By David Futrelle
Try to make head or tail of this one, folks!
In case you can’t quite parse the syntax here, Mr kur955 is asking his Men’s Rights colleagues whether they have noticed that women make fun of gay men a lot, and if this is because women know that men are better partners than women and are afraid that if men realize this they’ll all go gay.
He spells all this out a tiny bit more coherently in a comment, arguing that women want to make the “gay experience” look bad because
they know … that if hetero men turn to gay suddenly theyll run out of punching bags … because sexual desire will not stand in the way of making a truthful fair and from the outside world true to the internal world judgemental opinion
So ladies, fess up! Why are you using homophobia to keep men from going gay and deserting you?
If you say, “what are you talking about, that’s absurd and also that’s not how being gay works” I’ll know you’re part of the vast conspiracy.
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@Ohlmann
I’ve seen that in other groups as well, like with women like Bettina Arndt who agree with MRAs in promoting misogyny, or trans* people like Debbie Hayton who ally with TERFs and bash other trans* people.
I think another part is they feel they can “get ahead” by sucking up to those who have power over them and showing themselves to be “the good ones.” In Aella’s case, she is demonstrative of a lot of other bigotries as well, so I don’t really see her hatred of autistic people as very different from that.
@Nanny Oggs Bosom
I think the wording was intentional; I think Aella wanted to add plausible deniability and make it harder to tell exactly how bigoted she is in her polls (seeing as this wasn’t the only poll worded this way, she has very similarly worded polls on ADHD, being gay, and being trans*).
It’s not a huge deal, I don’t think her polls actually do anything other than let her put out bad takes. Accidentally voting the wrong way probably doesn’t make any difference, so don’t stress over it.
People will find all kinds of ways to hate people who aren’t like them. Our minds work differently than many other people’s, and some of us struggle with things they find easy, so they hate us.
Homophobia by straight men is, of course, just one aspect of toxic masculinity. Speaking of which, here’s that effeminate, beta male simp Dwayne Johnson stooping to women’s work by teaching his daughter to wash her hands (warning: ADORABLE):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEPUpdgRYL4
If only he could be as alpha as true manly men like Roosh V.
@Allandrel
If only he had a bread machine…
Conspiracist: (outlines conspiracy fantasy)
Me: “… or, not”
@Naglfar
One day he may aspire to being a bread scientist. /sarcasm
Seriously, though, Dwayne Johnson strikes me as the kind of guy who wouldn’t mind learning how to cook, either for himself, for his partner, or for his children.
@Victorious Parasol
Well, his catchphrase was/is “if you smell what I’m cooking,” so it would follow that he’d be able to cook.
2010: Virus attacks your internet cell phone
2020: Internet phone virus attacks your cells
When I was a kid/teenager, I remember both boys and girls would make fun of people for being gay. I can’t say who did it more. But it was more common for boys to use “gay” indirectly as a negative quality (e.g. calling clothing/activities etc. “gay”). That seems less common now, thankfully.
In the class I’m taking, this kind of thing is called “indexing”* and we were using it to talk about gendered language – there’s evidence that using words like “mailman” will lead kids to think that mail deliverers are automatically male.
“Indexing” was also mentioned in an article by Lal Zimman on trans* self-identification: he wrote about how 3rd-person pronouns are so powerful because they’re presupposed indexes:
(Zimman p. 155)
*In philosophy, according to my boyfriend, “indexing” is when one thing is the direct physical outcome of another thing that it represents, e.g. smoke indexing fire. In sociolinguistics the connection is more symbolic but still has practical outcomes.
@ epitome of incomprehensibility
Now you’ve really got me overthinking the whole “There’s no smoke without fire” cliche!
@epitome:
Hehe, I just had to tell Lal that you posted his stuff. We went to grad school together.
I once had a very weird conversation with a guy who used to comment on a blog I also commented on…he really wanted me to understand that gay men only pretended to like women (socially), and that as soon as I turned my back, the gay men I might think were my friends were using terrible language about me and talking about how horrible women were.
I finally said something to the effect that if they’d learned to say it behind women’s backs, they were doing better than many straight men of my acquaintance, and tried to drop it. He couldn’t let it go. This was the TRUTH, and apparently I’d turn into a normal homophobe if he could get this through to me.
@epitome : gender in name do have a pretty big effect. To take a lighter example, I alway see hydras as female (and laying eggs and all) by default, because the french word for hydra is feminine.
(there’s no neutral in France, so everything have a gender. For example, cars are feminine, bread is masculine, computers are masculine, and, most amusingly, almost all slang designing the male sex are feminine)
A follow up on yesterday’s incident with Aella: she has now decided to start a private Twitter “with less filter.” So I’m guessing she’s going to use it to talk amongst her friends about how awful LGBTQIPA+ and autistic people are without even trying to veil her premise.
It made me so mad when Aella pulled the whole “I’m autistic!” bullshit when confronted with her bigotry. No, sorry, being ‘autistic’ is not an excuse to harm other autistic or otherwise neurodiverse people.
@Yutolia
I’ve seen a lot of people do that in varying communities. The script is always something like “But I’m autistic/ADHD/gay/trans*/etc and I wouldn’t want future people to be like me.” I think it stems from self-hatred, but also from trying to fit in with bigots by appearing to be one of the “good ones.”
In Aella’s case, she went off that script a bit by managing to throw in some extra ableism, when she said that she only wanted “low functioning” autistic people to not exist. And compared autism to having cluster headaches.
Then a few hours later said something about how she didn’t think eugenics would elicit a “knee-jerk” reaction from the people it targets.
In a few hours we will see the final results of all her polls. My guess is that all of them will have results similar to her trans* poll, which finished earlier: about 90% of respondents were cis and of those, the overwhelming majority wanted no more trans* people. There’s definitely a selection bias, but the truth of the matter is that it rarely ends well for minorities to have the majority decide whether to eliminate them.
@epitome
Thanks for the link! I’m always low-key interested in pronouns stuff, not least because Finnish doesn’t have gendered pronouns so I like to read up on them.
(IIRC some studies have shown that even though the pronoun hän is not gendered, people are more likely to assume the antecedent is male if the sentence gives no gender cues. Also some people have been hankering for gendered pronouns ever since written Finnish as we know it was created, so even though I enjoy the current situation, it could be better.)
@Ohlmann:
Of course, in German there IS a neuter gender in language. All ‘diminutives’ (words ending in -chen or -lein) are neuter as a general case, which leads to the situation where the words for a young girl (Mädchen) or young woman (Fraulein) are neuter. A boy is just ‘Junge’ which is basically ‘Youth’.
(I have long said that I learned more about the English language from my German class than I ever did from my English classes. I’m a native English speaker, but learning French and German put it into context.)
With regards to conspiracy theories, I was noting elsewhere that I think a lot of it comes down to:
5G == something new that I can’t see that still affects me == magic
Covid-19 == something new that I can’t see that still affects me == magic
Basically it’s ‘these are both scary new things that I can’t do anything about that came up at the same time, so they must be related’, and then add the grifters who love stirring up panic so they can sell their EM shields and the like.
The fact that both of these came from China as far as most people are concerned (I know I first heard about a lot of 5G stuff in reference to Huawei) adds another racist angle as well.
@Jenora Feuer
I don’t speak German, but in the same vein, learning Spanish made me understand a lot more about grammar and parts of speech in English and other languages than I ever did before.
Well, that’s one way to use Clarke’s first law.
@Yutolia – Oh, cool! I found the essay really good.
And the language was precise yet accessible. Some of the stuff I’m reading for the class is…not. Like here: “This triangulation of linguistic activity, semiotic codes, and indexicality needs to be complexified…”
Me: “YOU’RE complexified!” 😛
@Masse_Mysteria – I didn’t know that about Finnish! (Though probably someone mentioned it here and I forgot.) Farsi (Persian) and Twi (a language in Ghana) also don’t have gendered pronouns.
@Naglfar:
I’m kind of a linguistic dilettante. I only really speak one language, but can mostly read French (I live in Canada, it’s useful) and know enough of bits of things like German and Latin to pick out structures and roots. All of which comes in surprisingly handy at times, like realizing when I was down in Brazil on business that I could actually figure out the warning signs in Portuguese, because both French and Portuguese are essentially provincial dialects of Latin and thus the core root words overlap a LOT even if the spelling and inflections are different.
As for ‘== magic’, the webcomic Freefall actually had a take on that a long while back:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff300/fv00255.gif
(Florence Ambrose being the name of the character there.)
It can be a lot easier to convince people of things if they don’t actually know enough basic science to understand why what they’re being told is quite fundamentally impossible. To most people even an old-school analogue television is magic, never mind that it’s pretty much just an oscilloscope with finely tuned sweep frequencies.
Most people just seem to have so given up on understanding the world that:
A) they have no way of telling whether any given explanation makes sense, and,
B) they can be desperate enough for anything that SEEMS to make things understandable that they’ll latch on to the first explanation they find.
As I’ve said before, the last seems to explain a lot of conspiracy theories: some people are happier with the idea that there’s someone in control who hates them than they are with the idea that sometimes things happen for no reason and there’s nobody actually running things.
@Jenora Feuer
I had a similar thing happen when I was in the Azores a few years back. I don’t speak Portuguese at all, but was mostly able to decipher it in written form for the reason you described.
This is a viewpoint that is pretty much the opposite of mine. As long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to understand exactly how things work, even if it’s complex or requires a lot of learning. I think it’s part of being autistic, but I’m not sure, I just know it’s part of my personality.
I am reminded of the title text of xkcd 1081:
“Really, the comforting side in most conspiracy theory arguments is the one claiming that anyone who’s in power has any plan at all.”
Speaking of autism, the final result of Aella’s bigoted eugenics poll is in. Somewhat reassuring that the majority of allistic voters decided not to eradicate autism, but still alarming how many did want to. And the premise of the poll is still ableist and awful.
@Jenora
I’m a slight linguistic dilettante too. I can only speak English, but bouncing from learning French at school, picking up a bit of latin when I went through a ‘fascinated by the Romans’ phase, same with Old English during my fascinated by the Dark Ages phase, trying to learn German, relearn French, my dad randomly speaking Spanish because he learnt for his holidays, my uncle randomly bursting into Dutch or German because he worked in the Netherlands and currently works in Hamburg, I’ve managed to pick up enough learning to sort of read German, Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish, because of shared roots. Can’t speak or write any of them. Which was a pain when I went to Paris in 2016. At one point I ended up saying Ja instead of Oui.
I really want to focus on linguistics more, but there are so many other things I need to learn. Can I live forever and learn all the things?
@epitome
I’m always the Finn telling people online that Finnish doesn’t have gendered pronouns. Then I feel bad because they may get overly excited (“Must be so easy being nonbinary!”), when in real life there are Finns who wonder why we don’t have gendered pronouns when “all the other languages” have them, and then you’re stuck trying to explain to them that not all languages have pronouns, let alone gendered ones.
Might be easier if I actually knew languages. It’s cool to sometimes utilise Swedish for understanding its near relatives (at least in writing), and I mostly coasted through a French course’s reading comprehension bits by guessing through English. I’m starting to feel I’m too lazy for languages.
@Masse_mysteria
I imagine it would be somewhat hard to use language without pronouns. Which is part of why I find it a little bit funny when transphobes insist that cis people don’t have pronouns. I’ve seriously seen so many transphobes insist that only trans* people use pronouns, often while using pronouns in the same sentence (sentences like “I have no need for a pronoun”).
@Naglfar
There are several classes of pronouns, and no language lacks all of them, but e.g. in Japanese the words used for “I/me” literally translate as “this person” or “this servant”, depending on formality and status relationships.