad as the MRAs are now, although there were a few regulars there who I suspect have gone on to be part of AVFM etc.
Dhag,
You are definitely not the only one. The whole thing about white working class men winning the oppression Olympics, class is the only oppression that really matters, and feminists are rich women who need to acknowledge men’s suffering bullshit are all classic red flags.
Honestly, I’m a bit offended and hurt that people are treating this person as someone here in good faith when they have yet to apologize for whining about how hard it is not to call women cunts.
@WWTH
I’m kinda tired of Jo breaking the rules and everyone pointing it out but Jo ignoring it, tbh. Maybe if we’re lucky, she’ll get bored.
I’m pretty sure she’s commented here before and wasn’t all that kosher but left for a while. I remember a Jo and magenta commenter from a couple months ago, maybe? IDK.
I love that this thread has now become Jo holding forth as if they’ve just bestowed the previously unknown concept of intersectionality upon us.
First Ziggy Stardust and now Severus Snape? Both from Cancer? I hope we find a cure for that more and more each time this happens.
@ultimateprotagonistnerd
You forgot Lemmy from back in December.
Despite their behavior going from “calling women cunts isn’t offensive in the UK, therefore you shouldn’t object! trolling to “but my ableism is accurate therefore you shouldn’t object!” trolling. That’s some fantastic intersectionality there!
I’m seriously side eying Jo and Jo’s defenders right now.
Not that I wasn’t before
This comments section is a mess.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/d2d307bd587936f3eef77e2ce6417466/tumblr_mlwyqeBncq1rj1d5oo1_500.gif
@Alan –
I did get a little carried away with the analogy, though.
The only way I could see it close to fitting would be if it had been expected that all white people everywhere in the slave owning parts of the antebellum US (which was actually, like, everywhere to some extent, though more brutally manifested down South) owned slaves and if you didn’t, worked against it, or expressed a desire not to, or simply didn’t conduct yourself like a slave owner, you’d be declared “not really white”.
Which is, I dunno, kind of how it seems to happen for men. Except if it’s you’re “overly emotional” (you know, excluding anger) you’re “acting like a girl” or if you’re a dude who goes gaga over babies and enjoys spending time with small children it’s assumed you’re a molester or something.
Or I could be typing complete drivel that I’ll totally rescind later. I’ve gotten shit sleep the past few nights. Note the assed-up time stamps (for EDT…or is it EST right now? I never get those straight).
___________________________
*reads rest of thread*
Er, I don’t think I have anything to add to the whole Jo-centric discussion, though I enjoyed the German insults.
Oh! O/T but re: Mary Beard: This came out in November:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/books/review-in-spqr-a-history-of-ancient-rome-mary-beard-tackles-myths-and-more.html?referer=
@contrapangloss
Yeah! A group (pod?) of orcas passed the ship on the starboard side in the middle of the afternoon, luckily while we still had daylight. They weren’t close enough to make out much detail, but there was quite a bit of splashing and flashing of fins. 🙂
Hope you have better luck with the killer whale spotting in the future!
EDIT: Oh, and we crossed the arctic circle about an hour ago!
Dhag, so cool.
Have an awesome rest of your trip, because it sounds super sweet.
🙂
Wow, Milo. You really are a horrible person. Fuck you, you shit-eating, cowardly, despicable, vile puddle of piss anthropomorphized as a human being. Fuck you and all the people who liked your vile tweet.
I’m off to look at pictures and videos of kittens to get that sack of garbage and his gross tweet out of my head.
@dhag85
Huskies and orcas? Lucky you!
Glad that you’re enjoying yourself, but I think that your kitties might ignore you for a while once you return. They always punish.
Maybe a better way to put it, and a more accurate way to describe the sentiment Iggy is getting at, is “performing gender.” IE, adopting styles of dress, behavior, etc, that is associated with a particular gender. Of course the clothes themselves don’t have any ultimately meaningful connection to a gender, but the performance is gendered: You’re acting in a way that you know people will interpret as male or female, and you’re choosing to either affirm or reject people’s assumption that you’ll perform your birth-assigned gender.
So Iggy’s saying there’s nothing wrong with performing femininity — and thereby allowing people to associate you with femaleness — because there’s nothing wrong with being female.
I’ve been mulling over the concept of gender performance a lot lately but I’ve definitely barely begun to unpack all the implications.
@dlouwe @katz
reminds me of that famous Eddie Izzard quote:
“They’re not women’s clothes. They’re my clothes. I bought them.”
That’s why I and my partner were so impressed with Kijowski turning up at the Polish 8th March rally with a skirt. Just a guy with long hair, a beard, a leather jacket and a skirt – he didn’t (explicitly) perform any gender, neither male nor female. I’m totally alright with drag either way, and from my own experience it’s great fun to perform stereotypical gender, but the way forward is to mix it up and subvert the stereotypes.
@ Jo
For fuck’s sake, you don’t have to follow the comments policy on other sites that don’t mind what you’re doing. Here, in this community? Not so much. Please stop. Peeps with mental illness are less likely to harm people than people without, not the other way around. This community is ableism free, and I and everyone else soul like it to stay that way. Some people here have mental illnesses, possibly including me, so it’s actually upsetting. Just don’t push back against it.
@Bernardo Soares:
I didn’t know any of the Swabian words you mentioned, they are pretty funny. 🙂
But you are right about misogynistic insults – we have a lot of derogatory words here for prostituted women and/or women who have a lot of sex partners. Also for women who are “ugly”. It’s depressing to think about it.
Wow, really? They are on the XYZ side of the [psychologicall illness] range but hey, I didn’t call them cray-cray, why are you objecting?\
No wonder she can’t understand the objections to the use of the word “cunt”, yes, even in the UK.