2009-09-11 10:20 | "Well, what about them?"

Here's Your Big Chance to Ask: What About the Men?, by Melissa McEwan at Shakesville.  She wrote about a New York Times Magazine article, entitled Saving The World's Women.

Interesting. From whom are the world's women being saved? From themselves? From just the women and girls in the developing world? Or are those the only women and girls who need saving? Everything's peachy in the developed world, is it? And then there is this: Can the lives of women and girls, anywhere, be changed if the lives and men and boys aren't changed, too?

[...]

It's just the most amazing thing that the jack-booted enforcers of the patriarchy can't stop demanding, "What about the men?" in every feminist thread on the planet, but when there's actually a place in which it is not only appropriate and useful, but necessary to ask and answer the question, "What about the men?" there's a yawning cavern of silence.

M. LeBlanc at Ph.D. wrote a jumping-off post, Systems, Not People:

The problem with the WuDunn/Kristof piece is not that they painted third-world men as misogynist oppressors each and every one. It's that they left out of the conversation any discussion of the systems that endeavor to keep women oppressed and poor, leaving the racist, xenophobic and triumphalist Western reader free to assume that it is the fault of the dark and violent nature of the men of the developing world. It's a familiar and comfortable reflex, to paint non-Westerners as other. It creates a cocoon of fake security. [...]

Contrary to Okong'o, what WuDunn and Kristof needed to do was not qualify their statements by reminding us that not all men are evil patriarchs bent on oppression, but put their narrative in an analytical context, of why and how these things happen, and why and how they go unpunished in silence.

2009-04-16 14:56 | Well, that was perfectly horrifying.

The post, at/by Bitch PhD: Ann Coulter really is a cunt, people

The post that one refers to: Teabag me

The best possible response to the second link is at Shakesville: Quote of the Day

The understandable part: I can joke about plenty of things with close folk that I would never think to with acquaintances.  I know my close-folk's history, and values, and senses of humour, so we can joke about something wretched like that.  Not to mention, if a bunch of commenters started dissing a partner of mine, I'd be pretty defensive.

The really awful part: Well, first, I always thought it was fairly obvious that one can generally joke more freely with one's close ones than with acquaintances or the internet.  Therefore, posting offensive jokes made between close-folk to the internet is kind of "wat" to begin with.

But further… just… read that post, and read her comments in the post.  Apparently, trans* jokes just can't be made yet by cis folk, alas.  We're just being sensitive.  And what do we expect, when we called her boyfriend an asshole?  She's not going to apologise because they were dissing her boyfriend, so there.

And for serious, since when are image-based offensive goddamn jokes okay?  "No no, it's pining a critique!  It's subtle!"  No.  No, what it is is not fucking okay.

And I thought I had defensiveness problems.

I'm waiting for a follow-up post about how she was just doing it for the lulz.

2007-04-28 14:07 | Quotes and links and…

* At I Blame The Patriarchy, Twisty pens some notes on the revolution:

Do you guys get, I mean actually get, that our society is a patriarchy?

* There's a post over at Bitch Ph.D. from August 2005 (hey, I'm catching up) about misogyny in real life.  The post is good; the comments are better.  I'm about 30 comments in, and this quote hit my ah-ha!-o-meter:

It's using a male default as the standard and then because (well, duh) women are different from that standard, we are found lacking.
- Sarah In Chicago

* What's fun is combining the two with the question: How many anecdotes, how much data, will it take before it stops being a whole lot of women just having really bad luck?  I ask you.