Yet more from the misogyny files.
On Saturday morning, after getting the news that President Obama would be giving the commencement address at Barnard College this May, graduating senior Marly Faherty did what her generation does: she went online, to a Columbia University blog called Bwog. But as she watched the comments pouring in, her excitement turned to shock, and then despair. “It was the first time I’d seen something get that nasty that quickly,” she told The Daily Beast. “It was like watching a train wreck. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”
…commenters started attacking Barnard, Columbia’s all-women’s sister school across the street, and accusing its students of academic inferiority and much, much worse. Using terms like “feminazis” and calling Barnard “Barnyard,” commenters said the school was just a back door to Columbia, and its students deserved neither Obama as a speaker nor affiliation with the university as a whole.
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By the end of the day, comments like this one, posted under the name “Blue and White Vagina,” started to appear: “While you guys were perfecting your deepthroating techniques and experimenting with scissoring and anal play, we were learning Calculus (usually by sophomore year of High School). Trust me, if you actually deserved to go to Columbia and put in the work it required, you would understand our resentment. Moral of the story is that feeble, ugly Barnyard women need to shut their jizz holes and just be happy that Columbia let Barnyard pretend it was affiliated for this long.”
Right.
Natalie Reed has an eloquent post on hipster misogyny which seems highly relevant.
Amongst hipsters, indie rockers, punks, metalheads, etc. you’ll hear all kinds of “ironic” horrendously sexist shit (“bitches be crazy”, “stop being such a pussy bitch”, “haha Cheryl is such a cunt”, “what are you, on your period or something?”, “how about I shut you up by shoving my dick in your mouth”, “make me a sandwich LOL”, “man, Ellen Page is hot! I would totally rape her in a bathroom!”, “Ann Coulter looks like a fucking tranny”) or see all kinds of horrendously sexist behaviour, (“hold my jacket while I mosh”, blatant sexual harassment, sexual objectification of any and all female musicians or artists or members of a scene, evaluating them all on the basis of appearance first, implying that women can’t possibly do certain things right like audio engineering or DJing a party, sexual assault and date rape, talking over and interrupting women, repeating a woman’s idea and taking credit for it, talking down to women, gender segregating conversational spaces, paying lip service to feminism while only actively supporting ideologies that allow them to get away with not directly confronting any actual issues of gender, allowing the “leaders” of a scene or movement to be completely dominated by men without noticing or questioning it, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.)
…
… but the men involved “aren’t sexists”. They’re cool. They’re totally down with feminism. That stuff about Newsom? That because they “respect her as a female artist”. And when they say things like wanting to rape Ellen Page, they mean it “ironically”. They’re “making fun of sexism”. They can do, say, believe or think all the sexist shit they want, because as long as they’re not “them”, “the sexists” (who vote republican and stuff), they’re exempt from criticism. And if you do criticize them? Well that’s because you’re hypersensitive, or sex-negative, or have no sense of humour, or don’t understand nuance, or are just being a drama queen, or a petty bitch, or you’re on your period, or you have some kind of personal issue, or you’re trying to co-opt the conversation, or you’re disrespecting cultural differences, or you just don’t “get” the issue or what someone meant and what’s really going on, or it’s “art” and you’re trying to “censor” it, or you’re being too politically didactic / too politically correct, or there’s a worse problem somewhere else which makes this complaint irrelevant, or “first world problems!”, or blah blah blah. Because if sexism is only done by sexists, who explicitly think men and women shouldn’t be equal, and I don’t explicitly think that, then I’m not a sexist, so I can’t be being sexist, so therefore whatever stupid cunt is saying I’m being sexist MUST be wrong. QED, bitch!
Or you think words inherently mean X or Y when in fact the meaning of words is always social, so wow are you ever dumb.
Wow, the entitlement! Jesus, mate, grow the fuck up. Who gives a shit if you took calc when you were a sophmore? What’s that got to do with anything?
Schools should be openly hostile to these people. Who gives a damn what their gpa is if they’re going to do their best to demean and degrade their fellow students for being as successful as they are?
404’s on links ‘President Obama’, ‘Barnard College’ and ‘feminazis’; if they’re not just temporary failures, can you plz fix them and then delete this comment?
Thanks 🙂
Those links are all internal to the Daily Beast article, Tony (I didn’t add them, they just showed up when I pasted in the passages) – try getting at them via the article. I’ll just undo-link the ones here since they don’t work.
“if you actually deserved to go to Columbia”
It’s a punishment?
Perhaps this is why the Republicans believe their misogyny ploy will work; they know misogynists are everywhere.
From the article:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…. oh, wait, the author was serious?
I have to confess that I found both Reed’s post and Ellison’s article shocking. I teach at a low tier, and I rarely encounter this shit. Maybe I’m just blind or sheltered, but I wonder if privilege leads some people to think that they are above any obligation to human decency.
Rachel Simmons:
That’s fashionable nonsense. It is the responsibility of students at Columbia to analyze the culture in which they’ve been raised and to rise above it. Christ, you might as well say that it’s not the responsibility of Rush Limbaugh to change the way he talks.
jesus h christ I have been through this kind of crap about “i’m not racist, i’m cool therefore I can talk like a drooling racist jerk b/c I’m cool, too cool for school.”
Then I went through it about women and respect, “I’m not sexist and I’m cool so I can say cunt b/c it’s just a word blah blah blah. . And then I went through it about gays, “I can say kill the fags b/c I’m cool. . ” Then I went through it w/people w/disabilities. Then I went through it w/people with one disability demeaning people with another disability. (I’m Deaf so I can be stupid and offensive about alcholics, deaf-blind people, etc etc.” Then I went through it w/transgender sexism Then I went through it w/racism. The I went through it w/”cunt” and “pussy.” Last week? About women. Tomorrow? Any and all of the above.
And all of these lowlife speakers truly believe that they and only they know what words mean, goddamnit! And I don’t! They have delved the depths of word meaning in social context and miraculously come up with the one true word meaning and it is THEIR VERY OWN FAVORITE word meaning. So they can’t be sexist/racist/ableist sniveling bigots. It’s impossibe. They are lexicological etymological geniuses. And I am a dope. And I am taking things too personally or I am too sensitive or I am not practical. Every last one of these men still lived in a social world too. But every last one of them believed that they were right and the social world was wrong (and not sophisticated enough). Just like me.
I’m tired of this crapped out non-argument.
Yes I’ve been through it what feels like five billion times now. It never gets any less stupid!! And there’s more of it all the time. It’s a plot to nauseate us all to the point that we’ll give up and move to Yellowknife.
My partner and his friends (and me, for a while) used to do this with racism, all “hey, we’re ~making fun~ of racist assumptions…by repeating them and reinforcing them, or something…”. That ended once I really started to think about language and how it shapes and reifies thought. Language isn’t just used to describe reality; in many ways, language shapes and defines what is “real” (not physically real, of course [although it does shape that as well, in the sense that it limits some possibilities and opens others], but certainly social realities). Words have power. Even restating slurs have the power to make one more inured to those slurs, less hurt by them–especially if one has the privilege to not be materially hurt by them.