Guest post: There is a pattern

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Ophelia Benson

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Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Take notes.

As much as I dislike the wokeism that got our hostess bullied off FTB, I take issue with the frequently repeated trope about how it killed the atheist and skeptics movements. The Men’s Rights Activists who flooded Watson, McCreight, Ophelia, and so many others with personal attacks, cyberbullying, harassment, and threats had dealt these movements their mortal blow long before that. If anything, wokeism just put them out of their misery.

Since the #MeToo movement (remember that?) was briefly mentioned, I was positively surprised to see the #MeToo hashtag gain the traction it did after seeing so many comparable campaigns fizzle out. I was not surprised to see the backlash to #MeToo, which I take to include the “Karen” meme, the “white feminist” meme, the “TERF”/”SWERF” memes, the “sex negative” meme, and, more recently, the “AWFUL”* meme. Nor, for that matter, was I surprised (depressed and disgusted, yes, but not surprised) to see Donald “Grab Them By the Pussy” Trump elected president a few years later. These things are not “fringe”! I predict already now that we will see a similar backlash to the Epstein scandal. As Victoria Smith puts it in HAGS:

It is only when you have witnessed several such Great Reckonings that you start to get suspicious. There is a pattern: everyone chants the slogans and uses the hashtags; a few ritual sacrifices are made; certain voices start to worry things are going too far; in one or two very well publicised instances, things do indeed go too far; the ‘going too far’ incidents are considered far greater tragedies than all the instances in which women have never seen justice at all; people start to talk about things being ‘post-#MeToo’ or ‘after Rotherham’, as though we have witnessed an irreversible cultural shift; everyone will shake their heads at the fact that ‘no one’ ever noticed the problem before. In practice, very little changes.

Be prepared for the inevitable moment when the current focus on the the horrific abuses of women and girls by powerful men once again starts giving way to the “gone too far” narrative, the “hysteria” narrative, the “witch-hunt” narrative etc.

* Affluent, White, Female, Urban, and Liberal.

Comments

2 responses to “Guest post: There is a pattern”

  1. tigger_the_wing Avatar
    tigger_the_wing

    “AWFUL”? Affluent, White, Female, Urban, and Liberal?

    So, they refuse to pay any attention to women who are poor, and/or brown, and/or live in rural areas regardless of their politics (because they are busy disenfranchising them), and they are now inventing reasons to ignore every other woman too. Not much change from a century ago, then.

  2. Bjarte Foshaug Avatar
    Bjarte Foshaug

    I may have gotten the F wrong. I suspect it’s supposed to be “Feminist” rather than “Female”. Anyway it’s very much in the spirit of “Dear Muslima”. If, on a scale from one to ten, the average Afghan woman has one privilege points, the average white woman in the West has five, and the average white man has eight, the solution should be to improve the Afghan woman’s status by seven points and the white woman’s status by three points. Instead the “Dear Muslima” trope, just like the “white feminist” and “AWFUL” tropes, seem to suggest that the white woman should have four privilege-points subtracted from her without the Afghan woman gaining anything, and without the white man having to give up any of his privilege. The situation of women in the third world is not improved at all by forcing white women to put up with more sexist crap from white men. It’s entirely self-serving. Once again it basically boils down to “There is so much sexism and misogyny in the world, that it is unfair if white men don’t get to enjoy their fair share”.

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