Another piece of ugliness, in case we’re running short: a petition to “fire” Rose Eveleth (although it doesn’t say fire from what).
Rose Eveleth is the woman that started demeaning a scientist in his finest hour for wearing a T-Shirt that was gifted to him by a female friend who designed and made it.
Such behavior is appalling and should not be encouraged.
Nobody should be shamed for what they are wearing, and feminists should be all too familiar with that sentiment.
This sort of abuse behavior should not be tolerated and we, the undersigned, would like to see action undertaken betting anyone who would instigate and encourage the harassment Matt Taylor received.
She should not be employed by any publication in any way if hate speech and encouraged abuse are her contributions.
644 signatures so far.
No mention of the threats Rose Eveleth has been getting.
Also no mention of who started this petition. Anonymous coward.
What is this sort of thinking? “This disgusting shirt depicting women as sex objects was made by a woman, so that makes it a shirt that promotes feminism!” Newsflash: There are now, and have always been, women who have attacked women’s rights and feminism, just as there are always people who vote against their own self-interest. The shirt can and should be evaluated on its own merits, not on the basis of the identity of who made it. The whole “But it was made BY A WOMAN!” is nothing but a disingenuous dodge to attempt to change the subject away from the fact that this was a stupic, absolutely indefensible choice for any professional appearance, full stop.
“for wearing a T-Shirt”
Except it wasn’t a T-shirt, which makes it look an awful lot like these “defenders of Matt Taylor” don’t actually care about him or the Rosetta mission, but rather just came to harass a woman voicing an opinion online.
“Women, be appropriately silent or you will lose the PRIVILEGE of being able to support yourselves. You have been warned.”
I think Rose Eveleth is a horrible person. I also think anyone signing this petition is a fascist, anti-free speech idiot. I hope the petition has little to no effect. Ruining people’s lives over slight differences in opinion only suits SJWs such as yourself. Others should know better.
But there’s no harassment as bad as telling a guy he should have worn a different shirt. No siree.
@6 carlie, I guess men aren’t accustomed to being told they aren’t dressed sufficiently “professionally” for a given professional milieu, and it hurt his widdle feewings. Imagine, for people to focus on what you’re wearing instead of on your work! Why, it’s an outrage!!
*eyeroll*
So, people who are anti-social justice are doing things that we (SJW) do not do, (but you attribute to us anyway because, fuck the truth. It only get’s in your way.) and the antiisocial justice folk’s action is wrong because it makes them as bad as the people who do not do that action?
Kira,
That is some backasswards crap right there. You need to look at your life and look at your choices.
Uh, no. It suits gamergaters, slymepitters, MRAs and assorted creeps like you quite well. It’s what you do.
Kira Des sez:
Sweetie, Rose Eveleth criticizing Taylor’s shirt? That’s…free speech.
Yeah, sure, that happened.
Stuff your bullshit hyperbolic Gamergate propaganda. Y’know what’s proto-fascist? Demonizing criticism and creating a chilly climate for it. As you dumbshits do.
You gotta appreciate the irony of a comment saying “stop internet bullying” on an internet petition seeking to get someone fired for expressing an opinion
… I completely missed that point. Who is this petition going to? Which organization do they want to drop her? Eveleth has written for the BBC, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and even Modern Farmer. She’s helping out with multiple podcasts, too.
This petition is nothing more than an empty show of force, at best, and a honeypot to gather names and emails at worst.
This framing they’re apparently trying to go with is just dumbfounding. ‘Hey Chris, you probably shouldn’t wear your KKK outfit to work’ ‘DON’T SHAME CHRIS FOR HIS CLOTHING CHOICES!!!!!’
These are the same sort of people who would look at the stars and bars flying over a southern courthouse and say, “It’s just a flag. What’s the big deal?”.
I can’t wait to see all of these anti-social justice atheists defending nativity scenes in front of court houses this Christmas. I’m sure they’ll try to get atheists who complain fired for waging a war on Christmas.
Yeah. That’s gonna happen.
Witch hunts really do happen, apparently. The MRAs are just trying to prove that.
I’m sure teh freeze peach warriors are lining up to loudly denounce this petition, right?
Soooo, as usual, I’ve been paying little enough attention to the internet at a time of Great Strife that, while I was aware of the shirtstorm and the shirt in question, I wasn’t sure what the actual catalyst was. I just looked through Ms. Eveleth’s twitter feed and saw her most evil and heinous comments! Oh, what horrors I found!
It’s weird… looking back to the first gate that swept a community I was in, I did the same thing, and it took ages because searching “elevatorgate” didn’t actually bring me to Skepchick right away, and I was groping around in the dark. By the time I found the original video, I was totally hyped up and expecting a torrent of misandrist vitriol and spite and… yeah… “guys, don’t do that.”
So she was snarky and called him an asshole. Oh no. That monster. She must be stopped before she’s snarky about us all!!
*headdesk*
Is this how it has always been? Or is it a sign of progress that they’re getting so aggressive over so little these days? I mean, surely nobody but the misogynists can look at their reactions and think they’re at all reasonable?
It’s always funny to see how they highlight “given to him by a FEMALE friend.” These are of course the same people who would be completely swayed by feminism if only we could find a single male feminist. *eyeroll*
I am going to give the petition the amount of seriousness it deserves by asking the following questions.
Why don’t people say/write “given” anymore, instead of using this noun? When did the use as a verb become common? I don’t like this trend.
There are other grammatical issues with the petition which makes me wonder if it was written by someone who is not a native English speaker. Or maybe someone rather young.
I know, I don’t like “gifted.” But I guess the idea is to distinguish from plain “given” which could mean it was a shirt a friend didn’t like or outgrew, as opposed to a present acquired on purpose to give.
So do they draw up similar petitions to be sent to various entertainment media whenever an awards show comes along and all the female entertainers are judged (and often very shamed and denigrated) for their clothing choices? Somehow I doubt it very strongly.
maudell at 18:
Apparently that’s the talking point now for that crowd. It can’t be bad or anti-feminist if a woman did/ said it and it’s something they’re fine with. I guess now that they have people like Christina Hoff Sommers on their side, and thus are no longer reliant on whole-cloth created females entities like Vivian James for such support, they feel they have some sort of trump card. Just a couple of weeks ago, on another blog, I pointed out that CHS was only a feminist in the same way Kent Hovind was a scientist and someone immediately jump down my throat demanding how I could say a woman wasn’t a feminist. No other reason she might be qualified or why I might object to her claim of such status; Sommers is a woman and therefore an unassailable feminist according to them. It’s all the feminists who point out that CHS is not a feminist who are the fake feminists, even though they are usually also women so their status of feminist should be equally unassailable by that logic.
I don’t think they realize how telling such a tactic really is.
644 signatures so far.
Surely not a single sock-puppet could be found to sign, eh?
I wonder: did the FEMALE friend who knitted him that shirt from yarn that she made from her own HAIR and TEARS intend for him to wear it to important business functions? Did she say “I want you to make sure that if you’re ever on TV for a major scientific event that will be broadcast worldwide, you’re wearing the titty shirt I made for you out of memory of dear Papá, as we both know he would have wanted”?
Or did she say “hey, I found this crazy fabric and check out the shirt I made for you. You can wear it when we go bowling, it’ll be a hoot”?
Like Ann Coulter.
Or Phyllis Shclafly.
Or Beverly LaHaye.
Or Debi Pearl.
Or Michelle Duggar.
That “T-shirt” thing came up a couple of threads back. Let’s see — oh, yeah, a drive-by:
So, either this is the petition author, or, more likely, there are a whole lot of ideology-driven, fact-challenged zealots who have never even bothered to see the actual shirt or watch or read the news, blogosphere, or even Twitter coverage and commentary of the Philae landing (at least 99% about, y’know, the landing). And I keep noticing how much they are talking about the landing itself — no, wait, they just have a lot of phrases like “great achievement”, “day of rejoicing”, etc. — they don’t talk about the actual event, just how horrible it was for people to point out that, by the way, someone peed in the punchbowl, you might not want to drink that.
In real life. Among sane grown ups. This would all have been over quite a while ago. Taylor would look at the shirt in his closet and think: ‘not today, too garish, too ugly, and yeah, hasn’t their been a lot of creepy trolling about women in gaming?’
Even if he had been tasteless enough to wear it, a friend should have taken him aside and lent him a sweater. Even if he had been oblivious enough to show up on camera with the shirt, it would have been reasonable to say ‘Wonderful news! What the hell was that shirt about?’
Instead, we get the avalanche of fury and hatred, the whining about how Big Bad Feminists are taking away Freeze Peach….. THIS ‘meta-reaction’ is what makes it worth grousing about the stupid shirt in the first place.
If people were really being all that ‘oversensitive’ ANY Hawaiian shirt could be scorned as symbolic of anti-Polynesian, racist tourism. And people would either re-think their wardrobes or roll their eyes. But the hair-trigger anti-feminist mania at loose in the world makes THIS shirt a Big Deal. And the failure to recognise the Big Deal is the problem.
So of course, if you ignore the past trolling and can’t anticipate the next wave of bile, it looks like overreaction. But it ain’t.