C0nc0rdance has posted a new video, titled “Clarifying my positions”, which outlines his dissent from the usual anti-feminist ranters on youtube. It’s almost there, but it still perpetuates some problematic attitudes.
Here’s my problem with that: he’s still got a prejudicial view of feminism derived from too much exposure to that weird crowd of angry men on the internet. At one point, he puts up two pictures representing the extremes of radical feminism and anti-feminism, and suggests that they’re equally awful. His choices? Stefan Molyneux, who I agree is a pompous git with some very bizarre anti-woman ideas, and … the woman used as a poster-child for feminist haters everywhere, the woman who was nicknamed “Big Red” by the goons of A Voice For Men.
She was pissed off and angry, no doubt, and was very rude in cursing at men who tried to interrupt her. Her face is now used routinely as a symbol for hating on feminists, supposedly deservedly. Yet what she gets for yelling “shut the fuck up” at people trying to interrupt her is this:
Since being targeted by angry YouTube misogynists and MRAs, the red-haired activist has received death threats, rape threats and literally hundreds of other hateful and harassing messages. She’s also been “doxxed” — that is, she’s had her personal information plastered all over the internet, including on A Voice for Men’s forum. Ten days after being uploaded to YouTube, the video of her faceoff against the MRAs has garnered more than 300,000 views, and YouTubers are still leaving threats and insults and crude sexual comments.
Furthermore, no one bothers to reference the horrible radical feminist things she was trying to read as a statement. Do you think they were equivalent to death and rape threats? It was an abbreviated paraphrase of this list of feminist goals by Lindy West. Read it. It’s a pretty accurate summary of the position of most Radical Feminists…you know, the people c0nc0rdance thinks are just as bad as a hate-filled MRA who blames women for all the evil in the world.
C0nc0rdance is basically making the same mistake (to a lesser degree!) this clown in his comments is doing, caricaturing the feminist position because he doesn’t have the slightest clue what it is, so he fills it in with garbage he heard on the internet.
TF wasn’t saying that all men are stronger than all women, but the reality that on average, men and women have differing muscle mass. The feminist message is that women and men are equal in every respect, except in the ability of men to rule over women in the patriarchy. It’s silly.
That is silly, because it’s not the feminist, or even radical feminist, message at all. You will not find any rational feminist declaring that the average man and woman have the same dosage of testosterone running through their veins, or that testosterone and estrogen do not have differing effects on physiology and even brain development.
I appreciate the message he’s trying to send, I would just recommend that c0nc0rdance do some actual research on what feminism argues before making poor comparisons.
Straw men (or women) are always easier to argue against the the real thing.
BOTH SIDES
@2 anteprepro
He’s in the middle like a real rationalist on his gilded fence! D:
Darn tootin’, Mr. Concordance! Everything was going just great before Gloria Steinem and her cabal of penis-haters came along. Women had just as big paychecks, half the CEOs on the Fortune 500 were female, they had to build extra restrooms for women Congresspersons because there were so many of them.
Oh, Mr. Concordance, why, oh why did the man-haters have to wreck all that? *sob*
With a few exceptions as pointed out in the blog and the comments above, I really enjoyed that video and thought it was a great start. Moreover, he openly asked for open engagement and discussion, so it will be interesting to see how he responds to critiques.
Right?
Just like how atheists are only hated because we aren’t sweet enough and accommodating enough to religionists. If we weren’t such poopyheads about wanting equal rights and representation all that bigotry will just disappear and the people who want to erase our voices and right will just show up and offer us everything we’re entitled to. We just have to quietly kiss their asses and smile prettily for a few more decades and it will toes happen! If we stop complaining about religion in public education and politics, religion will politely excuse itself. But if we get too uppity, to shrill and too loud, we deserve the backlash we get, don’t we? Besides, don’t we know how bad atheists have it in other parts of the world? How dare we complain when atheists in theocracies are murdered or jailed?
/s
That’s Dusty Smith, not Conc0rdance.
Oops, that’s what I get when I comment before I click. D’oh!
Mandy,
Why the fuck should we be willing to “engage” with people who want to deny us rights and call us slurs? What’s to discuss? They’re wrong, just like creationists are wrong. There is nothing to discuss. What they are telling us is that we can all get along so long as some of us keep to our place and do not question our superiors. Fuck that noise. If I wanted to make nice with bigots who will only accept me if I am silent and pliant, I’ll join a fundamentalist church.
They’re always so transparent with their criticism of feminists. A woman gets angry at being interupted and that makes her as horrible as Molyneux? Literally it’s saying that women who aren’t demure enough are as horrible as someone who thinks women are the source of everything bad in the world.
It’s also incredibly lazy, they can’t bother to dig up truly terrible people who claim feminism. They certainly are out there, for example: trans-exclusionary radical feminists like Cathy Brennan http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cathy_Brennan However, they don’t. In all the time I’ve been following what MRAs and other anti-feminists are saying I’ve never seen them take on TERFs. You know who does? Feminists who think trans people and sex workers shouldn’t be treated like shit.
Noadi,
No, they don’t take them on. They just claim that TERFs are “proof” that all feminists hate trans people.
@Noadi,
Unfortunately, I think it isn’t so much that anti-feminists are lazy, but rather that they would have to pretend to care about the LGBTQ community to take on TERFs. And they don’t care. Because they’re assholes.
Does that cigarette express Bogart envy or narwhal envy?
Honestly, I’m half surprised he didn’t trot out that old canard about how Andrea Dworkin believed* that all PIV sex is rape.
* Dworkin did not in fact believe this. What she actually said is that in a context where “marital rape” is a contradiction in terms, any discussion of consensual sex within marriage is premature: for “consent” to be possible, “non-consent, i.e. rape” has to be possible.
Listening to anti-feminists I always assumed that there were all these man-hating oppressive radical feminists out there and that reasonable feminists were a tiny minority. But every time I actually read what one of these “crazy” feminists were saying, they were arguing for something so reasonable I couldn’t understand how anyone could object to it. I still have the same response whenever someone argues against Rebecca Watson or Anita Sarkeesian.
Oh, I’d never actually heard of the “red-headed activist” video before, only seen the picture. But that example is pretty much symptomatic of the “if only feminists weren’t so radical” fence-sitter bait and switch: point to one individual being emotional and rude, and when your opponent wants to talk about the specific issues, jump to another individual calmly saying something horrible, when your opponent points out that these are the real radicals and that most feminists vehemently disagree with this person you can jump to another feminist who “wears makeup”…. and so on and so on.
People are multifaceted, don’t always behave perfectly and almost always have something we can find about them to complain about.
Or these people just flat out lie. As in almost everything that was ever said about elevatorgate by the antifeminists.