The second part of problems with Why it’s totally fine to call The Sisterhood of the Oppressed Feminazis and Femistasi and totalitarian.
Remember the Women in Secularism conference the other week? How that conference was hailed by the Oppressed Sisters and their Approved Male Chorus!
Wow. I don’t have much more than that.
Well wait, one thing occurs to me. Paula’s counterpart Liz Cornwell was at that conference. Liz and I were both absolutely electrified by the talk that Wafa Sultan gave, and excited about possibilities for RDF to help her get the word out. It seems odd that Paula is willing to be quite so rude about the conference. She’s angry at “the Oppressed Sisters” for dividing the movement, but that remark doesn’t seem very collegial.
But also, wow. She might as well call the “Approved Male Chorus” pussy-whipped – that’s about the level of that remark.
Far from encouraging new women to get involved, all this hysterical and unjustified insistence on how dangerous our conferences are for women, how hostile our movement is to them, the indignities and humiliations they will be exposed to should they dare to set foot over the skeptical threshold could have been calculated to scare them away.
That’s all nonsense. Nobody’s been saying that. That’s ridiculous.
DJ Grothe was, predictably, shot down in furious flames by the Sisters when he dared suggest such a thing recently, yet Ophelia Benson herself would have us believe she’s been scared away from attending a conference because of the exaggerated and over-the-top messages she got about the terrible risks she’d face if she went.
So for the second time she all but calls me a liar, and she presumes to be able to know what it’s like to get a peculiar email that could be read as an exaggerated warning or as mockery or as a threat.
It’s interesting that she calls me out by name twice. I guess she really didn’t like me when we met at QED. She certainly hid it well. I liked her a lot, despite the fact that we’d disagreed sharply over elevator issues and she’d defriended me at Facebook. I must be gullible!