Be careful out there, men! There is a terrible new danger I’ve just learned about on Twitter, a group of dastardly man-hating monsters who call themselves “feminsits.”
Apparently they are somewhat similar to those other dastardly man-hating monsters known as “feminists.”
Here’s what I have been able to figure out about them so far.
Feminsits want to make men illegal!
Feminsits are overloading Tumblr servers!
Feminsits are terrible at household chores!
Feminsits probably would not enjoy working in mines!
Tedious concern trolls have some of the same concerns about feminsits as they do about feminists!
Feminsits have a thing against windmills!
Feminsits dumb like woman!
Feminsits hate bikinis!
Feminsits are the ones responsible for rape culture!
Yeah, I think we heard this one about the light bulbs already.
Feminsits will use rape and abuse to silence you, whatever that means!
Feminsits are kind of like One Direction fans in their terribleness!
Wait but it’s not even a real word!
Feminsits think that children should be cared for!
The real goal of the feminsit movement is to walk around topless!
Feminsits have a slogan!
But shouldnt that be “FAT UGLY FEMINSITS UNTIE?”
Damn, you anti-feminsits are really worked up about this lightbulb thing, huh?
Wait, there are “femonists” out there as well?
unfollowing femonists cuz im tired of seeing all you girls try to put down every guy like we ALLL fucking the devil like nah fuck that shit
— Cannonball (@MikeyCannon1) November 12, 2015
https://twitter.com/JackShiite/status/527740790538121216
Feminism and femonists messed up the lives of millions and caused great damage for several generation as well as cultural devastation.
— Glaring Tiger (@Glaring_Tiger) November 11, 2012
Who took wiz khalifas balls with alll these femonists tweets
— MuscleMarinara (@Mikeyyygallo) January 13, 2012
Damn, these femonists sound as bad as the feminsits!
Wow femonists are the most annoying people on the planet!
— Ryan Harris (@ryanissuppafly) June 27, 2010
Correction: Even worse!
I feel like it should be something you have — “I have a wicked case of the feminsits!”
Maybe that’s why we can’t change lightbulbs.
Dragon Arthur:
I love it! ?
Rouge Angles of Satin is a great name for a rock band!
They also obviously have never heard of Lewis Hine
http://cdnstatic.visualizeus.com/thumbs/53/67/bn,bw,clasico,hine-53679a645ba1c19150f1ce844e823bde_h.jpg
Feminsits are always accusing me of fucking the devil. Misandry!!!
Maybe it’s like when the right says Demoncrat instead of Democrat. Either way, it’s funny and the idiocy on display in the tweets is not reliant on the misspellings.
Nowadays, of course, scantily clad women only show up in coal mines when they need to shill in ridiculously ironic GE commercials.
@Alan
You raise a really interesting and important point. My gut reaction is that these are just typos that are common because of keyboard arrangements. When I’m typing on a desktop or laptop, there are certain words that I mistype with tedious regularity and I always mistype them the same way (eg. ‘Thier’ instead of ‘Their’). Twitter doesn’t correct these or flag them for me, unlike Word or my iDevices, so I have to check things, which I usually do although some things go through to the keeper.
But…I speak from the privileged POV of someone without a language disability. So while I can look at these examples and feel that it’s just laziness and lack of proofing, like it would be if I had made the mistake, it’s good to be reminded of the privilege I’m exercising in making that judgement.
I am endlessly sympathetic to those who have language disabilities. In my job in a call centre, I come across quite a lot of people who stutter. It’s hard to remind myself sometimes not to complete their sentences, especially when it’s easy to predict what they’re trying to say, but it’s important to give them respect by giving them agency (and it doesn’t cost me anything to wait a bit longer for them to finish what they’re saying). And anyway, it may be hard for me once in a while, but it’s hard for people with speech impediments ALL THE TIME. So I suck up any impatience I instinctively feel and try to be a better human.
Back to the twitters though…
In this case, doing my best to disengage from my privileged POV and considering it as sympathetically as I can, I still think most of these are neither deliberate misspellings nor, for the most part, a result of any disability such as dyslexia. I can’t completely discount those possibilities though, so I think your point is well made. I guess I shy away from armchair diagnosis of any disability, especially using examples from such a short-form medium as Twitter – there’s not enough to go on, and I just find it hard to be charitable to people who, disability or not, are gigantic douche canoes. I hope that doesn’t make me a bad person.
Thank you for starting the conversation – you’re a good man!
I can’t stop thinking of Sitz baths, which, fittingly, give relief to both male AND female perinuems.
@Dr Hoveiny
Oh my! That sent my brain in an interesting direction! As an opera singer, when we run through the score with the orchestra for the first time, it’s called a Sitzprobe. It’s often a tedious and interminable process and I can’t help feeling, now, that it would be much more bearable if we got to do it in a nice warm bath instead, although that probably wouldn’t go down too well with the instrumentalists given the extra humidity. It might also be difficult to find a big enough bath to fit all of us chorus at once. We singers would love the steam though – so good for the voice!
Oh no, won’t someone think of the man-children.
@Scaly Llama,
I’m pretty sure the brass players would hate the condensation on their instruments, the strings players would spend the whole time paranoid about their instruments, and the winds would have to spend the whole time cutting new reeds, while the conductor would blanch at the thought of sweating even more than usual.
The triangle player, though? He would be down with that.
(Apologies to any triangle players out there, I know you get made fun of almost as much as the violas do.)
@Rabid Rabbit
Indeed! And the brass players have enough trouble with condensation inside their instruments as it is – I’ve seen the spit pools next to the French horns ?
@brooked
If I may quote some great American philosophers
Don’t go chasing waterfells
Please stick to the rivets and the steam that you’re used to
😛
@Alan
While I would definitely feel the way you feel if this was picking on an individual, I think it’s fair game to make fun of it when it’s a trait that they show as a group. We’re not making fun of individual X for misspelling feminist, we’re making fun of a group of antifeminists for making the exact same mistake. And, while it’s possible that they’re all dyslexic or ESL, the much more plausible and likely scenario is lack of proofreading, especially when the tweets aren’t particularly riddled with mistakes or signs of a deficiency in English skills and these particular mistakes are common for everyone when speed typing.
@Scaly Lama
Ha, fun mental image! I had to look it up, “sitzbad” is German in origin and does just literally mean “sit bath.” “Probe” seems to mean “sample” or “trial.” So seated trial I guess?
I guess I assumed “sitz” was just a silly sounding advertising neologism from the 50s. Always fun to take a jaunt down the linguistics rabbit hole!
=We singers would love the steam though – so good for the voice! =
Absolutely. My singing teacher used to recommend having a thermos of boiling water, so that you could take a nice big lungful after you’d been standing in the often dusty wings waiting for your turn to compete in Eisteddfods and the like. Stride out on stage fully primed, ready to go.
But leave the thermos behind.
@katz
Wow, that commercial. I mean normally I’d be all for ads about strong gorgeous women flipping off gender stereotypes and showing off their muscles, but the completely idiotic punchline and the use of a song about the horrible conditions of early 20th century coal mines… wow. Someone at GE needs to get their Irony Meter looked at.
@mildlymagnificent
I nearly snorted coffee out of my nose!
(Very good advice for almost every life situation, btw.)
@Dr Hoveiny
Yes, that’s it exactly ? It’s a trial run through with the orchestra to make sure we’re all on the same page, literally, and for the conductor to work out how to keep us there. The ‘sitz’ part refers to the singers who, having spent the previous weeks rehearsing movements on stage, get to sit since it would be counterproductive to have them moving around.
Alan, while I certainly understand your concern, I’m sure in most of the cases I’ve quoted, “feminsit” is just a typo; it’s one I occasionally make myself (and if you look through the search results for “feminsits” on Twitter, you’ll see it’s one that feminists themselves, including one acclaimed writer, sometimes make, though much much less often than antifeminists).
None of the tweets I quoted suggest ESL or learning disabilities; most, while rather silly, are basically grammatical, certainly by Twitter standards. In most (if not all) of these examples, I’m pretty sure the misspelling is the result of haste and sloppiness.
Basically, the point of this post was to make a joke about a rather common typo, and to use the tweets to illustrate some of the utterly ridiculous things that antifeminists say about feminism.
(In writing that last sentence, I started to mistype “antifeminists” as “atnifeminists,” but noticed the error and fixed it. In typing that last sentence I mistyped “sentence” and fixed it. In fact, I’ve made and corrected typos on the fly in every sentence in this paragraph, including this one.)
I read those in the same voice as muslamic ray guns
Ummm, I think you misread that one, David.
The original tweet asserted:
Therefore, I think the headline you were looking for resides here:
No, no. No need to offer sex in exchange for a kind word now and again. I know this white knighting is very confusing, but for real, David: I’m not trying to get into your pants. I’m just happy to help.
These MRAs, they fuck up everything.
Damn you, autocorrect! [rolls onto back and fires gun into the air, yelling inarticulately while the surfers/bankrobbers(/autocorrect programmers) get away]
FeminSITS
FeminSITS.
Sheez.
====================================
Oh, hey!
What’s the countdown timer for? The one next to the word “edit”. My, that’s interesting. Perhaps instead of firing dangerous ballistic projectiles into the air to land who knows where causing who-knows-what-damage I should have just fixed my error.
But that would require me to actually pay attention to the fact that this website is different from other sites on which I comment. Too much to expect. Sorry.
Crip Dyke, ha, I missed that! Apparently it was tweeted by unfrozen caveman lawyer.
@Alan et al. re: typos/spelling mistakes
I get the hesitation at mocking this and am honestly on the fence regarding it myself. I personally wouldn’t have made a post like this at all were I David, but as the blog owner/cat wrangler, it’s his call.
However, – and while I cannot comment on the dyslexia part – in my opinion, there’s nothing in the tweets suggesting ESL on the level where writing “feminsits” would be automatically defendable. To put it bluntly, not all spelling mistakes are created equal.
In this case, the spelling mistake is in a suffix that is fairly common in the English language (even if it does have a remarkably awful concentration of consonants). I would be more forgiving of a spelling mistake in the actual body of the word (see “femonists” which is likely an honest typo, since I and O are next to each other on most keyboards), especially since “femin” as a building block for words is actually pretty rare in English. Although one would think it and different words build on it would be more familiar to the MRAs than to the average person due to their, ahem, interest in the topic.
There’s also the fact someone else mentioned earlier that most of the tweeters managed to spell correctly more or equally challenging words such as “humanists”, “contributed”, “confronting”, “light bulb”, “skyscrapers”.
Oh, hey! I know that guy!
He represented a massage therapist who thought that massage therapists credibly accused of the sexual abuse of clients should never be required by the licensing board to post a notice that there is an accusation that has not yet been adjudicated and that persons of the same legal sex as the accuser are entitled to a chaperone, all as interim measures to be immediately removed by the disciplinary committee once an actual administrative hearing has been heard.
Oh, but wait. That wasn’t his argument. His argument was that such interim protective measures should not be considered the reasonable exercise of legislatively delegated authority nor part of the regulatory board’s mandate in the types of cases characterized by the situation of his client. This despite the fact that the law specifically requires the board to protect the public from “risk” (not “harm”) with interim measures when “risk” appears to exist from the point of view of the board.
Nope! Wait again! That was his conclusion. His actual argument was that such interim measures could NOT legally be imposed on his client despite the statute requiring protection of the public because 1, his client is a man, 2, his client has never been convicted of the same crime in a criminal court, and 3, his client is married!!!!! Given the facts he had not yet been convicted and that he had won the coveted title “man-who-drag-woman-to-cave” with its accompanying tax breaks and that he is a legally-recognized penis-haver, it is clear that a risk to the public could not possibly exist!
Therefore, the board had no “risk” before it upon which it could act! Ipso, fatso! Quid pro se! Quad Ears are Demonstrated!
Seriously.
Isn’t it obvious to anyone who is not thawed-caveman-lawyer that man-who-drag-woman-to-cave cannot commit a sexual crime unless he’s already been convicted of a sexual crime? Why can’t feminsits follow this kind of logic?