Bigotry flourishes in a landscape of apathy. It doesn’t need support to continue, only the illusion of support which comes from silence and a lack of repercussions for the harassment. This is what struck me when otherwise moral, smart people see another story about a woman being harassed online and being the target of rape threats.
I noted this in response to a recent case of Janelle Asselin (that Ophelia highlghted) over at The Daily Beast.
People are terrible, aren’t they? Sorry “not all people“… etc. (That delightful link comes from and is written by my friend, Ewa)
Definitely stop sending rape threats to women, and also everyone else! Rape threats are bad behavior.
All people *are* terrible. Most are also wonderful to some degree. Is it really that difficult to use qualifiers when appropriate instead of making universal/generalized assertions? Feminists have rightly been debunking generalizations like this made about women for as long as feminism has been a thing, and it really is a problem when they (or anyone else!) then turn around and do the same thing to any other group, if only becasue it unnecessarily provides someone with a technicality as a hook to refute the argument. Not being mind-readers, people don’t know how exactly one intends to qualify and bound one’s generalizations unless it’s stated. Just learn to use the words “most”, “many”, and “some” and the phrase “as a class” to avoid the entire issue if one cannot be specific about how one intends the generalization.
But not ALL feminists are like that… LOL.
Thank you for covering this, Tauriq. Janelle has since posted on twitter that some of the haters are trying to hack into her bank account. All because she said, basically, don’t draw watermelon-sized breasts on a teenage girl. Damn.