Talk about internalised misogyny
It turns out that cringey BBC “let’s you trash ‘Karens'” tweet didn’t go down all that well.
Really not well at all. I’ve scrolled and scrolled and haven’t seen a “good stuff” reply yet.
Helen Joyce: I can only shudder when I think just how ashamed these women are going to be of their ageist younger selves in, ooh, about 15 years. Talk about internalised misogyny
You would [think] after being dragged to court by its experienced female presenters for age & sex discrimination that the bbc would have learned it’s lesson. Sadly no. The broadcaster thinks broadcasting pejorative ageist & sexist language & popular abuse among the woke crowd i[s] ok.
ThePen: ‘Don’t be so loud’. When did these libfems decide it was their job to help men in shutting up women? When did racism become women’s problem to solve? And calling women ‘Karens’ is just another silencing mechanism. The self loathing of these young women makes me want to weep.
But is it self-loathing? They seem to see themselves as something so different from “Karens”, so much better than “old feminists” or “white feminists”. They don’t seem to understand that “white” means people with white skin; they think it means people who think a particular way, and they don’t think that way, so while, yes, they have white skin, they are not “white” in the sense of being a Karen.
Of course, they may also have self-loathing. It can go either way.
It is, yes; it’s that clueless self-loathing that we’re unaware of in the moment but learn to recognize later…or else don’t, in which case we remain deluded.
In other words that’s what Helen’s talking about as self-loathing, that thinking “we’re not named in this because we’re SO much better than those dreary Other women.”
Yeah, I see that. I’m just so used to self-loathing of the type I have to deal with, where I loathe myself to the very core of my being, usually for things that aren’t wrong with me, but I perceive to be because of bad social messages. The distancing of someone from their own group (women) is a form of self-loathing, even if you rationalize it away.
Re: internalized misogyny
From a rhetorical perspective, I’ve always had a hard time with accusations of internalized anything. They’re very difficult to employ without being pure ad hominem. That’s not to say that people don’t internalize deleterious beliefs and attitudes, merely that the charge is difficult to substantiate and easy to make. Much better, I think, to draw out the implicit belief (i.e., the suppressed premise in logic-speak) and demonstrate it to be irrational or misogynistic. Hopefully, the latter entails the former.
Re: self-loathing
It’s a peculiar sort of phenomenon. I imagine it works like this.
The emotional relationship to whatever feature/trait/quality it is that you loathe is one that you don’t see in yourself, or see yourself having mastered. Therefore, you don’t currently loathe yourself for having the trait. However, you do recognize that others like you have the trait, and this causes dissonance. You worry, even if only subconsciously, that you could be like them. That’s why you are constantly on guard, constantly engaging in introspection to detect even the barest hint of the trait’s precursors. It troubles you that other “good” people might not understand that you aren’t different. That’s why you distance yourself even more from the others like yourself, and you make your demonstrations of your separation as severe and public as you can. If it takes throwing them all under the bus, then so be it, because that shows you’re better than they are.
So it’s not really self-loathing in the common sense. It’s not, “I’m horrible.” Instead, it’s the more insidious, “Am I horrible?” Maybe the closest to it really is scrupulosity. And maybe society is in the grip of a kind of contagious scrupulosity.
And the tweet has vanished.
I almost think twitter shouldn’t allow deleting of tweets. Let people remove from them from their feed, but they stick around so direct links to them still work. Maybe tag them it with some text saying the user has hidden it.
I guess that sort of seems punitive and unforgiving, but does it really matter? Someone’s inevitably grabbed a screenshot or saved the video anyway, so it’s not really going away anyway.
Maybe they can let you remove from your feed, label it as removed, and let you append an explanation / apology.
How interesting that the tweet is gone. I wonder if they’re having any second thoughts.
Nullius in Verba
Maybe, ‘from a rhetorical perspective’, we should make a difference between ‘internalised’ as a personal mea culpa and the same used as an accusation?
I grew up in a strongly racist society – France in the 1970s – and I am still aware of the near-automatic responses this upbringing causes in me in a variety of situations.
I would like to say I am not a racist. But I know myself too well. It is not self loathing to criticize your own behaviour.
As for feminism… Let’s just say there are good reason I don’t usually comment on such issues.
It only become self loathing if you can only define yourself as a member of a group. Otherwise, it’s growing up. Or better, growing out.
Arnaud – I was just talking about that in a new post – about the power of what we grow up in, and how that makes a certain amount of “groupthink” not such a terrible thing.
Automatic thoughts do not a racist make, any more than they make one an adulterer or murderer. Damning us for our fleeting thoughts is the purview of religion.
what did the tweet say? it’s gone.
I’ll look for a screenshot – I’m sure there are many. The chief point of it was that it linked to the podcast and approvingly quoted a woman-hating remark uttered by a woman.