bspencer at Lawyers, Guns & Money points out one of Christina Hoff Sommers’s latest sneers at feminism.
Anita Sarkeesian Kickstartered a video project continuing her work on women and tropes in video games. Gamers everywhere responded with measured skepticism by threatening her with rape and death. She was even temporarily hounded from her home. But she was a feminist on the internet–she should have known what she was getting into. Christina Hoff Sommers, vile faux-feminist, approves.
Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers
I always expected other liberal-minded scholars to join me in exposing 3rd wave feminist lunacy. Never happened. But now the gamers r here.
7:21 PM – 30 Aug 2014Yes, that’s right. Christina Hoff Sommers is backing doxxers and men who think making rape and death threats is a reasonable response to a video project exploring sexist tropes. Oddly, this should surprise no one, as Christina Hoff Sommers is an old school Chill Girl.
Disgusted and surprised by that, I went to take a look at Sommers’s Twitter, and got more disgusted than I was when I set out. She’s basically just another Phyllis Schlafly without the religion. What a pity that Richard Dawkins keeps retweeting her.
Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers
Most gamers seem to support equality feminism. What they reject is today’s male-bashing, propaganda-driven, female chauvinism. #GamerGate
That got 1,423 retweets. The anti-feminists adore her.
Here is my Factual Feminist playlist. I am trying to correct all the sisterly sophistries. Keeps me busy. https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLytTJqkSQqtr7BqC1Jf4nv3g2yDfu7Xmd …
ICYMI: Recent interview in which I explain why today’s hashtag feminism is a scourge. #GamerGatehttp://www.ravishly.com/ladies-we-love/christina-sommers-author-who-stole-feminism …
How did feminism become toxic? In early 90s, my side won all the arguments. But other side quietly assumed all the assistant professorships.
There is a good deal of bullshit in (at least some) Women’s Studies programs – anti-science; women’s special “ways of knowing”; addled relativism about FGM; etc – but feminism hasn’t “become toxic.” That claim is itself bullshit.
3rd wave feminism is based on false violence & injustice data.The propaganda is now fueling a panic against men. http://chronicle.com/article/Persistent-Myths-in-Feminis/46965 …
After that one a retweet:
@CHSommers You’re a mythbuster in the grand tradition of those who debunk harmful nonsense, speaking truth to power in the public interest.
Yeah – feminism is “the power.” Right.
Back to Sommers:
Feminism should be about equality of opportunity, mutual respect between sexes–not trigger warnings, sex panics, victimology or policing men.
Most guys like images of sexy women. Why attack them? It is wrong to police sexuality of LBGT people–but also wrong to police hetero guys.
That sounds like that Fox News panel we saw the other day – “Let men be men!”
Gay people have been sex shamed and demonized forever. Deeply wrong. But today, heterosexual men are also demonized & lied about. Not OK.
Term “rape culture” is sexist. Implicates average guy in a horrible crime. Call people out who use it. It’s a form of gender profiling.
That one I just don’t begin to understand (having seen it before is no help). How is it sexist? It’s about a particular culture; it doesn’t say that everyone, or everyone in any particular category, is part of that culture. She’s just shamelessly bullshitting there.
Enough for now. She seems to be worse every time I look at her Twitter account. I think Twitter has gone to her head.
Most gamers seem to support equality feminism. What they reject is today’s male-bashing, propaganda-driven, female chauvinism.
Wait, it’s “female chauvinism” to point out that women’s corpses are used in video games as sand-bags to hide behind in gunfights? I had no idea “chauvinism” had gone so far! What’ll they be demanding, next, that women not be used as nude punching bags? Fucking chauvinism!!!
Uh, “rape culture” is a gender neutral concept. It is used to describe problematic societal attitudes regarding male victims of sexual assault and female sexual predators. In fact, the term was originally coined to describe attitudes regarding male victims of prison rape. It sounds like Sommers is the only person who believes that “rapist” and male sexuality are synonymous.
Barf?
*sigh*
I really wish I could figure out which ‘wave’ of feminism I’m in.
What is it about trigger warnings that isn’t mutual respect? It is very mutually respectful. I just, wut.
And the rest there is also vague. What are “sex panics”?
How is mutual respect supposed to happen if we don’t police the people who are not being respectful?
How is equal opportunity supposed to happen if we pretend no one is the victim of unequal treatment?
What the hell is this?
I didn’t realize that anyone took CHS seriously, so to see Dawkins re-tweeting her was unsettling. I mean, she can complain about the ‘wrong’ type of feminists secretly and sneakily taking professorships, but is she taken seriously by any academics? The wage gap denialism should raise red flags from her supporters. It is no different than climate change denialism. There was a really angry commenter on a thread the other day spouting off about how even school children know there is no wage gap, and everyone he knew also knew this. I was surprised. I assumed most people acknowledged that it was a thing that needed fixed. Guess not.
I’m guessing the collective horror some men are feeling because they have been told that you cannot get a woman super drunk and then rape her. You know, along with those false memories that ‘alleged rape victims’ conjure up because people are talking about rape. (See the guest post over at Brute Reason).
–
tl;dr
Men panicking that they can’t have sex with any woman they want whenever they want.
You really think women are all “sugar and spice”?
The most privileged class of human to ever walk the planet whines when called bossy. Like the feminist are now so supreme as not to be criticized.
I pride myself as a free thinker. It saddens me that freethoughtblogs has become an echo chamber for shrill feminism. CHS is attacked but NOT her arguments. Playing the player and not the ball. This is everything that free thinking is NOT supposed to be.
This is freethoughtsblogs. No free thinking is allowed.
I’m just going to leave this here to knock you off that high horse you are on. The so-called feminists are just as bad as the so-called gamers and you aren’t doing anyone any favors by acting like only one side of this confrontation is crazy.
Feminists doxx and issue death threats to 10-year-old: http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/819/615/72b.jpg
@yazikus
You are a freaking idiot that no amount of words could describe how out of touch and clinically brain dead you are.
Men and women are not different when it comes to the opposite sex if they are hetero. Men will look at women and ogle a bit and may make jokes with their male friends just as females can gawk at a male she finds attractive and giggle about it with her girlfriends. Neither gender actually has some secret Illuminati type meeting about how to rape nor is either as a majority upset they can’t sleep with whoever.
I’m in a loving relationship with a woman I respect. Even when I was single, it NEVER crossed my mind to randomly rape let alone feel sorry for myself that I can’t sex any woman I want. Believe it or not, not all men are that shallow like you toxic feminists believe. Many respect women and their own partner. BOTH genders are free to look at each other and be attracted, that does NOT mean rape is on their mind.
By god, you are what’s wrong with feminist and why many with sound minds, even former female feminist find you types complete poison to the advancement of humanity.
tl;dr rad feminists are poison and not all men are rapists/ even care they can’t have sex with anything that moves
These last couple of weeks have been insane for gaming fans who care about these issues. Harassment and conspiracy theories have driven one major site (kotaku) to a rash decision on patreon (their writers can no longer support anyone there) which actually reduces variety in writing about games and contributes to what the harassers claim they are against: conflicts of interest in games journalism.
Of course, it makes sense when you realize what they’re really about is harassing women and minorities and crying about having their toys taken away when someone dares approach a game from a different perspective. (All while complaining to other people that games aren’t taken seriously).
There have been some positives – from Joss Whedon and other major figures to developers at big companies speaking up against this – but little action so far. I hope if gets better before it gets too much worse.
robertwilson@8:
The supposed concern about conflicts of interest in games journalism is a false flag. The problem of conflicted reviewing is real and goes back a long way…but what happened here was that a well-known female games designer was outed by an ex-boyfriend for sleeping with him and a few others in the industry. From this the MRA gamers decided to make the story about conflicts of interest even though there is not a shred of evidence that she ever slept with anyone in order to get a good review, nor that any of the reviewers gave her work an overly kind report…instead of the real story which is, as usual, one of the few prominent women in gaming gets her reputation trashed publicly for the sin of (gosh!) having sex with people she liked who, unsurprisingly, were often people working in the same industry as her. Notice how none of the anger has been directed at the men she supposedly slept with, you know the ones who, if they gave puff-piece reviews for sex, were the ones who betrayed their professional ethics.
So, yeah, I have to conclude that the “we care about conflict of interest” is an utter lie designed to cloak the underlying misogyny.
Yes, that’s why I labeled them as harassers and conspiracy theorists and I said they claim to be about that, not that they are indeed about that.
Believe me, I’ve been following this since it started. Like I said, the positives have been good, but far too few. I would love to see a Polygon or Giant Bomb or Escapist do something more than just tweet support, and would especially love to see a major developer condemn this stuff and support Sarkeesian in more than just words. And now that two great female writers have decided they had enough, I wish someone had picked them up a long time ago instead of just talked about how good they are.
Especially funny earlier today was seeing one person point out the actual nepotism at a decent publication like Polygon (not that it’s an issue mind you, but it is what the MRA type claimed was an issue) only to have people react with “we had no idea” but not make a big deal out of it, just proving the real issue is something else, in this case misogyny.
At least I’m happy to see MSM like Auntie Beeb picking up on this story.
Well, nobody other than the usual reactionaries, right-wingers, and anti-feminists. (But I repeat myself).
Yeah, that’s her USP in a nutshell. She self-identifies as an “(equity) feminist” (in fact, she invented the term), but that’s the limit of her feminist credentials.
I have to say, this bit by bspencer at LGM is bothersome:
“Oddly, this should surprise no one, as Christina Hoff Sommers is an old school Chill Girl. Only it’s an especially unseemly brand of Chillgirlism at work here because Christina Hoff Sommers is ancient and looking for head-pats from slobbering cretins half her age. OH, CHRISTINA.”
Age-shaming? Really? OH, BSPENCER, this is very disappointing.
@brianpansky #5
Like a sex picnic, except instead of invading ants or rain, everyone is suddenly afraid they or their partner will come too quickly. In other words “it’s about the menz”.
Marcus, could you point me towards the mainstream videogame where female corpses are used as sandbags? This sounds like a shocking misogynist violation, and I need to know which publisher(s) I will no longer be buying from.
An MRA might think that in situations where heterosexual men have most or all of the power, then (hot) women have an advantage hidden in their vaginas… Most unfair that men can’t trade on their sexuality, too! (Not that that’s particularly what happened here.)
/end snark
Say what you like about missing promised engagement after promised engagement, I can’t believe they fired DJ Grothe when he’s just so damn good at gushy, sycophantic tweets full of meaningless praise like this.
When she’s regarding rape culture she is completely on the ball. Wanna know why? Rape culture implies that men are systemically normalized in terms of seeing women as objects and that rape is okay. Or rather, having sex with a woman when she doesn’t want to. If you call our ENTIRE CULTURE a RAPE CULTURE then you are saying that MEN have culturally been indoctrinated into being potential rapists in the waiting. That’s how you make women afraid of men. You blame culture so you don’t look bigoted. But culture implies the whole of culture, and when you peel the issue down to simply being a female issue then guess who is to blame? I think you’re at least that capable of seeing her point.
Yup. Men (and rapists) are a force of nature, an implacable reality we are powerless to confront and change.
Of course, if people like DJ Grothe took CHS’ reasoning to heart, they’d disband the JREF in a heartbeat*, since wooish thinking is even more ubiquitously a part of human nature than rapiness is.
After all, Most people like believing in angels and bigfoots. Why attack them?
*Were they able.
Glinda @ 13 – yes, I disliked that passage too, which is why I didn’t include it when I quoted. (I could have included it and criticized it, but that would have been a distraction from the main point, so I opted to leave it out.)
@aliam
it seems you don’t understand what Rape Culture is. You are doing the whole “why are there still monkeys” bit, and it’s tiresome.
Yep. There are people who believe that the “wage gap” is more or less entirely attributable to the institution of marriage: i.e., that women choose (whether voluntarily or because patriarchy) to accept under-employment in order to optimize their partners’ career; that they accept a disproportionate share of household duties which impacts work; that they have lower seniority and experience from quitting (or taking leave) to have children; etc. There have been econometric studies that purport to show this–that if men are compared only with women in the “never married” category, the wage gap disappears. I can’t comment on the validity of such studies, because I’m not in that field and I don’t care enough to actually try laying my hands on one. (To substantiate that such papers exist at all, though here is one: “Discrimination: An Interdisciplinary Analysis,” by Walter Block, Journal of Business Ethics, 1992.)
Even if (partially) true, that doesn’t tell the whole story, of course. Availability of parental leave more or less cancels out the “childbirth penalty” by facilitating a rapid return to work without loss of seniority (http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/209897?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104589239377). Even if employers are giving less pay based on objectively lower seniority/experience, rather than discrimination, the lack of good parental leave can be attributed at least partly to discrimination, with the wage gap as an indirect effect. Not to mention other stuff pointless to belabor here, such as a perceived lower quality in the same work when done by a woman as compared to a man–meaning that a woman might be paid less for the “objective” reason that her work is inferior, except that the inferiority of her work is itself not an objective fact. The discrimination can be completely unconscious, but still very real.
Is that actually debatable? Rapists get a year of probation and then go back to their football careers. Rapists who claim it’s only rape if the victim was conscious enough to remember it are given three years’ probation for drugging a woman and having sex with her while she was unconscious, but the probation is for illegal drug use, not sexual assault. FTB alumnus Thunderf00t tweets out a meme suggesting rapists are are like careless drivers.
That’s systemic normalisation.
aliam, #18:
Brian Pansky is right: you’re doing “why are there still monkeys?” You’re trying to interpret a criticism of culture as a criticism of all members of the culture in general, and each one in particular, so that you can conclude, “If ‘rape culture’ is real, then you’re saying I am a rapist!” No such thing.
TW: rape culture, references to rape.
The culture is basically the collection of stories we tell about ourselves. It’s a set of shared myths. Such as the myth that men are protectors, and “don’t hit women,” but rather defend them. That they’re providers. That women are the nurturers. That “normal” is growing up with your mommy, who is definitely a woman and makes dinner every night, and your daddy, who is definitely a man and comes home every night bringing the bacon and stories about his day. And so on, and so on.
And within those myths are some that weaken women’s boundaries by trivializing them or outright denying their existence. There’s the myth that marriage is a contract to have sex, and saying “no” to your husband is a violation of the contract. Or the myth that women say “no” in order to look like “good girls,” when really they mean “yes,” and what they really want is for your manly manliness to overcome their resistance in order to give them an alibi. Or the myth that women who aren’t “good girls” are “sluts” who will have sex with anyone, and who if they say no to you, are insulting your masculinity. And so on, and so on.
The net effect of those stories isn’t to make men hide in the bushes and rape random passers-by. But it very much IS to make men less respectful of boundaries. More likely to badger women who say no, or have sex with intoxicated women without worrying whether they’d have consented when sober, or otherwise have sexual contact with women who are not freely consenting. Which is very much not OK. Which is rape.
What does she mean by “liberal-minded”? Does that mean “liberal in thought but not words?”
@26: Nicely put. That has “guest post” written all over it.
See that little clump of enraged comments up there – 8 through 11 – that all came in at roughly the same time, around 8:30 last night my time? They’re all first-time comments. Guess what happened at the same time last night.
Sommers tweeted this post.
That’s her fan-base.
Not for the faint of heart? Really? Is she literally clutching pearls and heading to the fainting couch because of this post? I’m sure one could find much ventier angry feminists to complain about. Oh well. And the rude little fake Trigger Warning is fucking offensive. TWs serve a purpose, and we could debate their merit, but mockingly using one is just shitty of her.
It’s only baboons if it’s a FTBlogger.
Finally, a blogger recognising me for the toxic element I am and holding me in moderation. 😉
(Make no mistake, I’m toxic and aim to be.)
@Akoni Lee
um, the person you are responding to LITERALLY said “some men”.
YOU’RE being out of touch here. Sigh.
Anthony – I have no idea why that comment was held. Totally random.
*Checks self in mirror. Notices swarthy, end-of-summer complexion and thickening autumn beard*
Ri-i-i-i-ight. ‘Random’.
There’s no such thing as rape culture. Rape is taken totally seriously and isn’t casually joked about, because it’s such a serious thing that’s taken seriously. It would be normalising to joke about having a ‘rape room’ in the back of one’s place of work, but since rape culture doesn’t exist such things clearly don’t happen.
HAHA …
Sommers fans are as ingenious as the Slymepitters, I looked up this 10-yr old “dox” and “threaten”, seemed weird that they blanked out the person attacked as well. The account in question joined in 2010, presumably when this advanced young man was 6 years old. Seems legit …
Anthony K @38:
You might want to put something like /sarcasm at the end. There are a lot of people who come by and say such things in all seriousness….
Yes, a /sarcasm tag is warranted there, AMM.
I should probably just append one to my handle.
Anthony, I’d suggest naming yourself after a cultural guile hero with trickster aspects, but it won’t help. Or so I’ve heard.
Hi Ophelia, we meet again.
I am absolutely baffled by this post, I cannot understand what you are thinking whatsoever.
I hope this idea isn’t insulting to you, but if you would humour me, try separating this post out into the quotes from Hoff Sommers, and the parts that you wrote.
Does her writing look sexist or even biased when left on its own? Does your writing provide evidence to a reader with no prior information on the topic that your opinion is the correct one?
I honestly just cannot see where you are coming from on this, at all. Maybe that’s just a failure of empathy on my part…
Again? When did we meet before? I have no idea who you are.
Facebook. That’s okay if you don’t remember, I don’t mind.