Great. Another mobbing. NUS Women, the National Union of Students Women, are apparently having a conference and they tweeted a ludicrous and embarrassing tweet, so…of course they’re being Twitter-mobbed, because it’s Tuesday.
First the ludicrous tweet.
Well jazz hands trigger my anxiety, so could we do a square dance instead? But wait, square dances trigger some people, so maybe we could meditate for 2 minutes instead? Yes that should work, and I can’t see any possible downside at all.
Ok fine, it’s a silly suggestion, but Twitter mobs are overkill for silliness. The hashtag is mob-city.
We can’t have any nice things!
Airing your policies and procedures discussions to the whole friggin’ world is probably not a great idea.
I hope that some of the people poking fun at this nonsense are feminists themselves.
Conference hashtags are primarily of use to the conference goers themselves rather than the outside world, and no one making those sorts of administrative tweets would probably have the expectation that such mundane house-keeping announcements would ‘go viral’. So comments like ‘don’t use conference hashtags’ sounds a bit victim-blamey. Trolling conference hashtags is exactly what Slymepitters have been doing to events like Women in Secularism and SkepchickCon, and when combined in large numbers, it becomes a real problem of harassment and abuse, because the trolls deliberately pick out individuals who they think are susceptible to abuse for attack.
Sadly I have seen that some of the people making fun of the ‘jazz hands’ tweet are in fact feminists with large numbers of Twitter followers… which may be adding to the problem by making it more visible, since a number of the participants at the NUS Women’s conference are now being harassed and dogpiled by large numbers of trolls. Yay, Twitter.
Something which should sensibly have been kept within the conference got out of control because some feminist(s) with lots of followers tweeted it to them all indiscriminately and it got out of hand? Easy to say it’s irresponsible in hindsight. But in fairness it’s only really egregiously stupid if something like that has happened before and you’ve failed to learn from it. #AdriaRichards
Ludicrous and embarrassing?
Hmm …kind of like banning drag, stereotyping gay men (not least of all by banning gay men from appropriating the culture of black women (what the fuck?), denigrating an entire culture, being wholly ignorant of drag and gay history.
I think the twitter backlash that was got for jazz hands is the tip of the iceberg. And I’ve read a
defense of this by Aliya Yule, who is associated with the NUS that amounts to calling everyone who disagrees a troll and an attempt to reframe the stupid motions that were passed as not that important, because there are other bigger issues that we deal with.
And yeah, the jazz hands thing is patently ludicrous and riddled with problems, but what takes the case? Oh, yeah, white gay men don’t experience intersectionality. Wait, what? Yeah. Also,
Because apparently this is a real thing, she thinks, and they think.
Because where best to discuss an issue within the gay community and to make judgements about the actions of gay men (even those utra-privileged white gay men) than at a women’s conference?
A significant amount of the responses on that conference hashtag for jazz hands are atrocious and awful. There is, however, hypocrisy here. At the same time I must take issue with the utter ignorance of a motion passed that hits close to home for me and I must also voice my disgust with vile tweets resulting from a suggestion to replace clapping with jazz hands. Yet I can find no one who finds the ignorant and homophobic motions passed at the UAS women’s conference unacceptable or abhorrent and no one, further, who think it’s even slightly wrong that issues for gay men were discussed and judged in their absence.
This stinks terribly. It stinks everywhere.