When a college feminist decided, one cold night in 2014, to burn her personal copy of pseudofeminist Christina Hoff Sommers’ book The War Against Boys, the internet’s antifeminists responded as if Hitler himself had risen from the grave.
“Universities bring book-burning back, one page at a time,” declared a blogger at TheRebelMedia. After an extended comparison with the infamous book burning campaigns of the literal Nazis, he declared that “[t]he burning of Hoff Sommers’ book is a striking visual synecdoche for the malaise afflicting free expression across not only North American college campuses.” In a featured article, A Voice for Men described the burning as a “disturbing” example of “misandry in academia.”
On the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, one angry dude declared that
If you’re burning a book, you’re basically admitting to being not just a bigot, but one who doesn’t even have enough confidence in the strength of their own views to believe that they can stand up for themselves without needing to silence and censor those that oppose them.
If we set aside the fact that, unlike the Nazis, who confiscated the books they burned, a person burning their own copy of a book that is readily available to others is not actually censoring anything, he’s got a point.
So it’s interesting to see how many of the Internet’s antifeminsts and Anti-Social-Justice-Warrior-Warriors are embracing a proposal from one of their own to literally censor all academics who teach stuff they don’t like.
On Change.org, professional feminism-hater Carl Benjamin, known on YouTube as Sargon of Akkad, has started a petition demanding that “UNIVERSITIES” — presumably, every single one of them — immediately “Suspend Social Justice Courses” because he thinks that “social justice” professors are up to no good.
In vague but melodramatic language Benjamin proclaims that
Social justice has become scientifically illiterate, logically unsound, deeply bigoted and openly supremacist.
He doesn’t specify exactly what kind of supremacism he’s complaining about here; presumably not white.
Nor does he ever define exactly what courses count as “social justice courses.” There aren’t any departments of Social Justice that I’m aware of. [EDIT: Oops! Turns out there are.] Does Benjamin mean a tiny handful of, say, women’s studies courses taught by radical feminists? Or does he hope (at least in his wildest dreams) to take down the humanities and social sciences as a whole?
Social justice professors are indoctrinating young people into a pseudoscientific cult behind closed doors that is doing damage to their health, education and future.
Well, technically, I guess, virtually all college courses are taught “behind closed doors,” since the doors of lecture halls generally do get closed before class begins. Technically, I’m writing this post behind closed doors, because I don’t leave the doors of my apartment wide open. (People might wander in; the cats might wander out.) I suspect that Benjamin himself wrote up his petition behind closed doors!
Benjamin goes on to declare that
[s]ocial justice … has become another ideology fit only to pave the road to Hell, so it is time to turn around and choose another path that is concerned with reason, science and improving the lives of every human.
If only some evil Social Justice English professor has indoctrinated Benjamin in the devilish art of writing without resorting to hackneyed cliches.
But that’s pretty much all there is to Benjamin’s petition. Somehow, thought, the vagueness of Benjamin’s plan hasn’t stopped 9,878 people — so far — from signing the petition.
It is, however, possible that some of the signers are a little bit confused as to what exactly they’re signing.
Indeed, the top two most-liked comments on the petition, for example, were written by people who seem to think that Benjamin’s proposal to peremptorily censor all college courses that he thinks are excessively social-justicey is, somehow, a defense of free speech?
Benjamin has posted a video in which he explains his crusade in a little more detail. It’s possible that somewhere in it he answers the question of how exactly his plan to drive all professors he doesn’t like from all the college campuses in the world is actually a crusade for free speech.
Here’s the video in question:
Oops! Wrong video. Let me try again:
Huh. I don’t think that was it either.
No, that’s clearly not it.
Ok, ok. I found the real one here.
But it’s 40 minutes long. I sampled the first 2 seconds, and that was about all I could bring myself to watch. So I guess I’ll just have to resign myself to a life of servitude under the jackboots of the Social Justice warlords. Still, that’s a far better option than actually watching a Sargon of Akkad video all the way through.
Nationalism is just racism in a tailored suit. Dig into a vocal nationalist and you find a seething froth of racism and xenophobia.
And what’s your excuse for forgetting that the entire Republican party is just as racist as Trump?
“Guys, I think that this cabinet is more made of wood than it is a piece of furniture.”
These are not mutually exclusive categories.
The internet has this marvellous feature called “not posting.” I use it quite a lot. If you genuinely feel that a discussion on a particular matter would be unwelcome, you can use that feature.
On the other hand, some of us have indicated by their behaviour that they are entirely consenting on the matter at the moment, and I know them well enough to know that they can handle themselves, so I believe that provided you stick to the topic you have my blessing. For what that’s worth, anyway.
(BTW, here “the topic” doesn’t generally mean “what the topic used to be, X pages ago.” The topic currently seems to have drifted to matters of privilege, which is always a matter worth discussing. However, please be aware that Scented Fucking Hard Chairs and Policy Of Madness are both very, very knowledgeable on the matter. If you would not step to me on matters of astrophysics, you would be wise to adopt the same mindset with them.)
HAHAHAHA.
White nationalist, yeah, it’s all the same.
@EJ I will take your advice to heart and not poke the bear. I would like them to discuss varying levels of privilege with them. The analogy of weight that was mentioned, I liked that. By not having privilege in society you have more weight against you, making it more and more difficult to achieve the same things in life. I’d kind of like to quantify that somehow, either by measuring income, education, happiness level, ect. That sure would be interesting to see.
@ Paradoxy
Not even that, actually. ‘Whip-cracker’ is a false etymology. The term was originally self-applied by and to whites in the Southeast during the early colonial period, and meant something akin to ‘braggart’, but without derogatory overtones. Crack, in some dialects (esp. in Ireland), means conversation, shooting the breeze, big talk, etc., and the ‘Florida Crackers’ and ‘Georgia Crackers’ were famous for their tall tales and florid boasts (A tradition that survived in that area for centuries, and traces of which remain).
Now Richard is pretending that racism is only real if someone outright states that they hate anyone who isn’t white.
Of course he is.
Richard, I have to ask, what is the practical difference between nationalism and racism, in your opinion?
@Richard Via:
The way you phrase that request is, “Please Policy Of Madness, please SHFC, please Scildfreja, would you give me some links and book recommendations so I can educate myself?”
There is a myth that people will always be willing to drop everything to explain a concept to someone. Puzzling, people seem to be more willing to believe this myth when they’ve acted in a hostile or impolite fashion, or when they’ve indicated that they plan to act antagonistically during this explanation. I call it a myth because it isn’t true: people only have a certain amount of time in their day, and if they choose to give you links to sources rather than take the time and energy to write, then that isn’t because you’ve won any sort of contest.
Humility always helps, especially when talking to people who a) know more than you, and b) you have antagonised.
On the other hand, this cuts both ways. While WWTH and isidore13 are taking the mick out of you entirely justifiably, you are not required to respond if you do not wish to and we will not think worse of you if take this choice.
Hello again, Richard! I see that my previous post has gone unnoticed, so perhaps you’ll maybe take a look back and answer some of the questions I had for you? I know the post was long, so I did bold the specific questions so you can see them easier.
Why should it be that way though? We have to walk before we can run, and thus we have to learn about what oppression is and why it happens before we can run off to go “overcome” that oppression. Sending people off willy-nilly to go fight and “overcome” something that they don’t fully understand only leads to more problems.
Not to mention, we can only really “overcome” if those who are doing the oppressing are willing to help, and that’s always a huge hurdle.
A first-world nation that still has its fair share of problems with other forms of oppression.
This kind of smacks of the Oppression Olympics argument, in that [oppressed group] shouldn’t talk about [thing that bothers them], because [oppressed group] people have it worse in [“third-world” country].
For instance, when I talk to some men about catcalling, I get told that I should shut up about it because girls are being murdered for going to school in THE MIDDLE EAST (and yes, they say it like the middle east is one monolith, instead of a group of countries with their own laws and such).
It’s like seeing two abused people, one physically abused, and one mentally abused, and telling one of them to shut up because the other has bruises “where it counts”.
Both these situations are horrible, and we’re very capable of caring about them both, even if we’re only discussing the “lesser” of the two evils at one time.
Yes, I have certain privileges (being born in America, and being white), but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t talk about problems I face.
No one is using oppression or privilege as a “crutch”, and I mean no offense by this, but: You’re essentially in too good of a position to look down your nose at other people for talking about their oppression.
One particular way that many anti-SJ people like to attempt to discredit those who speak against them is by hand-waving them away as “over-dramatic”, or otherwise trying to discredit their legitimate concerns as “hysteria” (this especially happens when women are involved). Not calling you out and saying you’re a bad person here, just that this is a common thing people do to discredit other people instead of discrediting their ideas.
Scildfreja said it best, however. These people don’t want to be challenged, they want to say their piece and not be questioned. They want a place, on a public campus, where they can bully others and not be challenged.
And you also said it: People have the right to protest if they don’t agree with a speaker, and as Scildfreja said (yet again): These people aren’t going to allow them to speak during their engagement. Would you not protest if someone you thought had toxic beliefs got a speaking engagement at your local college or university, and you knew they wouldn’t let you speak in protest of them?
Freedom of speech works both ways, and people also have Freedom of Assembly.
You’re not a misogynist for liking to listen to her. I know there has to be at least a few people who listen to her if only to form their own opinions or to rebut her ideas, but you may be a misogynist if you believe some of the misogynistic things she says or agrees with.
That’s the issue here. I’m sure even I can find something I can agree with CHS on, but I still don’t agree with her brand of “feminism”, mostly because it’s counter-intuitive and destructive to other feminists who are actually fighting for equality instead of reassuring men that they’re not evil monsters that the straw feminists they made up tell them they are.
That still doesn’t give you, a white man, any room to discuss “black issues”. Feel free to follow them as closely as you like, but from one white person to another: It’s not our place to say anything. This isn’t our discussion.
We can, and should, listen to what black people are saying, and repeat what we hear to other white people so they can get the message too, but it’s not our place to discuss it amongst ourselves. We cannot possibly understand what it’s like to “live while black”. We don’t have that lived experience, and we never will.
Huh, I didn’t know that! Thanks for correcting me! 😀
EJ,
Funny how that myth about people being willing and able to drop everything to educate someone is most often believed about women, or on the internet, people assumed to be women because they’re in a pro-feminist space and haven’t said they aren’t a woman.
PI,
The silliest thing about the assumption that catcalling is a first world problem only is that women in countries that aren’t first world actually complain about street harassment too. A friend from college was from Karachi, Pakistan and one of the first things we bonded over was street harassment. Another thing we discussed often was the expectation that women are supposed to be very thin. Another so-called first world problem that occurs outside of the first.
It’s also very racist and colonialist to assume that everyone in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East is poor, uneducated, and brutally oppressed. That friend of mine from Pakistan is from a well off and highly educated family. Although she experiences types of misogyny that I don’t and experiences racism and xenophobia here in the states that white Americans don’t, she is in many ways more privileged than lower income and less educated Americans are.
tl;dr privilege and oppression are complicated and people don’t always fall into one group or the other. A concept that seems to be lost on people like Richard.
@WWTH: Absolutely. I thought about mentioning that myself, actually, but I couldn’t put it in a way I liked. You did a much better job of it than my sorry attempt.
Privilege and oppression aren’t zero-sum games, black and white, or just ones and zeroes. A cishet white dude can be oppressed in certain ways, and a person of color who isn’t cishet can still have privilege in certain ways.
That doesn’t mean that the oppression or privilege is suddenly moot because one or the other is happening simultaneously, and it’s still important to discuss them both and how they relate to one another.
Someone did mention that cishet white dudes to tend to cling to the oppression of being lower-class economically because it’s the only thing they know. I think it was WWTH.
Yeah, after I wrote that I pretty much had to go back to work and do some important shit for a change. I don’t necessarily have 24/7 internet access to educamate people like Richard.
Read some of the articles on this site. David documents this shit every day. Every day. There is a lot of overlap between racism and misogyny, which means that this site has experienced some mission creep. I’m not personally complaining, because it’s actually not helpful to put the various axes of privilege/disadvantage into individual silos and pretend they are not related in some way.
I mean, fuck, just yesterday there was a new article on JudgyBitch, who usually makes the site with her misogyny, but she basically exploded into a pile of racist bile on Twitter over the past week. And that’s just the overt racism. You literally need go no further than the front page to see that.
You really have to have your head faaaaaaaaaaaar up your ass to think that racism is basically solved in the United States and the KKK is a quaint little holdover from the bad ol’ days. The bad ol’ days are still here.
Why don’t you name some of those topics for me, in a social justice context, since that’s what we’re talking about, after all. I can’t wait to see where you believe there is a 50/50 split, where intelligent and educated people of good faith can just disagree. (hint: there’s a reason why it’s called social justice)
Why? Why do you think it would be useful to quantify oppression? The only application of that that comes to my mind is to play Oppression Olympics.
Oh, nm, I see that your reasoning is that you think it would be fun.
Nope, you still clearly don’t.
In reply to @Imaginary Petal
I’m a registered Republican in that weird middle ground of fiscally conservative/socially liberal. As such, I take offense to this assertion-or at least a part of me does. However, it’s true of enough Republicans to be a safe assumption of the vast majority of them. The best comparison I can think of (and I really wish this wasn’t the case) is to men and rape: not all men are rapists, but enough of them are to make women generally more suspicious of the whole group.
For those curious as to why I’m a fisc-con/soclib Republican, I’m actually probably more of an Independent, but I register and vote GOP in the (admittedly slim) hopes that enlightened Republicans will eventually take party leadership, hear my voice and those of other GOP moderates, and try to bring the party back to its best, most accepting days.
Argh, the edit window mammoth got me! This sentence
should read “However, I recognize (and abhor-the world really sucks some days, especially when it comes to things like this, which makes places like this site so important) that it’s true of enough Republicans to be a safe assumption of the vast majority of them.”
I’m gone for like 24 hours and Pandapool turns into Handsome Jack!
And also joins Sevenofmine in the group of people whose comments I will always hear in their characters’ voices.
@Nikki
I’m of the opinion that the fiscal part can’t be fully separated from the social part. Fiscal decisions have real life social consequences, and the fiscal policies of the Republican party are, just like their social policies, racist and overall terrible for everybody (but mostly women and minorities).
The comparison between men/rapists and Republican/racists is not very helpful. The assumption that any man you meet could be a rapist is a form of worst case scenario safety precation, since it’s been well established that most men are not rapists. A Republican non-racist, by contrast, is a unicorn.
I also can’t have any sympathy for the idea of trying to change the GOP from within. It’s a group of the worst people in the world, ffs. It’s time to get out.
Sorry. :/
Accurate.
The Republican party sells the story that there is a ton of waste in government and we can run a lean, cheap country if we just get rid of it.
The reality is that most of the fat that existed was trimmed in the 90s (by Clinton). A lot of meat was trimmed with it, and you now have agencies like the FDA having to depend upon the industry they regulate to test their products and report in on their findings. The FDA just doesn’t have the resources anymore to do that testing themselves. They operate more or less on the honor system now. Most regulatory agencies on the federal level have the same problem. State and local are variable, but I have yet to meet an agency that has real waste left to cut.
These regulatory agencies operate to protect the rank and file public from the actions of greedy rich people and corporations. And now they can’t do that effectively! I’m not sure how this can be reconciled with social liberalism. That’s not even getting into changing entitlement programs to CDBGs and how that empowers states to operate federal programs in an overtly racist manner, or telling stories about welfare queens and people buying lobster with SNAP, or ensuring that a single drug conviction blocks a young person off from higher education.
I don’t like that kind of rhetoric, sounds too much like, not all Muslims are terrorist, but enough of them are to make us generally more suspicious of the whole group. I can’t stand that Islamiphobic trash that comes out of people like Trump.
Mentioned before, but I think I should restate I don’t believe nationalism is the same as racism, they are two different things. One can usually be found with the other.
@ scildfreja
I’m not sure thats necassarily always the case. Over here we have the Scottish Nationalist Party and they’re very non racist.
The British Nationalist Party on the other hand…..
It might be more accurate to say that “trimming the fat” led to huge chunks of muscle being cut while miles of adipose were left untouched.
Even putting aside the intentional gutting of the enforcement abilities of regulatory agencies and the pet-project boondoggles allowed to flourish, the “use it or lose it” nature of many budgetary determinants is…problematic at best.
Too late to ETA: I’ve seen so much asinine waste when budget managers have gone on end of fiscal year spending sprees for justified rubbish because they knew that they’d need the same (or were asking for increased) funds for a big project or two in the coming year.
ETA: I mean, I understand the impetus for such policies – to ensure that unneeded programs don’t continue to get a level of funding simply because they’ve always had that level of funding – but the world would be a better place if sufficient oversight + trust in the competence of employees could = actual, non-raidable rainy day funds being a common practice.
Funny enough, I don’t think it is. Different people in different socioeconomic status can share privileges with people in a different one. They are more privileged, problems matter for them, just less.
My problems matter, I’m just in a better position to change them, whereas someone, dealing with multiple different sets of oppression may not be able to change their status so easily.
Your problems matter, and it’s not actually bad that you have privilege. Ideally, all the privileges you have would be shared by everyone.
What is bad is when you don’t fucking notice this, and when you don’t fucking do anything about it. When you navel-gaze at whatever minor inconvenience you have experienced today and inflate it in your rhetoric and your actions to be more than it is.
For instance:
Around 10% of men in the United States are rapists. 3% – 5% of them are serial rapists, with an average of six victims each. If 10% of Muslims in the United States were terrorists, we would have a real cause to be cautious around all Muslims. If 5% of Muslims in the United States were serial terrorists, with an average of six terrorist acts each, that would be a fucking emergency and people would act like it was. People would be asking what the fuck it is about Islam that tells people that it’s okay to be a terrorist.
But the numbers just don’t warrant that kind of panic. For every Muslim terrorist, there are hundreds of thousands of Muslims who are not. Rapists are not one in 500,000. Rapists are 1 in 10. A woman walking down the street and passing 100 people has likely passed 5 rapists. She has passed 0 terrorists. If 100% of those people were Muslim, she has still passed 0 terrorists.
Nevertheless! You have never been placed on a no-fly list because you are a man. You have never been stopped and hassled by the cops because you have a 10% chance of being a fucking rapist. All you experience is a tiny bit of sad feels at knowing that women are viewing you with healthy caution. The number of actual, objective problems you face for sharing a gender with rapists is effectively zero, even though you have an exponentially higher probability of being a rapist than any Muslim has of being a terrorist.
Your equation is bullshit, and your reasoning is bullshit. The only way we could think of them as remotely equivalent is if we inflate your tiny little inconvenience into the worst possible thing that exists. Maybe to you it is the worst possible thing, but in objective terms it’s not even a papercut. Shut the fuck up about your feels and start caring about the fact that 10% of men are fucking rapists.
That’s what makes you a problem. Not your privilege per se, but the fact that your privilege means you don’t have to care and you choose to factually not care.
1 in 10 seems a bit high. I found a study supporting that conducted in some Asian countries. Rape is definitely a big problem over there. In America I can’t really find a comparable study. The one I did find stated rapes occur every 107 seconds. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000. Source-RAINN I don’t know if that’s just reported rapes or estimates. If they don’t factor that in that’s puts the number far higher, over one million. Over a lifetime, with current population increases, at least the US I can’t find any study supporting a 1 in 10 number. Which study is that 1 in 10 number coming from? Im not saying I don’t believe you, just want to read the study.
I’m not trying to lessen anything here, any amount of rape and sexual assault is too much. Even if the number was 1 in 100 it’s still to high, this isn’t about guilt, this isn’t about making men feel better. This issue is important to me, someone very close to me dealt with this at a young age.
I one day want to do more to help people like my friend and the countless other people’s lives who have been afflicted with sometime so awful. For now all I can do is educate myself.