“Get your antifemininity out of my feminism”

April 30, 2012 Jason Thibeaultanti-feminism, antifemininity, feminism, gender roles, misogyny53 Comments

This essay by s. e. smith is something I honestly wish I could have written myself (but see Comment 1 below), because it’s a point that is rarely raised in fighting against misogynist sentiment and the gender roles that enable it. That point is, eliminating those gender stereotypes does not entail actually eliminating the stereotyped behaviour. Making this society safe for manly and effeminate behaviours from both sexes is paramount, regardless of whether or not the specific behaviours conform with the proscribed gender roles.

I want to live in a world where little girls are not pinkified, but where little girls who like pink are not punished for it, either. We can certainly talk about the social pressures surrounding gender roles, and the concerns that people have when they see girls and young women who appear to be forced into performances of femininity by the society around them, but let’s stop acting like they have no agency and free will. Let’s stop acting like women who choose to be feminine are somehow colluders, betraying the movement, bamboozled into thinking that they want to be feminine. Let’s stop denying women their own autonomy by telling them that their expressions of femininity are bad and wrong.

Antifemininity is misogynist. What you are saying when you engage in this type of rhetoric is that you think things traditionally associated with women are wrong. Which is misogynist. By telling feminine women that they don’t belong in the feminist movement, you are reinforcing the idea that to be feminine and a woman is wrong, that women who want to be taken seriously need to be more masculine, because most people view gender presentation in binary ways. This rewards the ‘one of the boys’ type rhetoric I encounter all over the place from self-avowed feminists who seem to think that bashing on women is a good way to prove how serious they are when it comes to caring about women and bringing men into the feminist movement.

There’s much, much more right here. What do you folks think?

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The twenty comments in my moderation queue

March 11, 2012December 10, 2015 Jason Thibeaultconspiracy theory, feminism, free speech, hate speech, misogyny, privilege, The Monument16 Comments

I want to clear out the twenty comments I have pending moderation — the only twenty comments to hit moderation since I joined Freethought Blogs. These comments came from people who have earned “bans” (which, around here, means they can post but only I see it) for various reasons, and in one major case, from someone who wanted to keep arguing long after he was blocked for threadjacking, thread hogging, mistreating me and basically every commenter, and being a general douchenozzle. I post these not to legitimize anything anyone’s said, but because I actually care a significant amount more about free speech than some of these aforementioned douchenozzles seem to believe. I don’t particularly like any of the lines of argumentation proffered by the people in question, but I don’t, also, want to simply black-hole them because that just ain’t my style.

So, I’m going to post these comments here. Think of this more as my having stopped people from shitting on the rug, forcing them to shit in the chamber pot, where I’ll now dump out the contents for any interested parties to see. If you dislike anti-feminist sentiment, misogyny, specious argumentation, or DavidByron, I strongly recommend you skip this post. If you’re just looking for whargarbl, there’s plenty to be had here.

Goes without saying — expect the possibility of triggering language from misogynist fuckwits. Funny that it’s only them who landed there.
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Are universal statements always a problem?

January 8, 2012 Jason Thibeaultegalitarianism, feminism, misandry, misogyny, sexism, universal statements84 Comments

Or just sometimes?

It occurs to me that many (“ALL!” “Shh.”) of our problems around these parts viz every new conflagration, from our recent conversation with Mallorie Nasrallah, to the statement by DJ Grothe that we only blog about controversial topics for hits, to the pushback against a Rebecca Watson blog title as though it meant she hates all atheists, is the fact that we as skeptics seem to have a problem with blanket universals even when they are not intended as universals. They are the quickest single thing you can do to engender hatred amongst your commentariat.
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Frat email trains frosh on how to treat women

January 6, 2012 Jason Thibeaultheavy sarcasm, misogyny, objectification, rape culture43 Comments

Edit: yes, this is from March. It is still relevant though, and it was news to me.

I just read the purest example of unbelievable fuckwittery that enablers of rape culture — the substrate of society that deals with everything to do with sex as a commodity and with women as objects and obstacles to that commodity who must be conquered or overcome — considers a “joke”. It’s this kind of pick-up artist bullshit that basically tells men in general that it’s perfectly acceptable to forget that women are people as long as you’re tricking as many of them to jump on your bone as humanly possible. Letting one another know who you banged is just good courtesy, so others know who pokes and who they don’t have to waste their time on. This is all need-to-know stuff if you’re a college freshman!

“By the end of this memo,” this douchebag exhorts, “you will not only gain a greater understanding of what it means to live, but you will have embraced a lifestyle.”

Oh, I’m sure I will.

However, in order for this to happen you first must know a couple key terms.

*grabs notepad, licks pen tip*

GO ONNNN.
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Mallorie Nasrallah’s misguided defense of serial harassers and misogyny in the skeptical community

January 3, 2012 Jason Thibeault#mencallmethings, feminism, Mallorie Nasrallah, misogyny, Penn Jilette, privilege, rape, sexism281 Comments

Please note that at Mallorie’s request, as Google indexes are returning potential business contacts to this page when searching for her name, I have retitled the post. The URL can’t change for indexing purposes, but the title itself has been changed from ‘Mallorie Nasrallah says “I like it when #mencallmethings”‘ — playing off a Twitter hashtag that was popular when the post was written.

That’s the only takeaway message I can get from this open letter to the skeptic community, which apparently came as a direct response to her active participation in this discussion at Greta’s.

In the comments on my ill-received but well-intentioned (but as Classical Cipher is fond of saying, intent is not magical) post regarding whether we should differentiate between a person being “a misogynist” and “exhibiting misogynist behaviour” yesterday, Mallorie Nasrallah chimed in. She claimed that the people involved in dissenting from the idea that there is a patriarchy, or that certain actions are misogynistic or enforcing of that patriarchy, might not dissent out of privilege, or out of misogyny in the sense of hating women, but just because they came to different logical conclusions.

She then went on to pen this open letter, which she sent to me via Twitter apparently hoping that I would amplify it. I didn’t. She is apparently friendly with some far bigger movers and shakers in the skeptic community though — Penn Jilette tweeted a link to it a few hours later, lending a very large audience to her letter in a hurry, most probably because he likes the idea she expresses.
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Vilifying dissent

January 2, 2012 Jason Thibeaultblogospherics, misogyny, vilification160 Comments

A fifteen year old girl posts a picture of herself on Reddit r/atheism holding a copy of Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World, which she took to post to Facebook originally. She didn’t know she was evidently transgressing unwritten and sexist-by-design social rules by posting her picture, and thus was being taught the lesson that she should have “worn a burka”, in her words. She ended up on the receiving end of hundreds of comments upvoted by thousands of users involving all manner of hateful and diminishing speech. Rebecca Watson pointed this situation out on Skepchick with the usual inflammatory results, since everything that Rebecca Watson ever points out must be wrong because it was pointed out by Rebecca Watson. Bloggers everywhere leapt on this conflagration, hoping to sway a closely-allied community into fighting back against the atheist and skeptic communities’ problem with sexism.

Then I started to notice a new trend in various blog posts’ comment threads, both here and at Greta’s. It’s a trend I’m not terribly sure I like. It is the conflation of enabling misogyny, and being a misogynist.
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More pushback against systemic misogyny within our respective communities

December 30, 2011 Jason Thibeaultatheism, feminism, gender, misogyny, pushback, skepticism, troll5 Comments

I’m sure you’ve seen quite a few of the posts that have sprung up about Freethought Blogs lately in the wake of Rebeccapocalypse 2. Posts like Greta Christina’s “Why ‘Yes But’ Is the Wrong Response to Misogyny” or Maryam Namazie’s “We are not an atheist community”. Excellent conversation abounds, but I do hope you’re looking at trackbacks and such. Otherwise, you’re missing conversation elsewhere. Here’s two you should read.
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Marieke Hardy apparently incorrectly named the man who calls her things

December 23, 2011 Jason Thibeaultfeminism, gender, Marieke Hardy, misogyny, pseudonymity, troll

A while back, in my post The General Pushback against Misogynist Trolls Begins, I mentioned an incident where Marieke Hardy, a screen writer from Australia, has endured a years-long hate campaign by a particularly vicious little misogynist troll. She posted the name Joshua Meggitt in a post supporting the Twitter #mencallmethings hashtag, only it turns out that naming was premature. On her blog today, the following post appeared, under the title Apology:
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In defense of my male feminism

December 23, 2011 Jason Thibeaultfeminism, gender, gender roles, male feminism, masculinity, misandry, misogyny, movement purity32 Comments

I’ve had listed for some time, as part of my profile on the right, the fact that I consider myself a feminist. I put it in shortly after joining Freethought Blogs and being assailed in very short order by the winged monkeys who have this absurd tendency of descending onto any pro-feminism post, shouting down the defenders of equality with absurd accusations of being misandrist. Merely by considering our patriarchy to be heavily weighted against women, who despite making up over half our population seem to get the short end of the stick more often than not, you are de facto anti-male, apparently. I added that descriptive out of spite for the denizens of the slimepit who consider women fighting for women’s rights to be evil, and men fighting for women’s rights to be “fauxminists” just looking to get laid.

And, frankly, I think I fit the descriptive of “feminist” well enough that I did not hesitate in adding it, though until that point I called myself pretty much exclusively an egalitarian. I despise the gender roles that harm both men and women in different ways, and I recognize that the ways in which women are disadvantaged significantly outweigh the disadvantages that men have, especially taken in concert with the advantages that male privilege confers. I want gender roles to simply evaporate, to disappear entirely, to be cast off like the vestigial organs that they are in light of the harm that they do to humans of all genders, and that simply won’t happen without taking out the cultural institutions that reinforce them with each generation.

So imagine my surprise when I saw a post by fellow FtB blogger Comrade PhysioProffe, excoriating a disturbing trend of taking the name of “feminism” under troubling pretenses, like the case of Hugo Schwyzer. My surprise came not from the fact that Schwyzer deserves more scrutiny — after all, he built a career of teaching women how to be feminists out of some expressed remorse for having attempted to murder an ex girlfriend, so he damn well deserves scrutiny as a result.

My surprise, rather, was borne out of the fact that Comrade caught me in the blast.
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Lousy Canuck

… Because I don't watch enough hockey, drink enough beer, or eat enough bacon.

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