feminism

Hot Chicks of OWS dude: “rape jokes are legitimate!”

Jason Thibeault, , , , 11 Comments

I paraphrase only slightly.

Via Feministe, it seems Stephen Greenstreet, the one-man brain-trust behind the Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street tumblr (no link this time — not even a nofollow), thinks he’s contributing to the movement by attracting dudes with erections. Erections that legitimize rape.

To protect the privacy of people who are Steven’s Facebook friends and because I just don’t feel like digging my heels in on this one, I’ve taken down the screenshot of Steven’s Facebook page. On that page, Steven linked to his “Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street” video, and added, “The way me and [a colleague] contribute to the movement.” A friend of his comments, “Way to legitimize the movement, Steve.” Steven replies, “An erection legitimizes anything.” His friend replies, “Even rape?” Steven Greenstreet says, “It probably wouldn’t be rape without one.”

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Hot Chicks of OWS dude: “rape jokes are legitimate!”
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Clue this dude in.

Jason Thibeault, , , 68 Comments

I often label myself as a feminist. I have a strong distaste for the patriarchy, and the gender roles today’s society has in place, and I hate all the myriad ways that those gender roles hurt men and women. I’d like to think I’m pretty savvy when it comes to gender issues, and that my approach to achieving egalitarianism is the most rational and achievable course of action — that being, recognizing privilege, owning up to it, and working to break it down and replace it with a better and more equal system.

So with my self-perceptions being what they are, am I wrong in thinking the use of the word “lady” at the end of a suggestion or angry comment has less to do with the gender of the recipient, and more to do with the lack of familiarity between them?
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Clue this dude in.

Owning the slur

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 31 Comments

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you. Well, not physically anyway. Not unless they’re slurs intended only to psychologically abuse a target, when they often accompany acts of violence.

There are a number of words whose only use is to hurt. There are words that once meant something strong and proud but, through repeated historical misuse, have become tainted by every bit of hate and venom that has ever flowed through them in their use. There are words that might, to some people, serve as a mere descriptive, an adjective to be used in daily discourse, but to others inculcate a fear of the types of violence with which the word has so often been used in parallel.

And then, there are the concerted efforts to retake those words, to rebrand them.
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Owning the slur

Gender studies homework: NVAWS and “think of the men!”

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

DavidByron, antifeminist troll extraordinaire, in a moderated comment on this post has described the National Violence Against Women Survey as an “own goal against feminists” by virtue of its defining rape in terms of actions, not in terms of the perceived transgression. The reasoning behind doing the survey this way is that people are less likely to report such transgressions if they’re unaware that lines have been crossed or that merely lacking consent or having been coerced into consent actually counts as rape.
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Gender studies homework: NVAWS and “think of the men!”

The Disadvantages of Being a Man

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 135 Comments

Before I start on this post, nothing I say here is intended to be a slight on people fighting for equality from the perspective of other genders or sexes. I intend this as an acknowledgement of the many ways that men are disadvantaged by the same societal mores that disadvantage women in other, additionally serious (and in many instances more serious) ways. I am a feminist as well as an egalitarian, and I approach these issues with those ideals as my starting point. This is in no way an attempt at drawing a false equivalency between the issues the various genders and sexes encounter.

The patriarchal society we find ourselves in today is a significantly eroded one, where the patriarchy finds itself under attack from almost every angle, but it remains a patriarchy still. Thanks to the monumental efforts of the feminist and civil rights movements, not to mention the recent secular pushback against religious authoritarianism and its adherents’ less than progressive ideals about women’s role in society, what was once a society that prided itself on its white male hegemony is now a more pluralistic one, though far from egalitarian. This patriarchy still exists, and societal pressure for men and women to conform to specific gender roles still has the very inertial effect on forestalling progressive change.

And while these gender roles have many powerful side-effects with regards to women and their sexual self-determination, men are not wholly insulated from the splash damage. In fact, I strongly believe that these gender roles are largely responsible for all of the gender related issues that all sexes and genders experience today.
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The Disadvantages of Being a Man

The Problem with Privilege (or: Predatory Behaviour)

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 88 Comments

Post 9 in an ongoing series. See the Master Post for previous entries in The Problem with Privilege.

From blacklava.net. Buy one today! (If you're privileged.)

In the last post in this series, comments diverged from the topic of overzealous application of skepticism to the idea of whether it’s right and rational for women to assume that all men are potential rapists. I made the following analogy, as regarding a comparison to assuming all Muslims are terrorists:

I also suspect you’re suggesting that there is a visual difference between Arabs and Caucasians, but you substituted “Muslim” for it. Muslims don’t necessarily have to look like brown people in turbans, you realize.

And as for assuming all of them are terrorists, there are just as many non-Muslim terrorists in recent history to suggest that what you mean is that you’re justified in thinking that anyone who is overzealous about some particular dogma is a potential terrorist. Meaning animal rights activists, Christians, men’s rights activists, anti-abortionists, et cetera. The problem with that is, you can’t visually distinguish that someone is an adherent to a dogma unless they do something to self-identify, like wearing some distinctive symbol. And even then, your fear responses shouldn’t automatically trigger or you get incidents like where clerics are arrested for praying in an airport.

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The Problem with Privilege (or: Predatory Behaviour)

The Problem with Privilege (or: Evidential Skepticism)

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , , 83 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts, so to catch you all up, here are my prior entries in the series.

From blacklava.net. Buy one today! (If you're privileged.)

The Problem with Privilege (or: you got sexism in my skepticism!)
The Problem with Privilege (or: no, you’re not a racist misogynist ass, calm down)
The Problem with Privilege (or: missing the point, sometimes spectacularly)
The Problem with Privilege (or: after this, can we get back to the actual issues?)
The Problem with Privilege: Manifesto for Change
The Problem with Privilege (or: cheap shots, epithets and baseless accusations for everyone!)
The Problem with Privilege: some correct assertions, with caveats

It appears that many of the bloggers now on FtB, once from various corners of the intertubes, are embroiled once again in the total catastrophic meltdown of reason that is discussing the nexus of sexism and skepticism.

The focus this time? The same as every other time — how Rebecca Watson can’t be trusted at her word, and how one must be skeptical — SKEPTICAL, I SAY — of anything she says because she’s making the obviously extraordinary claim that someone asserted his privilege to flirt over her request to not be treated that way. I mean, who’s going to believe THAT tall tale, right?

Stephanie Zvan challenges the Elevator Guy Apologists to try assuming Watson isn’t lying, and see what you think about EG’s actions thereafter. A number of folks dance around the challenge but ultimately refuse to participate. Some idiots took the opportunity over at Xblog to turn a post promoting Dawkins’ new book Magic of Reality into another thread about how poorly we’ve been treating Dawkins over his dismissive and sneering post regarding Rebecca Watson. And Ophelia Benson posted an evisceration of the meme that a man “cannot know” that a woman is interested until he cold-propositions her as a perfect stranger in an elevator at 4am.

What do these threads have in common in what’s driving their commentariat? Well, aside from having two trolls (Justicar and DavidByron, both making flat unevidenced assertions and ignoring all counterpoints to their chosen points of view) in common, the posts’ comments also run the gamut of questioning every aspect of Rebecca Watson’s story and present every conceivable method of character assassination of Rebecca Watson herself.

But isn’t that how skepticism works?

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The Problem with Privilege (or: Evidential Skepticism)

The Problem with Privilege: some correct assertions, with caveats

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , , , , 12 Comments

I really want to get on with other things. Seriously, I do. Which is why I want to cede a bit of ground — or at least it might seem that way to the casual observer, given all the things I’m about to agree to. It would pay dividends in furthering the conversation if you do your best not to skim before replying.

There are a number of arguments in this whole privilege debacle surrounding the so-called Elevatorgate (a timeline, for you newbies) that, while not actually rebutting the issues in question, are in themselves valid and correct. Here’s a few of them, and why they don’t address the problem at hand.
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The Problem with Privilege: some correct assertions, with caveats