Oh. Look. I’m still talking about feminism. Hoo-freaking-ray. Very well. Let’s to it. Oh, and be warned, there’s probably some potentially (hopefully) minor triggering discussion of rape and other forms of violence down there.
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I started poking around on feminist blogs around the same time I was starting to poke around on atheist blogs. The Venn diagram overlap on the whole atheist/feminist thing was pretty big for me, so it made a certain amount of sense to do exactly that. I tended to not comment, though, since being a commenter on a feminist blog seemed like a really good way to get your throat jumped on for saying something wrong that you didn’t even know was wrong.
That, in retrospect, was probably a good thing. I kept going back to certain blogs and I knew there were certain bloggers who would have interesting things to say about whatever the topic at hand was. I didn’t feel that I had to contribute at all, though. I showed up, I read, and I thought about what the blogger had to say. Sometimes I stuck around long enough to read the comments and see what other people had to say. Mostly, though, the key point is that I didn’t say anything.
I think this is the great weakness of the whole Web 2.0 experience. Most people naturally pay more attention to what they want to say in response to something than the thing that they’re responding to. That little box at the bottom that says, “Write your thoughts here, brosef!” shrieks out its Siren call and shorts out the part of the brain that is willing to sit quietly and listen, assuming that they didn’t actively strangle that part of their brain in grade school, of course.
That’s why you see so many comments on blogs that say things like, “You’re the worst writer in the world. Why do you keep doing this?” The other variation is, “Why are you writing about this? I prefer it when you write about this other thing.”[1] There is literally nothing easier in the world than not reading an article on the internet. I do it all the fucking time. In fact right at this very moment there are millions of articles on the internet that I’m not reading. Yet for some people the urge to go to some random article on the internet and tell the person writing it that, hey, they’re totally gonna start not reading the articles all up in this place starting a week from next Tuesday if they don’t start shaping up and writing ten thousand words about the glory that is the little dwarf guy on Game of Thrones and what he would sound like if he was calling NCAA basketball games alongside Dick Vitale is completely irresistible.[3]
Things get a whole hell of a lot worse when the sort of brain-dead simpleton who doesn’t understand that other people are allowed to have a different opinion end up on a feminist blog. And holy hell, do those brain-dead simpletons end up on feminist blogs. Here, I’ll let Amanda Marcotte and Natalie Reilly explain.
I quickly learned to (theoretically) run for the (hypothetical) hills when I ran across certain terms. The big ones were “rape culture,” “privilege,” and “mansplain.” Oh, god, how I hated seeing the world “mansplain.” It was the most aggravating possible word because it was the word that got pulled out when it was time to say, “Shut up, man, you have nothing valid to say.” You’ll note that I very specifically do not say it was the word that came out when I guy was attempting to do his best imitation of an entire bag of dicks. You also might want to note that I throw the word “privilege” around on a fairly regular basis and that I recently used the term “rape culture” quite a bit in a way that indicates that I am well and truly not on board with that sort of shenanigan. So what gives?
The problem, as I alluded to before, was that I came into the whole “lurking at feminist blogs” space from a position where I didn’t really have a strong sense of what was going on or a comprehensive thought about the whole thing beyond my basic “women are people, too,” thing. For the most part I believe that the whole “women are people, too” attitude is enough. As far as a general, all-around standard for living and working and generally interacting with women goes, simply being aware of the fact that women are people and, therefore, deserving of being treated as people and not, say, interchangeable mobile sex toys, is all you really need. If you want to go any deeper than that you need (and, by extension, I needed) to go much, much further beyond that point to a place of true understanding and unfortunately the first couple stages into that journey are the hardest and most likely to be annoying.
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I think there are three levels of what I will call political correctness in speech.
The first level is the, “We’re not gonna be PC here,” level of general jackassery. That’s where you get the people who say, “I’m going to say this extremely offensive thing because it pisses off all of the right people and makes everyone think I’m a big, tough culture warrior.” This is where you get the people who (most likely intentionally) ask, “Why can’t I use the n-word even though those black rappers get to use it all the time?” These are people who understand words only at the level of how to use them as weapons. They’re assholes.
The second level is the people who understand that, say, it’s not okay to use the n-word and there’s a really good reason for it. They get that saying racist or sexist things is bad mojo and they try to avoid it because it’s a bad idea in general and it’s the sort of thing that will create an unnecessary level of social stigma. Most people, I think, are in this second category. Some are well-intentioned people who don’t want to be offensive assholes. Some aren’t well-intentioned people who don’t want to seem like offensive assholes. At times it can be hard to distinguish between the two, though, since the words that cannot be used are often esoteric and weird and the rules come out of nowhere. Also, they’re often likely to seem really arbitrary to the uninitiated.[4]
When I say esoteric and weird, too, I mean that it’s sometimes something that comes across as extremely nitpicky. If you want an example go to a website where feminist-types hang out and use the word “hysterical” in a sentence. Hysterical is one of those words that’s become commonplace in the English language to describe something that’s just a totally crazy reaction to something,[5] usually in a negative way. Most people use the word innocently, since it’s a not-terribly-uncommon word in the English language and it's been stripped of all context about how being "hysterical" is a woman problem and a specific "women become hysterical because of their weaker constitutions and general woman-ness" problem. They don’t know there’s a problem, they mean nothing by it, and suddenly they’re being attacked by someone who wants them to know they’re the Devil.[6] That can be pretty damn confusing.
The third level is the people who have really, truly thought through words and the implications of said words. Or, in reality, they’ve thought through a bunch of words and, in doing so have opened themselves to the possibility that a word they use today might be totally offensive to someone and they don’t even know it. It’s hard to be a person who does this. I’d say that it’s also probably impossible to be a person who does this 100% of the time. Hell, I’d say anything over the 75% range is pretty damn good.
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Anyway, what was my point? Oh, yeah, mansplaining. To the uninitiated, that’s a portmanteau of “man” and “explain” and generally means, “a man who shows up and explains how the world really works to those silly-headed wimminz.” That word annoyed the hell out of me. It was the Swiss Army Knife of ending conversations. Some dude would wander in out of the cold and say, “Hey, I’ma let you finish, but first I think you need to know…” Someone else would then be all, “Mansplainer! How dare you mansplain to me in your mansplaining way with your smarmy mansplaininess!” Everything would then proceed in an orderly counterclockwise motion down the shitter (unless it happened in the southern hemisphere, at which point it would be a clockwise motion. Also, feel free to berate me for my anti-antipodean bias in the comments).
What I eventually figured out (I guess, since I’m talking about it) was that the guys accused of mansplaining were completely and totally violating the most simple precept of my proto-feminism. They weren’t really behaving in a fashion that indicated they believed that women were, in fact, people. Rather, they were treating women as inferiors who didn’t get it and needed someone to show up and explain to them how things actually worked. The annoyance on the part of the women in that situation suddenly made a whole hell of a lot more sense.
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The problem here is that men so completely and totally own the conversation space in this area that most men don’t even notice it. This gets back to the whole privilege thing. As a white male I am seen as the default viewpoint for everything from gender relations to politics to television programming, mostly because the people sharing that viewpoint are either also white males or some sort of not-white and/or not-male person who has been conditioned to speak in white male-ese. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think it should be a thing. I’m also generally blind to my own privilege because it’s simply a default way of looking at the world that I share with a disturbingly large majority of the people in the United States and Europe and also much of the rest of the world due to the legacy of European colonialism.
So if I were to go to, say, a feminist blog and see that the writer is making an argument about how the world works that I just don’t see my initial response might be to argue. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with disagreeing and sharing an opinion. Where the problem comes in is when I show up and say, “Oh, no, you’re totally wrong because you don’t understand how the world works. Lemme explain it to you.”
The simple fact of the matter is that doing that in any context is arrogant. It’s also stupid. In any case where I’m interacting with a woman of similar intelligence and cultural background and we’re discussing, say, music as non-musicians we’re probably on equal footing. If we’re discussing auto repair and she’s never opened the hood of a car I probably know more than she does. If we’re discussing what a woman has to think about as she’s walking down the street she knows way, way more than I do about it and I need to shut the fuck up and listen if I want to learn anything.
It’s really that simple. Women are people and should be treated as people. But it’s important to acknowledge the reality that women operate in a world that gives them a different set of rules and challenges than men. It’s stupid, for instance, to go to a female friend and say, “What does it mean when a woman [insert cliché question men ask women, generally in the context of dating]?” The appropriate answer is generally, “I don’t know, why don’t you ask her, since there’s no such thing as a universal language of women.” To turn that around and say, “There’s no such thing as a generic woman, therefore no women have ever actually had to worry about rape or job discrimination,” is really fucking stupid, too.
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The worst part about all of this, at least in what I’ve observed, is that the place this is most contentious is when the conversation turns to sexual violence. This goes back to my assertion that there are only a small number of predatory assholes out there, but that the small minority preys upon guys who aren’t predators but who also really don’t get what’s going on the multiply their numbers and their influence. This is where we get around to the whole concept of rape culture.
In my observation it works like this:
Woman: I have to be on guard against rapists at all times by doing [insert list of things here]. It’s exhausting and I wish it wasn’t that way.
Man: Well I’m not a rapist so you don’t have to be that way around me.
Woman: You might not be, but I don’t know that yet so I still have to be on guard.
Man: You’re calling me a rapist? How dare you!
Woman: No, I’m not calling you a rapist. I’m saying I don’t know that you’re not a rapist and I can’t afford to take that risk.
Man: Bitch! I ain’t no rapist. You need to stop being such a bitch and learn how the world actually works outside of your feminazi fantasies.
That’s not a conversation that’s going to end well.
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Oh, and there’s an added wrinkle. Let’s say that Mr. Mansplainer above does actually turn out to be a rapist. Guess who’s going to get blamed for not taking the proper steps to watch out for her own safety? If you said the woman you win.
What do you win? Um, how about this YouTube video of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl?”
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[1]There’s a third variation on this that doesn’t really apply and is more of a Facebook phenomenon in my experience. I generally see it specifically with status updates put out by bands.
Let’s say that you follow the band Funkyfunktopus and love their new album Garage It, Bitches. You’re all about Garage It, Bitches, but you’re also all about Calling Punky Brewster’s new release Ginger Sparklepony, which is similar but different in a good way.
Whoever’s responsible for Funkyfunktopus’s Facebook page is bored. So that person puts up a status that says, “Hey, guys, looking for some new music to listen to in the van. Anybody got suggestions?” So you’re all, “Oh, hells, yeah. I’ma tell them about the wonder and merriment that is Ginger Sparklepony.” So you click to share about Calling Punky Brewster but see that there are already 12 comments.
Four of those comments are some variation on, “I’m listening to this dope-ass disc called Garage It, Bitches by some band you’ve probably never heard of.” Three of the remaining comments will have some format that’s to the effect of twelve albums followed by an, “Oh, of course, Garage It, Bitches. SMILEYFACEEMOTICON.”
I’m thinking of making a drinking game out of this. That’s because there are only two valid responses to this kind of bullshit: drink heavily or throw the laptop out the window. Oh, sure, you could stop being on Facebook forever, but who does that? Nobody, that’s who. Sure, we all threaten it once or twice a week, but you know that no one actually leaves. I mean, where else are you going to hear pointless political rants from your racist, gun hoarding uncle or find out what that guy you hung out with for three weeks in the seventh grade had for lunch (migas at that place on Grand by the old tire factory, for the record. Next week he’s gonna Instagram his cholesterol screening) today? Google+? As if, honky.
By the way, I don’t think that the word “honky” gets used enough. I’m starting a campaign, which I’m sure will be exactly as successful as my campaign to get people to use the word “Biden” to describe anything that’s a big fucking deal. Think of the synergy in that, by the way. Like, your buddy misses that once-in-a-lifetime show where Calling Punky Brewster opens up for Funkyfunktopus because he has an epic case of the shits. So you get to the finale and the lead singer of Funkyfunktopus calls the lead singer of Calling Punky Brewster onstage and then a priest shows up and they announce that they’re getting gay married right then and there because it’s all legal in Illinois now[2] and then they call you on stage and say, “It’s because of this guy telling us about each others’ band on Facebook that we’ve reached this point. And then they give you lifetime administrator privileges on their Facebook pages to kick off any asshole who responds to a request for music suggestions by telling them about themselves as if they didn’t know that they were fucking musicians and they’d put out an album recently.
So the next day you see your buddy and say to him, “Dude, you should have been there. It was a total Biden, honky.”
And your friend will be ashamed of his weakness and make sure from that day forward to get a proper amount of fiber in his diet and never travel anywhere without a metric shit ton of Imodium and Pepto.
That, my honkies, would be one hell of a Biden.
[2]Note: gay marriage not currently legal in Illinois. It will be soon, though, as long as Francis Cardinal George has nothing to do with it, which he doesn’t. Yet for some reason we can’t see a single news item about the impending Illinois gaytopia without also seeing that the beanie wearing regional director for the Church of Kiddie Fucker Protectors, Inc. wants to lecture us in an entirely boring and predictable way about how sexual immorality is bad if it involves more than one dick and both people involved are consenting adults who would really, really like to contractually join themselves together.
I would like to propose a solution to this problem. Someone should be hired to write complimentary op-eds alongside Francis Cardinal George’s boringly predictable rants. It should start simply and on topic. Like, the op-ed should be about how interracial marriage is a truly bad idea because it will convince the good (white) folks that the bad (not white) folks are people and might create children who are a combination of white and brown and who believe that there’s nothing different between white and brown people, when god obviously ordained that the white people should be burdened to use their superior brains and mint julep-drinking capabilities to tell the brown people which of their crops to raise and that they should get little money because they’re just not smart enough to understand how hard it is to sit on the porch with a lemonade and masturbate all day.
After that it should become progressively more surreal. Like, maybe the next time Francis Cardinal George tells us how gay marriage will ruin America someone can write an article about how the Brooklyn Dodgers are sure to destroy the professional baseball league with their little Jackie Robinson experiment. Then they can write about how the University of Chicago Maroons are surely mocking god’s plans by creating their farcical Big Ten Conference and the idea will never catch on.
Also, I hereby nominate myself to get this job. Since newspapers are all going out of business and probably can’t afford to pay me I’ll offer a compromise. They just have to find some way to make sure that the attractive single ladies reading know I’m “single and ready to mingle” as the kids say. And they have to put the most flattering picture ever taken of me next to my byline:
Also, I’m officially at more than a page and a half of footnote for less than half a page of post. That’s gonna end well.
[3]In the interests of full disclosure, I have absolutely no idea what the fuck I just wrote there. I do not watch Game of Thrones. I also do not watch Dick Vitale unless I’m watching a pizza commercial during some sort of non-DVRed televised sporting event. It just seemed like the sort of absurd bullshit someone would put into the comments on a blog.
[4]I’d like to point to this Scalzi bit on transgender folk as a prime example of what I’m talking about. He mentions at one point that he’s learned that the term “tranny” is offensive. Several commenters come in later and ask why it’s a problem. Someone even popped in and said that they’re a transgender person who doesn’t find the word offensive at all. I don’t consider Scalzi to be a category two person, but a category three, since he’s obviously thought long and hard about his language use and how to minimize using it in a damaging way. Even so, he admits to a blind spot. That’s where it gets complicated. Sometimes people aren’t aware. Sometimes, too, a person has an experience with someone who says, “Oh, I’m totally okay if you call me a [insert word here],” and then the person generalizes that specific interaction to everyone in [applicable group]. So they meet someone else and say, “Oh, so you’re a [word]. Awesome. My best friend in high school was one, too.” This new person reacts in horror and all of the sudden bad shit is going down.
[5]Also, too, the word “crazy” or any other word that’s a pejorative term that applies to mental health.
[6] This, by the way, delves into another one of my not-at-all favorite internet argument things. I say something someone else finds offensive. That person tells me they find it offensive. I say, “Oh, shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to cause offense and didn’t know that there was anything wrong there.” The person then pulls out the internet-catch-all response: “Intent is not magic.”
On one level it’s true. My complete lack of intent to offend you doesn’t mean that I won’t offend you by accident. On another level, though, if I didn’t actually intend to offend you and didn’t even know that what I was saying could be taken as offensive then you really ought to cut me some slack. If I keep doing it the terms should change. But ignorance should be a defense, as should simple human fallibility.
The fact of the matter is that my whole thing about people reading shit on the internet and only thinking about how they want to react cuts both ways. It applies to the dudes who don’t think women should talk about anything. It also applies to the women who want to jump all over a dude who says something that comes across as insensitive. If it’s a guy who’s obviously an asshole and who’s trolling then, by all means, have at. If it’s a guy who’s trying to say something that’s on his mind and he tosses the word “hysterical” in because, y’know, fairly common English word that’s been divorced from its original context it’s probably not the end of the world.
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I started poking around on feminist blogs around the same time I was starting to poke around on atheist blogs. The Venn diagram overlap on the whole atheist/feminist thing was pretty big for me, so it made a certain amount of sense to do exactly that. I tended to not comment, though, since being a commenter on a feminist blog seemed like a really good way to get your throat jumped on for saying something wrong that you didn’t even know was wrong.
That, in retrospect, was probably a good thing. I kept going back to certain blogs and I knew there were certain bloggers who would have interesting things to say about whatever the topic at hand was. I didn’t feel that I had to contribute at all, though. I showed up, I read, and I thought about what the blogger had to say. Sometimes I stuck around long enough to read the comments and see what other people had to say. Mostly, though, the key point is that I didn’t say anything.
I think this is the great weakness of the whole Web 2.0 experience. Most people naturally pay more attention to what they want to say in response to something than the thing that they’re responding to. That little box at the bottom that says, “Write your thoughts here, brosef!” shrieks out its Siren call and shorts out the part of the brain that is willing to sit quietly and listen, assuming that they didn’t actively strangle that part of their brain in grade school, of course.
That’s why you see so many comments on blogs that say things like, “You’re the worst writer in the world. Why do you keep doing this?” The other variation is, “Why are you writing about this? I prefer it when you write about this other thing.”[1] There is literally nothing easier in the world than not reading an article on the internet. I do it all the fucking time. In fact right at this very moment there are millions of articles on the internet that I’m not reading. Yet for some people the urge to go to some random article on the internet and tell the person writing it that, hey, they’re totally gonna start not reading the articles all up in this place starting a week from next Tuesday if they don’t start shaping up and writing ten thousand words about the glory that is the little dwarf guy on Game of Thrones and what he would sound like if he was calling NCAA basketball games alongside Dick Vitale is completely irresistible.[3]
Things get a whole hell of a lot worse when the sort of brain-dead simpleton who doesn’t understand that other people are allowed to have a different opinion end up on a feminist blog. And holy hell, do those brain-dead simpletons end up on feminist blogs. Here, I’ll let Amanda Marcotte and Natalie Reilly explain.
I quickly learned to (theoretically) run for the (hypothetical) hills when I ran across certain terms. The big ones were “rape culture,” “privilege,” and “mansplain.” Oh, god, how I hated seeing the world “mansplain.” It was the most aggravating possible word because it was the word that got pulled out when it was time to say, “Shut up, man, you have nothing valid to say.” You’ll note that I very specifically do not say it was the word that came out when I guy was attempting to do his best imitation of an entire bag of dicks. You also might want to note that I throw the word “privilege” around on a fairly regular basis and that I recently used the term “rape culture” quite a bit in a way that indicates that I am well and truly not on board with that sort of shenanigan. So what gives?
The problem, as I alluded to before, was that I came into the whole “lurking at feminist blogs” space from a position where I didn’t really have a strong sense of what was going on or a comprehensive thought about the whole thing beyond my basic “women are people, too,” thing. For the most part I believe that the whole “women are people, too” attitude is enough. As far as a general, all-around standard for living and working and generally interacting with women goes, simply being aware of the fact that women are people and, therefore, deserving of being treated as people and not, say, interchangeable mobile sex toys, is all you really need. If you want to go any deeper than that you need (and, by extension, I needed) to go much, much further beyond that point to a place of true understanding and unfortunately the first couple stages into that journey are the hardest and most likely to be annoying.
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I think there are three levels of what I will call political correctness in speech.
The first level is the, “We’re not gonna be PC here,” level of general jackassery. That’s where you get the people who say, “I’m going to say this extremely offensive thing because it pisses off all of the right people and makes everyone think I’m a big, tough culture warrior.” This is where you get the people who (most likely intentionally) ask, “Why can’t I use the n-word even though those black rappers get to use it all the time?” These are people who understand words only at the level of how to use them as weapons. They’re assholes.
The second level is the people who understand that, say, it’s not okay to use the n-word and there’s a really good reason for it. They get that saying racist or sexist things is bad mojo and they try to avoid it because it’s a bad idea in general and it’s the sort of thing that will create an unnecessary level of social stigma. Most people, I think, are in this second category. Some are well-intentioned people who don’t want to be offensive assholes. Some aren’t well-intentioned people who don’t want to seem like offensive assholes. At times it can be hard to distinguish between the two, though, since the words that cannot be used are often esoteric and weird and the rules come out of nowhere. Also, they’re often likely to seem really arbitrary to the uninitiated.[4]
When I say esoteric and weird, too, I mean that it’s sometimes something that comes across as extremely nitpicky. If you want an example go to a website where feminist-types hang out and use the word “hysterical” in a sentence. Hysterical is one of those words that’s become commonplace in the English language to describe something that’s just a totally crazy reaction to something,[5] usually in a negative way. Most people use the word innocently, since it’s a not-terribly-uncommon word in the English language and it's been stripped of all context about how being "hysterical" is a woman problem and a specific "women become hysterical because of their weaker constitutions and general woman-ness" problem. They don’t know there’s a problem, they mean nothing by it, and suddenly they’re being attacked by someone who wants them to know they’re the Devil.[6] That can be pretty damn confusing.
The third level is the people who have really, truly thought through words and the implications of said words. Or, in reality, they’ve thought through a bunch of words and, in doing so have opened themselves to the possibility that a word they use today might be totally offensive to someone and they don’t even know it. It’s hard to be a person who does this. I’d say that it’s also probably impossible to be a person who does this 100% of the time. Hell, I’d say anything over the 75% range is pretty damn good.
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Anyway, what was my point? Oh, yeah, mansplaining. To the uninitiated, that’s a portmanteau of “man” and “explain” and generally means, “a man who shows up and explains how the world really works to those silly-headed wimminz.” That word annoyed the hell out of me. It was the Swiss Army Knife of ending conversations. Some dude would wander in out of the cold and say, “Hey, I’ma let you finish, but first I think you need to know…” Someone else would then be all, “Mansplainer! How dare you mansplain to me in your mansplaining way with your smarmy mansplaininess!” Everything would then proceed in an orderly counterclockwise motion down the shitter (unless it happened in the southern hemisphere, at which point it would be a clockwise motion. Also, feel free to berate me for my anti-antipodean bias in the comments).
What I eventually figured out (I guess, since I’m talking about it) was that the guys accused of mansplaining were completely and totally violating the most simple precept of my proto-feminism. They weren’t really behaving in a fashion that indicated they believed that women were, in fact, people. Rather, they were treating women as inferiors who didn’t get it and needed someone to show up and explain to them how things actually worked. The annoyance on the part of the women in that situation suddenly made a whole hell of a lot more sense.
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The problem here is that men so completely and totally own the conversation space in this area that most men don’t even notice it. This gets back to the whole privilege thing. As a white male I am seen as the default viewpoint for everything from gender relations to politics to television programming, mostly because the people sharing that viewpoint are either also white males or some sort of not-white and/or not-male person who has been conditioned to speak in white male-ese. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think it should be a thing. I’m also generally blind to my own privilege because it’s simply a default way of looking at the world that I share with a disturbingly large majority of the people in the United States and Europe and also much of the rest of the world due to the legacy of European colonialism.
So if I were to go to, say, a feminist blog and see that the writer is making an argument about how the world works that I just don’t see my initial response might be to argue. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with disagreeing and sharing an opinion. Where the problem comes in is when I show up and say, “Oh, no, you’re totally wrong because you don’t understand how the world works. Lemme explain it to you.”
The simple fact of the matter is that doing that in any context is arrogant. It’s also stupid. In any case where I’m interacting with a woman of similar intelligence and cultural background and we’re discussing, say, music as non-musicians we’re probably on equal footing. If we’re discussing auto repair and she’s never opened the hood of a car I probably know more than she does. If we’re discussing what a woman has to think about as she’s walking down the street she knows way, way more than I do about it and I need to shut the fuck up and listen if I want to learn anything.
It’s really that simple. Women are people and should be treated as people. But it’s important to acknowledge the reality that women operate in a world that gives them a different set of rules and challenges than men. It’s stupid, for instance, to go to a female friend and say, “What does it mean when a woman [insert cliché question men ask women, generally in the context of dating]?” The appropriate answer is generally, “I don’t know, why don’t you ask her, since there’s no such thing as a universal language of women.” To turn that around and say, “There’s no such thing as a generic woman, therefore no women have ever actually had to worry about rape or job discrimination,” is really fucking stupid, too.
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The worst part about all of this, at least in what I’ve observed, is that the place this is most contentious is when the conversation turns to sexual violence. This goes back to my assertion that there are only a small number of predatory assholes out there, but that the small minority preys upon guys who aren’t predators but who also really don’t get what’s going on the multiply their numbers and their influence. This is where we get around to the whole concept of rape culture.
In my observation it works like this:
Woman: I have to be on guard against rapists at all times by doing [insert list of things here]. It’s exhausting and I wish it wasn’t that way.
Man: Well I’m not a rapist so you don’t have to be that way around me.
Woman: You might not be, but I don’t know that yet so I still have to be on guard.
Man: You’re calling me a rapist? How dare you!
Woman: No, I’m not calling you a rapist. I’m saying I don’t know that you’re not a rapist and I can’t afford to take that risk.
Man: Bitch! I ain’t no rapist. You need to stop being such a bitch and learn how the world actually works outside of your feminazi fantasies.
That’s not a conversation that’s going to end well.
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Oh, and there’s an added wrinkle. Let’s say that Mr. Mansplainer above does actually turn out to be a rapist. Guess who’s going to get blamed for not taking the proper steps to watch out for her own safety? If you said the woman you win.
What do you win? Um, how about this YouTube video of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl?”
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[1]There’s a third variation on this that doesn’t really apply and is more of a Facebook phenomenon in my experience. I generally see it specifically with status updates put out by bands.
Let’s say that you follow the band Funkyfunktopus and love their new album Garage It, Bitches. You’re all about Garage It, Bitches, but you’re also all about Calling Punky Brewster’s new release Ginger Sparklepony, which is similar but different in a good way.
Whoever’s responsible for Funkyfunktopus’s Facebook page is bored. So that person puts up a status that says, “Hey, guys, looking for some new music to listen to in the van. Anybody got suggestions?” So you’re all, “Oh, hells, yeah. I’ma tell them about the wonder and merriment that is Ginger Sparklepony.” So you click to share about Calling Punky Brewster but see that there are already 12 comments.
Four of those comments are some variation on, “I’m listening to this dope-ass disc called Garage It, Bitches by some band you’ve probably never heard of.” Three of the remaining comments will have some format that’s to the effect of twelve albums followed by an, “Oh, of course, Garage It, Bitches. SMILEYFACEEMOTICON.”
I’m thinking of making a drinking game out of this. That’s because there are only two valid responses to this kind of bullshit: drink heavily or throw the laptop out the window. Oh, sure, you could stop being on Facebook forever, but who does that? Nobody, that’s who. Sure, we all threaten it once or twice a week, but you know that no one actually leaves. I mean, where else are you going to hear pointless political rants from your racist, gun hoarding uncle or find out what that guy you hung out with for three weeks in the seventh grade had for lunch (migas at that place on Grand by the old tire factory, for the record. Next week he’s gonna Instagram his cholesterol screening) today? Google+? As if, honky.
By the way, I don’t think that the word “honky” gets used enough. I’m starting a campaign, which I’m sure will be exactly as successful as my campaign to get people to use the word “Biden” to describe anything that’s a big fucking deal. Think of the synergy in that, by the way. Like, your buddy misses that once-in-a-lifetime show where Calling Punky Brewster opens up for Funkyfunktopus because he has an epic case of the shits. So you get to the finale and the lead singer of Funkyfunktopus calls the lead singer of Calling Punky Brewster onstage and then a priest shows up and they announce that they’re getting gay married right then and there because it’s all legal in Illinois now[2] and then they call you on stage and say, “It’s because of this guy telling us about each others’ band on Facebook that we’ve reached this point. And then they give you lifetime administrator privileges on their Facebook pages to kick off any asshole who responds to a request for music suggestions by telling them about themselves as if they didn’t know that they were fucking musicians and they’d put out an album recently.
So the next day you see your buddy and say to him, “Dude, you should have been there. It was a total Biden, honky.”
And your friend will be ashamed of his weakness and make sure from that day forward to get a proper amount of fiber in his diet and never travel anywhere without a metric shit ton of Imodium and Pepto.
That, my honkies, would be one hell of a Biden.
[2]Note: gay marriage not currently legal in Illinois. It will be soon, though, as long as Francis Cardinal George has nothing to do with it, which he doesn’t. Yet for some reason we can’t see a single news item about the impending Illinois gaytopia without also seeing that the beanie wearing regional director for the Church of Kiddie Fucker Protectors, Inc. wants to lecture us in an entirely boring and predictable way about how sexual immorality is bad if it involves more than one dick and both people involved are consenting adults who would really, really like to contractually join themselves together.
I would like to propose a solution to this problem. Someone should be hired to write complimentary op-eds alongside Francis Cardinal George’s boringly predictable rants. It should start simply and on topic. Like, the op-ed should be about how interracial marriage is a truly bad idea because it will convince the good (white) folks that the bad (not white) folks are people and might create children who are a combination of white and brown and who believe that there’s nothing different between white and brown people, when god obviously ordained that the white people should be burdened to use their superior brains and mint julep-drinking capabilities to tell the brown people which of their crops to raise and that they should get little money because they’re just not smart enough to understand how hard it is to sit on the porch with a lemonade and masturbate all day.
After that it should become progressively more surreal. Like, maybe the next time Francis Cardinal George tells us how gay marriage will ruin America someone can write an article about how the Brooklyn Dodgers are sure to destroy the professional baseball league with their little Jackie Robinson experiment. Then they can write about how the University of Chicago Maroons are surely mocking god’s plans by creating their farcical Big Ten Conference and the idea will never catch on.
Also, I hereby nominate myself to get this job. Since newspapers are all going out of business and probably can’t afford to pay me I’ll offer a compromise. They just have to find some way to make sure that the attractive single ladies reading know I’m “single and ready to mingle” as the kids say. And they have to put the most flattering picture ever taken of me next to my byline:
Also, I’m officially at more than a page and a half of footnote for less than half a page of post. That’s gonna end well.
[3]In the interests of full disclosure, I have absolutely no idea what the fuck I just wrote there. I do not watch Game of Thrones. I also do not watch Dick Vitale unless I’m watching a pizza commercial during some sort of non-DVRed televised sporting event. It just seemed like the sort of absurd bullshit someone would put into the comments on a blog.
[4]I’d like to point to this Scalzi bit on transgender folk as a prime example of what I’m talking about. He mentions at one point that he’s learned that the term “tranny” is offensive. Several commenters come in later and ask why it’s a problem. Someone even popped in and said that they’re a transgender person who doesn’t find the word offensive at all. I don’t consider Scalzi to be a category two person, but a category three, since he’s obviously thought long and hard about his language use and how to minimize using it in a damaging way. Even so, he admits to a blind spot. That’s where it gets complicated. Sometimes people aren’t aware. Sometimes, too, a person has an experience with someone who says, “Oh, I’m totally okay if you call me a [insert word here],” and then the person generalizes that specific interaction to everyone in [applicable group]. So they meet someone else and say, “Oh, so you’re a [word]. Awesome. My best friend in high school was one, too.” This new person reacts in horror and all of the sudden bad shit is going down.
[5]Also, too, the word “crazy” or any other word that’s a pejorative term that applies to mental health.
[6] This, by the way, delves into another one of my not-at-all favorite internet argument things. I say something someone else finds offensive. That person tells me they find it offensive. I say, “Oh, shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to cause offense and didn’t know that there was anything wrong there.” The person then pulls out the internet-catch-all response: “Intent is not magic.”
On one level it’s true. My complete lack of intent to offend you doesn’t mean that I won’t offend you by accident. On another level, though, if I didn’t actually intend to offend you and didn’t even know that what I was saying could be taken as offensive then you really ought to cut me some slack. If I keep doing it the terms should change. But ignorance should be a defense, as should simple human fallibility.
The fact of the matter is that my whole thing about people reading shit on the internet and only thinking about how they want to react cuts both ways. It applies to the dudes who don’t think women should talk about anything. It also applies to the women who want to jump all over a dude who says something that comes across as insensitive. If it’s a guy who’s obviously an asshole and who’s trolling then, by all means, have at. If it’s a guy who’s trying to say something that’s on his mind and he tosses the word “hysterical” in because, y’know, fairly common English word that’s been divorced from its original context it’s probably not the end of the world.
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