A scene that plays out all too often in my life as well.

Over at Pharyngula, on the thread discussing the Silverman / Vacula deba[cle|te], screechymonkey posted the most delicious proof of the femispiracy ever. I present it without comment.

I just didn’t notice the cult-like hold my fat, lumpy, old body had on the libidos of the young women in the group. [– PZ]

Don’t be silly. The attraction isn’t physical. It’s just that feminists completely forget their misandrist, anti-sex dogma and go ga-ga for any man who recites feminist talking points. I can’t tell you how many times the following scene has happened to me:

Me: “Hello”
Shrieking Feminist Harpy: “HELLO? How dare you say hello to me, you oppressive tool of the patriarchy! Security!”
[security guards arrive, women of course, because companies are now afraid to hire men for fear of being sued by Feminazis]
Guard 1: “What seems to be the problem here? Is this penis-haver oppressing you?”
SFH: “Yes! He just came up and started speaking to me! And he was looking at me, too! I think — [sniffs] — I think he was about to [whispering] ask me for coffee”
Guard 1: “That’s a violation of article IX, Section 2, paragraph (b), clause 6 of the Anti-Harassment Policy.”
Guard 2: “You’re going to have to come with us!”
Me: “Wait…”
[pause]
Guard 1: “What?”
Me: “No, really, I meant wait a second while I check my privilege. Done now, thanks. You see, I think she heard me say ‘hello,’ but what I really meant to say was ‘sorry.’ As in, ‘sorry for being part of the patriarchy.’ Of course, intent doesn’t matter, and the fact that I thought I heard myself say ‘hello’ is probably just due to my privilege, so I’m sure she is correct. Please take me away and punish me for the sins of all men.”
SFH: “Ooh, tell me more!” [flutters eyelashes]
Guard 1: [cooing] “I didn’t know you were an ally!”
Guard 2: “Maybe we can all ‘punish’ each other for the sins of all men”
Me: “Sure, why don’t we go somewhere private and discuss… intersectionality?”

A scene that plays out all too often in my life as well.
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Strawprivilege

How many times ’round this particular bush must we beat? The latest spate of intentional misunderstandings about what privilege is and is not has spurred me finally to post my thoughts on this matter, though to be quite honest I’ve made a false start at this particular post about a dozen times now.

Privilege as a term used in social justice circles is fairly well understood. In fact, it strays not one whit from the dictionary definition, regardless of which dictionary you use:

noun

  • a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people

— Oxford English Dictionary

Definition of PRIVILEGE

: a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor : prerogative; especially : such a right or immunity attached specifically to a position or an office

– Merriam-Webster (presently 19th most popular word on online lookups!)

And even law dictionaries, referring to specific legal privileges, scan in plain english:

A particular and peculiar benefit or advantage enjoyed by a person, company, or class, beyond the common advantages of other citizens. An exceptional or extraordinary power or exemption. A right, power, franchise, or immunity held by a person or class, against or beyond the course of the law.

– Black’s Law Dictionary

The concept is a solid one in sociological circles, describing existing behaviour. There are books of essays by sociologists, books by sociologists exploring how privilege interacts with viewpoint, and books of theory by sociologists who are cited often in religious discussion — it’s not exactly fringe science, and it’s certainly better supported and better explored than the present state of evolutionary psychology. It involves no just-so stories, it describes reality as observed by impartial observers, and provides an explanatory framework for how these power imbalances aggregate and perpetuate themselves without any necessarily immoral behaviour by any individuals. It is a powerful framework and it is well evidenced by thousands of years of recorded history aggregated across all our cultures.

The objections to the use of the word “privilege” are once again coming from the same quarter of our community that regularly forestalls progress (and, honestly, even discussion) with regard to social justice causes. Once again, a “leader” of our respective movements has spoken up against the terrible feminists who are “silencing dissent” with our horrible bullying tactics like “blocking people on Twitter” or “disagreeing with them on their own blogs” or “asking them to kindly stop actively talking for just long enough to hear someone else’s perspective”. This leader, and the people rising up to support and defend said leader’s words, fight tooth and nail against these feminists. By attempting to poison the well for this concept, by attempting to sap away our ability to use the concept to describe reality as it exists, they are attacking by extension everyone who happens to think that women are in a disadvantaged position in our society as a whole, and therefore by extension every woman, whether they recognize or do not recognize same.

Some of this leader’s defenders are motivated reasoners; some have a skeptical blind spot when it comes to the possibility that our communities could reflect the same background levels of misogyny and bigotry. Some are Men’s Rights Activists, who run around attacking feminists under the guise of working for the same men’s disadvantages which feminism also addresses by undermining patriarchy (while, naturally, largely ignoring men’s disadvantages altogether). Still others are onlookers, fence-sitters, people who don’t care to attempt to sort out the competing claims, people who’d really rather we return to the very serious work of being rude only to Ray Comfort and Sylvia Browne.

You’ll note I haven’t stated exactly whom I’m talking about yet. There’s a reason for that.
Continue reading “Strawprivilege”

Strawprivilege

Mock The Movie: Cat Women of the Moon transcript

So I screwed up the tweet-recording of this gloriously horrible hour long film. The logger was apparently not running at all through the entire movie. So I rejiggered the script to pull all the tweets available, but sadly, the Twitter API is kinda limiting and only grabbed the last 200 @-mentions. Other API methods support pagination to pull more than 200 per API-call, but apparently not Mentions, so I had to go to the Twitter web interface and save an HTML dump of the entire movie, then whip up a quick parser to parse it to something approximating my usual transcript style. The only flaws are that hashtags aren’t delinked, and the timestamp is in a different format that I simply couldn’t be bothered to reparse to the usual format. So the first half of the transcript will be slightly different from the second half, and I’ve marked where it switches to the usual style with a double-dash. (If you care.)

Sigh.

Anyway, this movie contained a lot of women acting pretty much like every straw-feminist trope in the book. And the only woman we were supposed to sympathize with spent the entire movie either enthralled by the evil straw-feminist moon cat women things via their mental telepathy, or enthralled by the thuggish physical ministrations of the man she loved. It was a riotous and rollicking adventure through nonsense, with an abrupt murderous end that happens almost entirely off-camera. It’s like they ran out of money to actually continue paying the Hollywood Cover Girls, so they decided to end it by shouting about their deaths from offscreen. A fitting end to such prototypical examples of the imaginary creature that is the straw-feminist, anyway.

Continue reading “Mock The Movie: Cat Women of the Moon transcript”

Mock The Movie: Cat Women of the Moon transcript