Feminism Catch-All (with FAQ)

After looking over things, in that exchange people (including me) did pile on Bloo in a bad way.

I think there [em]is[/em] a grain of truth in the first objections: that there is some essential difference in quality between tribal exclusion and gender exclusion. But, I think Bloo also made a reasonable attempt to call something like that out in his post... but in the flurry of replies and partial quotes, a number of us missed that, or forgot it. I do think that the defensive position that Bloo and others acting to defend him adopted fanned the flames a bit--but that's no excuse for what happened.

Something I've been increasingly trying to do these days is work my way back to primary sources, so that I know more about the context that something is coming from. It's all too easy without doing that to see people talking with concern about controversy and quoting things with important context missing and let stuff get out of control. I sort of wish it were easier to thread back in forum quotes here to read the original message and not just the quote. But, it's still doable to go back and find the messages and read them, it just requires more work. I'm also trying hard to not let the heat of the moment distract me, and if I don't really have time to look things over and respond in depth... wait until I [em]can[/em] do that.

On the other side of things: I think a good thing to do when you find you're being misunderstood is to explicitly call back to and quote from what you originally said, and then add additional explanation to that. That gives you an opportunity to make sure you said what you think you said, and the reader an opportunity to look at the original text and additional context and work from there. It keeps the comments under discussion "live", and also encourages someone to be just as detailed in explaining why they took any different impressions away (including adding more context from your original post if they need to). It also may make it a bit easier to avoid that defensive tone which is sort of like blood in the water. (It makes explanations [em]sound[/em] worse, in a way I can't really explain well.) Keeping things kind of formal and academic ("Here's what I said, here's what I think you think it means, here's what I think it means, here's what maybe you missed, here's what maybe I should have also said") also helps maintain a bit of distance so that attacks on what people have said don't feel quite so much like attacks on them personally.

(And I think it's particularly important, if you come to someone else's defense by attempting to interpret what they said, to quote in detail. Again, that keeps things grounded in the original text and keeps things from exploding to a point where people are now arguing about the way other people expressed their third-hand understandings, while still ending up with the original person feeling like it's about what they said.)

In the end though, that conversation went to a pretty awful place and I'm horribly sorry for not working harder to make sure I had all of the context before jumping in. It did not take very long at all before the quotes that were moving around were less about what Bloo had originally said, and more about what he was trying to tell people he hadn't said. And I read those later messages and only skimmed the original post, and did not do a good job of it. And then I'm sure other people took my stance as evidence that those interpretations from the nearby partial quotes were fair, and additional argument from that position was even further off the mark. The further off the mark things were, the worse the drift became.

I noted before that I'm trying to be much better at being careful--I've also been trying when I can to call out other peoples' misunderstandings by threading back through things. That second one is definitely harder, though. It's pretty easy to say to yourself "I will not post until I have time to do due diligence". It's harder when it's other people posting at their own pace, and there's a choice between being more careful and thorough to get things right, and being quick to respond and saying something that may be wrong in hopes of preventing an explosion. Still, I guess that's a good rule of thumb: It's okay to quickly say "I think there may be a misunderstanding here, and I'll post back later when I've thought about things more, in the meantime maybe people could try to be more calm?", but poor practice to try to actively interpret things at that speed (whether defending an idea or statement or objecting to it). "There might be a problem" is safe any time, but "this is what I think the problem is" requires a lot more work.

So again, I sincerely apologize.

I think this belongs here too.

Similar to how my brother (NYC born and bred) started getting interviews once he added "U.S. Citizen" to his resumé. It's amazing how people make assumptions based on a name.

But back to the topic of feminism. I just thought this piece of feminist geekery was really touching.

sometimesdee wrote:

But back to the topic of feminism. I just thought this piece of feminist geekery was really touching.

Yup. Good find.

...starting?

That's fair.

Yeah, the Catholic Church is getting more and more seriously conservative. :l I'm always interested in how the Catholic people I know are feeling about things. Mostly it sums up as "For f*ck's sake."

When will people realize NO ONE wants to hear "X is a gift"?

It doesn't help how badly they misunderstand things. Surprise: Trans* people don't choose our gender! But good-meaning asshats try to choose it for us by stuffing us in little boxes where they imagine we belong, because they haven't got a f*cking clue. And ill-meaning asshats, well, yeah. You can imagine.

SixteenBlue wrote:

When will people realize NO ONE wants to hear "X is a gift"?

What if I got you a gift?

Edwin wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

When will people realize NO ONE wants to hear "X is a gift"?

What if I got you a gift?

I'll just take back this Ferrari California. I mean, the original paint is in perfect condition, and it is blue, so fairly rare.

If it weren't for Pope John Paul I suspect the Catholic Church would have faded into obscurity decades ago. It's sad to see things backsliding with the new Pope(s).

IMAGE(https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/7688234240/h8B58FA4D/)

Maybe something happy?

An arrest has been made against the person who made rape threats to a feminist asking for the new bank note of the UK to feature a woman.

http://news.sky.com/story/1121399/ar...

Edwin wrote:

An arrest has been made against the person who made rape threats to a feminist asking for the new bank note of the UK to feature a woman.

http://news.sky.com/story/1121399/ar...

Following Ms Criado-Perez on Twitter today has been one of the most profoundly depressing experiences.

Re: Caroline Criado-Perez

Having just reported one abuser to his employer I see this from the economics editor of Newsnight:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/UKS7sXK.png)

And his reply, in which you can almost hear him staring at his shoes.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/CrcVREV.png)

"Yoohoo! I'll make ya famous!"

I think we could use a misogyny version of Yes, you're racist.

It's always kind of funny to see the "this isn't the place for it" argument waved around when it comes to feminism and gender issues. There always seems to be someone who tries to play the concern troll or "enlightened mediator" who points out that all this srs bsns talk is ruining everyone's good time. So there was a panel at SDCC about "Women Who Kick Ass", and somehow even that is apparently not the "right venue" for discussing women in Hollywood/Gaming. Somehow.

http://geeksout.org/blogs/amberhardf...

According to more than one reporter, the Hall H brohive was not receptive to such a frank discussion of how it can suck to be a woman in Hollywood. Todd VanDerWerff chronicled the devolution of some members of the crowd into knuckle-dragging troglodytes that ruined the chances of those hoping to get pictures after the talk with their favorite actors:

The final question — from a young woman about what aspects the perfect kick-ass woman would have — turns into a digression about the many roles that women play in real life and the few that they are asked to play onscreen. It’s all fascinating stuff, with Sackhoff talking about wanting to see someone as kind and strong as her mother onscreen, and Walking Dead’s Danai Gurira talking about the effectiveness of female political protestors in her native Zimbabwe, the sort of story that would almost never appear in a Hollywood film — but the longer it goes on, the more restless the crowd gets. When Rodriguez grabs the microphone again to follow up on a point made by another panelist, for the first time, the audience ripples with something close to jeering anger. When the panel finally ends and the five women on it proceed off to the side for photographs, something done at the end of most Hall H panels, someone shouts something from the audience, to a mixture of supportive laughs and horrified gasps, and the women quickly leave the stage. (I was not sitting close enough to hear what was said, but I confirmed with several people sitting in the immediate vicinity that it was a young man shouting “Women who talk too much!” after the loudspeaker asked attendees to voice their appreciation for the participants in the “Women Who Kick Ass” panel.)

edit: Also, hilariously enough - I've already seen some comments in my Facebox feed about people blaming the panelists for this one to the tune of: "They made themselves victims by leaving. They're fake kick-ass women, obv."

Just amazing.

In the "double standards" and "slut shaming" departments:

We Pardon Spitzer, But Still Judge Former Sex Workers (Like Me) (New York Magazine)

Five years ago, Eliot Spitzer got caught paying women like me. And now he is stumping, smiling for photographers, and topping the political polls for New York’s next comptroller.

Meanwhile, here I am, working on building a living as a former sex worker, with no full-time job since I lost mine as a schoolteacher three years ago. Today, I spend a lot of my time writing about being a former sex worker (which I have done many times by now). I also teach new writers, including those at risk of sexual exploitation, on how they can tell their own stories. I would be fine with Spitzer’s return to politics if sex workers were allowed the same dignity of returning to normalcy. But apologizing and getting my career back wasn't exactly an option our society supports.

Hypatian wrote:

In the "double standards" and "slut shaming" departments:

We Pardon Spitzer, But Still Judge Former Sex Workers (Like Me) (New York Magazine)

Five years ago, Eliot Spitzer got caught paying women like me. And now he is stumping, smiling for photographers, and topping the political polls for New York’s next comptroller.

Meanwhile, here I am, working on building a living as a former sex worker, with no full-time job since I lost mine as a schoolteacher three years ago. Today, I spend a lot of my time writing about being a former sex worker (which I have done many times by now). I also teach new writers, including those at risk of sexual exploitation, on how they can tell their own stories. I would be fine with Spitzer’s return to politics if sex workers were allowed the same dignity of returning to normalcy. But apologizing and getting my career back wasn't exactly an option our society supports.

You know what's interesting to me and vaguely related to this - Channing Tatum's former job as a stripper was in the news a whole bunch while Magic Mike was a thing. It was discussed as a fun little factoid or cute joke, and not much else. I wonder if we would have made so little of it if it turned out that Rinko Kikuchi or Amy Adams had been strippers.

Unfortunately, Hall H is the biggest hall at the convention center. Because of that, most if the popular panels are in that hall. The result? People camp inside Hall H hours before the panel they want to see actually takes place.

I imagine the vast majority of people at that panel were not there to see Women Who Kick Ass. They were holding spots for themselves for whatever panel they wanted to see and got their "dudebro feefees hurt by the feminazis". What jerks.

I wanted to see that panel too but Hall H is always full be because of camping.

Bloo Driver wrote:

You know what's interesting to me and vaguely related to this - Channing Tatum's former job as a stripper was in the news a whole bunch while Magic Mike was a thing. It was discussed as a fun little factoid or cute joke, and not much else. I wonder if we would have made so little of it if it turned out that Rinko Kikuchi or Amy Adams had been strippers.

While I certainly would watch both of those ladies on the stage, I'm quite certain that had she been a stripper Amy Adams would not have been in the Muppet movie.

I just read this about the same panel.

As the moderator started wrapping things up, apologizing for having to leave "right as things were getting good," Michelle leaned forward to her mic again.

"We gotta start writing," she said again. She meant women. "Writing, and directing, and producing the kind of content we want to see. Because otherwise, nothing's gonna change."

A few minutes after they left, I was still vibrating with excitement. A dude was back onstage, and I dragged my focus back to him. "I wanted to make another Planet of the Apes," he was saying, "Because I felt it was vital to tell the story from the ape's perspective."

grmbl. I'm so sick of having to scrounge for movies that don't seem like they just flat out hate women.

Feminism on Twitter: you're doing it right! (Stolen from "Post a Picture, Entertain Me!")

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BQV8KRqCQAENiIn.png:large)

I hope this FML is true.

Today, I was babysitting a kid for the first time. She asked if she could watch a movie, so I downloaded Cinderella for her. An hour later, this 10-year-old girl was lecturing me about unrealistic standards of beauty and abusive relationships, and how I suck for liking the movie. FML

That's cool. I've always found Cinderella disquieting for a variety of reasons.

Many of the old fairy tales are horrifically misogynistic.

Jayhawker wrote:

I think we could use a misogyny version of Yes, you're racist.

There was Yep, You're Sexist, but it hasn't updated for a few months now.