Tag: Anti-feminism

  • Feminism is everyone’s punchbag

    Jeanne de Montbaston sets the record straight on Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragette movement.

    When Pankhurst made her speech, slavery labelled as such was illegal in the UK, but, within that relative (very relative!) legal freedom, women’s bodies had been commodified within Pankhurst’s lifetime. Indeed, when she married in 1879, the legal act that would make it possible for married women to own property – that is, to be financially enfranchised – was still three years in the future. The famous campaigner Caroline Norton, who died just a couple of years before Pankhurst’s marriage, had managed to stir up public sympathy when her husband refused to divorce her and also claimed her earnings as his property, leaving her unable to earn a living and banning her from seeing her sons (which was also his legal right). Lower-profile women, naturally, lacked both the influential friends and the wealthy context of Norton, and faced stark choices between starvation, prostitution, or resigning themselves to the ownership of their husbands (with legalised marital rape). Slowly, women like Norton and Pankhurst were beginning to challenge the structural violence that treated them as non-persons, as individuals whose earning power and legal rights were controlled entirely by men.

    In other words women were literally enslaved in several senses, even though many such women were highly privileged in other ways.

    There are two things that bother me about the way I’ve seen this controversy play out in the media and in discussions. One problem – which is common to an awful lot of feminist issues – is that we’re being encouraged to treat feminist foremothers as if they must be discredited, as if we should expect them to act as if they’re perfect citizens of 2015, not ordinary women living in their own times. Feminism, in other words, is everyone’s punchbag.

    That.

    What is that? Why is it that so many “progressives” are so ready and willing to attack feminism every chance they get? Why is it that it’s almost always women who are singled out for attack and demonization and ostracism? Why is “TERF” a thing when “TEMRA” is not? Why is “cis privilege” so seldom applied to men? Why are so many people who would call themselves feminists so hostile to feminism and feminists?

    I don’t know the answers to those questions. I do know that I find the whole thing very disturbing and depressing…not personally, because my recent ostracism has actually ended up being a net benefit, but politically. In political terms, I think all this rabid hair-trigger hostility to feminism is a tragedy.

  • The exercise in narcissism

    At The Federalist Society, Mollie Hemingway lets us know how much she hates #YesAllWomen. It’s the Federalist Society, so you know what to expect.

    Elliot Rodger did what he did.

    Social media responded by accepting the murderer’s hate-filled screed as a legitimate point of discourse and the starting point for a massive act of hashtag activism: #YesAllWomen. Traditional media followed suit: the narrative was found. Eleventy billion tweets describing how all women were victims of men spread throughout the U.S. and Europe and the media breathlessly covered the exercise in narcissism. They all agreed it was “powerful.”

    Narcissism. That’s the kind of shit that makes me want to stab things. How is it fucking narcissism? I’m not the only woman in the world, so if I talk about issues that affect women, I’m not talking exclusively about myself, now am I. To repeat my questions of a few days ago, was it narcissism to see the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church as a racist attack? And to discuss it as such?

    Narcissism would be, perhaps, taking a selfie of yourself crying or fuming, or perhaps tweeting “Never mind Elliot Rodger, what shoes shall I put on?” But talking about misogyny and misogynist culture? I don’t think so.

    She goes on to give a list of “the ten most asinine things about #YesAllWomen”; take number 6 for example:

    6) It’s A Mockery Of The Real Problems Women Face Throughout The World

    As the #YesAllWomen craze spread, a woman was stoned by her family in Pakistan for marrying someone of her choice as opposed to someone of their arrangement. While the #YesAllWomen crowds talked about the unbearable horror of being whistled at on the street, annoyingly being told to smile, and being given gendered McDonald’s toys, more than 200 Nigerian girls remained in slavery to Islamist extremist rebels. While we turn the murder of six into a narcissistic contest of victimhood, a Sudanese Christian woman married to an American Christian man gave birth to a daughter in prison. She awaits her martyrdom for supposedly converting from Islam (because her father, who left her family, had been Muslim).

    Oh yay, another Dear Muslima! Just what the world needs. Why? Because we can’t do both; we have to choose one; we can’t discuss both Islamist horrors and homegrown misognyist shooters. Except wait, what, why can’t we? No reason. Just a sneery snotty Dear Muslima from someone who hates feminism.

     

  • The angry fanboys

    What’s it like being a woman in comics? What’s it like being a woman in comics who writes an article criticizing a comic book cover for among other things featuring a teenage girl with breasts as big as her head? What’s it like being a woman in comics who responds to aggressive (shall we say) reactions to her criticism of a comic book cover?

    About what you’d expect.

    I was called a whiny bitch, a feminazi, a feminist bitch, a bitter cunt, and then the rape threats started rolling in.

    You see, I’m also doing a survey about sexual harassment in comics. (If you’d like to take this survey, you can find it here.) And so as soon as the angry fanboys started looking me up after the CBR article, they discovered this survey and started answering my questions and using the open box at the end to write in all sorts of awfulness.

    Because if you talk about sexism or sexual harassment then the only proper and sensible thing to do is to attack in sexist, harassing terms, by way of demonstrating that it’s wrong to talk about sexism or sexual harassment because there is no such thing.

    Hmm.

    When the survey was posted on a blog, one of the comments included “If you have a entrenched ideology then it’s nigh impossible to be objective, and according to Ms. Asselin’s Twitter tag, she’s a self described feminist.”

    Let’s talk about that for a second. Feminist is not a bad word. People who think feminism is a negative often run in two very different directions – either they misunderstand what it is or are outright misogynists. Feminism is defined by Dictionary.com as “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.” If it’s an “entrenched ideology” to wish to be treated as an equal human along side men, then so be it.

    Speaking of entrenched ideology – you know what really is an entrenched ideology? The idea that feminism is – automatically, always, necessarily – an entrenched ideology.

    There are too many people, including professionals, who think it’s okay to condescend, harass, berate, etc. women in comics simply because they’ve espoused a belief that revolves around women being treated more as equals. I want women and girls to be seen as an equally promising demographic for comics as males; I want major companies with an easy opportunity to reach out to women to not feature art that is disgusting and objectifying; I want women to be hired as much as men to create comics; I want to not know so many people who have been violated in an industry I still love despite it all.

    …

    There are men in comics who understand how not to be a condescending asshole. But right now, the problem is that too many other men think that they are in a crowd of like-minded men who are super sick of this feminazi bullshit. The truth is that you are on the losing side. Women in comics aren’t going away. Even if you continue to talk to us like this. Your threats and insults do nothing more than make me want to stick around and shout even louder. So thank you for that.

    Feminism isn’t going away. Also? The last thing that would make it go away is condescending assholes calling it feminazi bullshit and threatening to rape all the feminists. All that does is show how desperately it’s needed.

    H/t Jen

     

     

  • Actively involved in opposition

    Shit just got real at Queen’s University.

    Police are investigating after a man allegedly beat up a Queen’s University student who says she received threats for her support of feminist activities on campus.

    Police say they haven’t dismissed the possibility the attack was a hate crime.

    Danielle d’Entremont said the attack occurred late Wednesday night as she was leaving her home. In a Facebook post, she said the suspect punched her in the face repeatedly, breaking one of her teeth.

    Ok but there could be some other explanation. Maybe the guy was just in a bad mood and she was the first person he saw. That can happen.

    Police haven’t said whether the fourth-year student’s campus politics are linked to the attack, but she wrote that her attacker was a man and knew her name.

    Well if he knew her name, that takes care of the first person he saw theory. But hey, she could totally be lying. Maybe she punched her own self in the face.

    The Queen’s Journal reported d’Entremont was “actively involved in opposition” to an event hosted by the Men’s Issues Awareness Society (MIAS) Thursday night.

    The student-run club organized a talk by Janice Fiamengo, an English professor at the University of Ottawa and a former-feminist-turned-men’s-rights activist.

    There was opposition; there was a motion to de-ratify the Men’s Issues Awareness Society; the motion was dismissed.

    On Thursday, MIAS president Mohammed Albaghdadi wrote on the event page: “We would like to state that the MIAS condemns the recent attack on a Queen’s student, and violence in general. There have been various comments associating MIAS with this attack. Please know that these claims are unfounded and untrue. Our sincerest thoughts go out to the student who was attacked.”

    How does he know that? How can he know that? I don’t know that the claims are true; how can he know that they are untrue?

  • God intended women

    Some more crazy. From Mary Pride’s The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality (quoted in Quiverful, p 135):

    Abortion is first of all a heart attitude: ‘Me first.’ ‘My career first.’ ‘My reputation first.’ ‘My convenience first.’ ‘My financial plans first.’ And these same choices are what family planning, which the churches have endorsed for three decades, is all about.

    Yes…………and? Why not? Why not think about one’s own self and career and other plans first when deciding what to do with one’s life?

    Well she explains why not.

    God intended women to spend their lives serving other people.

    Oh. So they don’t get to just decide to have some other kind of life, or to combine taking care of dependents with doing other things.

    “Lean not on your own understanding,” Quiverful mo[ther] Tracy Moore tells me, describing the scriptural foundation she discovered for Quiverfull after following the advice of formerly Amish families in Kentucky. [p 154]

    No, instead lean on an old book that includes some very harsh laws along with stories and poetry. Nope; I’ll go with the own understanding, thanks.

  • To impose the lifestyle of Manhattan and Hollywood

    Meet the Population Research Institute. It sounds respectable, doesn’t it. But

    Founded in 1989, the Population Research Institute is a non-profit research and educational organization dedicated to objectively presenting the truth about population-related issues, and to reversing the trends brought about by the myth of overpopulation. Our growing, global network of pro-life groups spans over 30 countries.

    It’s dedicated to objectively presenting its pronatalist antifeminist views as truth, so that’s an oxymoron, innit.

    Its mission is to

    Debunk the myth of overpopulation, which cheapens human life and paves the way for abusive population control programs

    Expose the relentless promotion of abortion, abortifacient contraception, and chemical and surgical sterilization in misleadingly labeled “population stabilization,” “family planning,” and “reproductive health” programs.

    Defund these programs by exposing the coercion, deception, and racism inherent in them.

    And they did; they got the Bush administration to defund the UN Population Fund.

    PRI’s so-called “investigation” of UNFPA’s activities in China (whose most spectacular finding was that there was a desk with a UNFPA sticker on it inside an official Chinese family planning office), was cited by members of Congress and the Bush Administration as rationale for reevaluating U.S. support for UNFPA in general. A subsequent U.S. State Department investigation found no evidence to support PRI’s claims of wrongdoing by UNFPA—in fact, it even commended their work in China. Nonetheless, the Bush Administration blocked all US funding of UNFPA in 2002 and has withheld more than $125 million from the agency through the end of 2005.

    They don’t like feminism – which they call “radical feminism,” laughably.

    “The pro-life pro-family movement should absolutely oppose the creation of a UN super-agency dedicated to radical feminist goals, which undermine marriage, weaken the family, and thus endanger children both born and unborn,” says Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute.  “What is being proposed is a very powerful agency with a global mandate to restructure relations between the sexes.  If the past is any indicator, it will be used to impose the lifestyle of Manhattan and Hollywood feminists on family-centered countries and cultures.  It is cultural imperialism at its worst.”

    Oooooh Manhattan and Hollywood – you know what that means, Precious. [whispers] It means Jewish.