Accidental Historian

On People

I consider myself a feminist.  I don’t necessarily call myself one, since I’m not sure if that’s appropriate.  Still, I’d say I’m definitely an ally.

I came to my feminism through a strange path: Judaism.

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This is a testimony.  It’s my story of awakening.

I went to Western Illinois University with the intent of getting a degree so I could go on to Seminary and become a pastor.  I took history as my major because I love history.  I took education as my co-major because I wanted a marketable skill to fall back on.  Then I realized I didn’t want to be a teacher.  That meant I needed a minor.  I chose religious studies because, well, duh.

I admit I was a little naïve.  I thought about religious studies from the perspective of my Evangelical upbringing, when all education was built around reinforcing the students’ view of the Bible as central, infallible, and the only document that truly mattered.  I wasn’t fully prepared for what I was about to learn as a history major with a religious studies minor.

I took a course on Judaism.  One of the assigned books was about Jewish feminism and written by a female rabbi.  It was the first time in my life I’d been forced to grapple with feminism on a personal level and as presented by someone who wasn’t offering a strawman interpretation of feminism.

I came away from that experience with a simple maxim: Women are people, too.

At the time I wasn’t even remotely conversant in or even aware of the common coin of what I think of as internet feminism.  I wouldn’t confront ideas like rape culture or privilege for a few years.  I’ll also admit that when I first confronted those terms I didn’t react in the best way possible.  Still, I think my first experience grappling with feminism and my simple maxim helped me to adjust and understand.

I’d like to say that I figured everything out at that moment.  I can’t, though.  I realize now that my conception of women at the time was a combination of salvation and resentment.  I expected a woman to come along and save me.  I resented women because none of them seemed willing to do so.

That’s why I spent so much time attached to the idea of Amy.  In my mind she was someone who could have made it all better.  I expected to find in her some sort of synthesis of the religion I wanted to find and the abolishment of the religion I hated.  I expected to find in her the forgiveness I couldn’t offer myself.  I expected to find in her the meaning I couldn’t find in anything else I’d explored.

Amy was people, too.  Amy was a person.  She had her own shit to deal with.  She had her own journey to take.  She had her own failures to fear and successes to cheer.  I couldn’t let her be people, though.  Even after we stopped talking I couldn’t let that happen.  Even after I left religion I couldn’t let that happen.  I needed her to be something bigger, something greater.  I needed her to be something lesser, something worse.

It’s why now, all these years later, I don’t know what I’d say to her if I suddenly found myself looking her in the eyes.  It’s why I alternate between, “I hate you,” and “I’m sorry.”

The truth is that she hurt me.

The truth is that I hurt her.

The truth is that I hate her for hurting me like she did.  The truth is that I hate me for hurting her like I did.

This is where the double standard comes into play.  I can deal with what I did because I’m a person and I know that I fail.  I can’t deal with what she did because she was supposed to be better.

Women are people, too.  Amy was people.  I hated her because she was supposed to be better than people.

So I suppose that if I were to find myself looking into her eyes right now I’d have to say, “I’m sorry.”

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That’s the thing about drawing the line at “Women are people, too.”  It’s easy, I suppose, for me to dismiss the assholes who think women are just pieces of meat to be ogled and hit on.  It’s a lot harder for me to realize that my former default assumption that women are god-like beings who can offer absolution was just as wrong.

Maybe I flatter myself.  Maybe I’m not as much of a feminist as I thought.  Maybe that’s why I hesitate to apply the label.  I know that somewhere deep down, or not so deep down, I still think women should be better and I know that I shouldn’t think that.

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I’d started writing this post as an excuse to tell a story that illustrated how enlightened I am.  I, um, I don’t feel I can do that with good conscience anymore.  So that’s awkward.

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One of the types of men who annoy me the most are the ones who just want a cookie.  They’re the ones who say that they’re feminist allies, but who could never say they’re actually feminists because of those feminists who give all feminists a bad name.  They then dredge up the worst straw feminists the internet has to offer as the type of woman who give feminism a bad name.  That isn’t being an ally.  That’s being an asshole who wants a cookie.[1]

There’s a pattern I see in both the cookie-wanting “allies” and the anti-feminists who want to be seen as friends to women who say they really know what women need.  They pick a particular woman or group of women.  Generally that woman is their wife or their mother or their sister.  If it’s a group it’s probably women they know at church.  They then say, “I love all women, but I can’t be a feminist because not all women are like [insert exemplar here].”

That’s where “women are people, too” comes back into play.

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It’s easy to see how bad it is to see women as meat and treat them as such.  Act like women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, hold down jobs, or make decisions and it’s pretty obvious you don’t think of them as people.  Act like women only exist to service men sexually and that service can be forcibly rendered at any time and in any way and it’s pretty obvious you don’t think of them as people.  The opposite view is somewhat harder to see and interpret, however.

If you act like women are supposed to be better than men in all ways it’s easy to disguise that as a good thing.  Positive stereotyping is easy to pass off as praise, after all.[3]  Saying that all women are better than men is just as bad.[4]

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So, I guess to try to bring this full circle, the lesson is that it’s best to remember that people are people.  Applying a label to yourself doesn’t make you better than anyone else any more than applying a label to someone else makes them worse.

Meanwhile, I don’t think that this means you can’t disagree with or even dislike someone.  You just need to find something beyond the most convenient label.  Like, “I can’t stand Janet because she ran over my dog with her car and didn’t apologize,” is a bit more sensible than, “I can’t stand Janet because she’s a woman.”  One of those is based on a defensible position.

Similarly, if you’re out in the realm of ideas you don’t have to agree with everything another person says.  I think this is the hardest thing for the internet to figure out.  For instance, I read Amanda Marcotte and I largely agree with her conclusions about stuff.  I don’t agree with everything she says or every conclusion she draws, but when I read what she says and I disagree it’s because I’ve read her words in good faith and decided that she took something the wrong way or made a leap from Point A directly to Point D or lacked/ignored a key bit of information or whatever.  Whenever she writes something, though, someone shows up in the comments section to tell her she’s wrong about everything and that she’s wrong because she’s a woman/feminist/both.  That’s fucking stupid.

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So…yeah.  I should probably cut this short.  I guess my point is this: it’s equally important for men to acknowledge that women will fuck up sometimes as it is to acknowledge that they will succeed.  It’s more obvious to see the disservice done when we say that they’re just meat but saying they’re ascended beings who will magically make everything better doesn’t help even a tiny little bit.

Or, to put it another way: Women are people, too.

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[1]I have a confession to make at this juncture.  I fear Bruce Gerencser’s most recent abrupt departure from the internet was my doing, precisely because of this.  He’d put up some post about how he was an ally to women because he loved and respected his wife but couldn’t call himself a feminist because there were women out there who went out in short skirts and got drunk and then cried “feminism!” whenever men dared hit on them.

I called bullshit in the comment thread and asked him to stop perpetuating such things, since that’s the core of victim blaming that victims of rape receive.  That, in turn, degenerated into a series of posts in which Bruce dug himself deeper into a hole, up to and including the old “if you get into a car accident the police will assign culpability and rape is exactly like a car accident” dodge.

Now, I’ve got nothing whatsoever against Bruce.  But he’s been married longer than I’ve been alive and before getting married he was hanging out in a more conservative Evangelical subculture than I ever knew.  I feel like I’m more of a subject matter expert than he is when it comes to hanging out in establishments that serve alcohol and observing the mating habits of humans.[2]  So I tried to convince him to back off and retract what he was saying, since he was showing his ass in public in a way that’s truly potentially harmful, especially coming from someone who has a fairly loud voice in a community I call home.  It got pretty contentious, I’ll admit.

A couple hours later I went to check and see what had happened and his website was down.  I suppose it’s possible that was a coincidence, but…well…

[2]Actually, one of the most interesting things I ever, um, eavesdropped on, I guess, was between a gay man and his female friend on the L.  He was telling her about some guy he’d met at a club who kept hitting on him and made him uncomfortable and then followed him after he left that club and went to some other place.  When he was telling the story it was obvious he was freaked out by the whole thing.

That’s one of those moments of enlightenment.  Harassment, assault, and rape and the accompanying fear of said activities by victims or potential victims truly isn’t an issue of short skirts and drunkenness and those damn bitches who want to be out drunk and in short skirts.  It’s an issue of predators looking for prey and people who don’t take no for an answer.

[3]To offer a different example, there’s the stereotype that all Asians are good at math.  This sounds like a praise, at least coming from a white person, because it’s saying, “Hey, aren’t you good at this one thing,” instead of saying, “Hey, y’all are subhuman and we’re going to take all of your stuff.”

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an Asian person.  First, you probably don’t think of yourself as “Asian,” but rather “Chinese” or “Japanese” or even, gasp, “American,” since you were born in fucking Munster, Indiana and you’re a third generation American who’s never been outside of the continental United States and your grandmother’s Australian.  That’s even assuming you think of yourself in those terms (I, for instance, am Scandinavian but the child of many generations of Americans.  I’d put those tags somewhere below “Doctor Who fan” on my list of self-identifiers), but that’s a whole different rant.  Imagine your name is Joe and your ancestors came from, say, Japan.  Imagine, further, that you absolutely suck at math.  You have to pull out a calculator to figure out what happens if you subtract 2 from 3.

Anyway, back to the point.  You’ve spent your entire life hearing, “Asians are good at math.”  You suck at math in ways that can’t even be quantified by science (or math).  How good does that “positive” stereotype make you feel when it gets passed around?

[4]NK Jemisin has written some of my favorite fiction books of late.  In The Shadowed Sun there’s a bit where two characters are talking about the treatment of women in the civilization that’s the focus of the Dreamblood books.  One of the characters says that women are treated as goddesses and, as such, it’s impossible to say they’re repressed.  The other character retorts that the depiction of women as goddesses seems to be the excuse for repression.  It’s a really well done bit that illustrates the problem precisely.

Basically, I’m offering some book suggestions here.  Give her money.

Also, oh my god, looking for links to NK Jemisin’s books brought me to this link about something Vox Day said about her.  Vox Day is a shitstain on the underwear of humanity.  Like, I don’t know how anyone can wake up and be as offensive to as many people as he is without spontaneously combusting.  I was prepared for just about anything since I’ve seen his MRA bullshit on full display, but…wow.  Just…wow.

NK Jemisin’s response was classy and…well, civilized.  And it degenerated into the sort of argument the internet is supposed to facilitate.
This is the text of the speech that set off Vox Day’s subhuman diatribe.

Plus 1 Internet

So back when I wrote my Being Me posts and then wandered off into the weeds with stuff that annoyed me about the internet I thought I’d wrap it all up with a post about bullying as an act of enforcing conformity.  My general, overarching point was that anyone can become a bully.  All it takes is attempting to force other people to conform to a specific notion of what it means to be a [insert group here].  The bullied sometimes become the bullies when they get power.  It’s a tic of human nature, basically.

The solution to bullying, I’ve come to believe, is to say, “I am [insert label here] and you don’t get to define that for me.”  Alternately, in the case of some bullies – such as MRAs, who compelled me to write a recent post – the solution is to say, “I don’t give a shit what you think, since your labels are stupid and don’t apply to me.  Or reality.”  It helps when people outside that specific situation then come alongside and help people see the bigger picture.  This idea was basically the genesis of Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, to name a famous example.

The last couple days an interesting thing has been happening over at Scalzi’s place that illustrates my point way better than the post I never wrote would have.  A fellow Scalzi refers to as the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit (RSHD for short, because Scalzi has no urge to use his real name or link to him) has been talking all kinds of shit about Scalzi for the last few months using fairly standard MRA bullshit.  This resulted in a lot of trolls heading over to Whatever and annoying the hell out of Scalzi.  Scalzi doesn’t seem to like being annoyed by trolls that much.  So he did something about it.

Specifically, he pledged to donate money to organizations pushing for equality every time the RSHD mentioned him, capped out at a grand.  That’s where the internet took over, specifically the bit where Scalzi is one of the true mensches of the internet and has one hell of a following.  Other people started pledging, too.  By the end of the day the pledges were over $20,000.  By now, three days later, the pledges are at over $50,000.

That’s pretty much amazing.  It’s a whole lot of people standing up and saying, “We don’t want your bullying.  But we’re going to make something good come out of it and make you look like an ass in the process.”  It won’t stop the RSHD, since he seems to get off on shit like this, but this sort of thing isn’t directed at the RSHD.  It’s directed at observers to show that there are those who are willing to stand up to the bullies.  It’s also intended to show that the bullies themselves are absurd and can be effectively ignored.

It seems to be working, too.  Scalzi got a write-up in the freaking Guardian.  And the Guardian article called the RSHD a “Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit.”  It also didn’t use the RSHD’s real name nor did it link to his blog(s).  It’s brilliant, really.

Scalzi also commissioned some art.  See, MRAs use the (largely discredited) notion of Alpha and Beta males to make sure everyone knows they’re the alphas and everyone who isn’t exactly like them is a beta or a gamma or whatever and, therefore, inferior.  There are also animal themes in there for some reason.  Scalzi’s solution was to say, “Hey, in your taxonomy I’m a Gamma Rabbit.  That sounds like an awesome thing to be, since I’m happy.”

That’s the only way to approach people who try to call you inferior but whose only power is with words.  Take away the power of those words and you stymie the bullying.

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I figured out who the RSHD was almost immediately.  Spend any time on the internet paying attention to MRAs and one name pops up a lot: Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale.  He’s harassed PZed and Ed Brayton over the years, who are also a couple of guys who don’t let bullies use them as chew toys.  They have a different, significantly less whimsical style, though.

I checked over at Pharyngula to see if PZed had anything to say, mostly out of curiosity.  What he had was a link to a Jim Hines post about Beale running for President of the SFWA, an organization for speculative fiction authors which has been headed by one John Scalzi for the last couple of years.  I find that notion fascinating.

If you go back to my previous MRA post about an idiot who went after Fred it occurs to me that the entire reason anyone becomes a bully, especially an internet bully, is because they’re deeply unhappy.  So they define themselves according to some scale where they can show the world (themselves, mostly) how amazing they are).  Seeing someone who doesn’t use their scale but who is also obviously content with the world must, then, be absolutely awful.

That’s basically why Scalzi keeps saying that Vox has a mancrush on him.  I’m not saying that Vox Day is a deeply self-loathing closet case (mostly because I have endeavored to know as little about him as possible).  I’m saying that Vox Day is a great example of a deeply self-loathing bully who keeps trying to find meaning by emulating the path and then destroying the happiness of others.  That must be an awful way to live.

It’s why, on some level, I feel sorry for MRAs.  They’re sad, sad people.

MRAs Suck, Film at 11

I suppose it’s possible that most MRAs on the internet are all just extremely skilled and subtle satirists attempting to offer a display of exactly what it looks like when an overly testosteroned bully crawls so far up his own ass that he can no longer breathe through all the shit.  Somehow, though, I doubt that’s the case.  I doubt that’s the case, specifically, because every time I run into an MRA he’s so very serious and mean-spirited that I can’t believe he has enough human empathy to actually engage in satire.  So either every MRA is dead serious, every MRA is a pitch perfect satirist, or all MRAs are one or the other.  I’m forced to assume that it’s the first option, mostly because satirizing that sort of bullshit would be exhausting.

I bring this up because of Fred Clark over at Slacktivist.  See, a couple of years ago he got married to a woman who already had kids from a previous marriage.  From time to time he writes about his adopted daughters and gives off the impression that 1.) he’s adjusted to fatherhood quite well, thankyouverymuch and that 2.) he’s rather proud of his adopted daughters and pretty much treats them as if they were his own.  He is, in short, a mensch in this just as much as he is in pretty much everything else he does.

I think that Fred’s example here is important.  A couple of months ago I tossed in a bit about my realization that at 31 I was seriously limiting my dating options with my blanket ban on single mothers.  This is a phenomenon that we as a society will have to deal with more and more, as there are a lot of people out there who have kids and are also not in committed, long-term relationships with their co-parent.

This isn’t a problem from a moral standpoint.  This is, however, a problem from a logistical and emotional standpoint.  Getting into a relationship is, by itself, fraught with complications.  Getting into a relationship with someone who has kids through another person is far, far more complicated.

I actually tossed a question about the whole thing into a post a couple months ago.  It was a thought experiment because I’ve run up against the problem a couple of times and I’d thought about it but hadn’t actually put myself into a position to deal with it.  So I solicited advice.  I got a comment from Mike Timonin that was definite food for thought:

The thing you need to keep in mind in regard to kids in a family is that families are exponential, not additive. So, if you meet someone and form a relationship (any relationship, but let's assume romantic for the moment), that 2 - your relationship with hir and hir relationship with you. Add a kid (or any other person - poly relationships are complicated in the same way) and you're not just adding one new relationship, but 3 - the kid's relationship with their parent, the kid's relationship with you, and the kid's relationship with your relationship with hir parent. So, it's complicated. You need to consider how you feel about the mom, and about the kid, and about how your relationship with the mom will affect the parent-child relationship and so on.

It was really thoughtful and I meant to respond to it at the time, but, um, I didn’t.  Mostly because I’m easily distracted by – hey!  Look!  A squirrel!

I actually think that Mike understated the problem.  If you get into a relationship with someone who has a kid you have to manage your relationship with that person.  You have to manage your relationship with that kid.  You have to be aware of how they relate to each other.  You also have to be aware of the fact that you now have a relationship with the biological parent with whom you are not in a relationship.  You also now have two sets of biological grandparents and you have to deal with the fact that you’ve now made your own family into a collection of in-laws and grandparents, aunts, and/or uncles.  It’s all crazy go nuts, basically.

You also don’t get an easy mode.  I’ve spent most of the last decade in easy mode and, I’ve got to tell you, it’s been pretty easy.  If I want to sit around and drink beer and watch TV and not give a shit about anything I can.  If I want to go on a couple dates with someone somewhere I can.  Since I’ve mostly been dealing with women who are also childless I’ve been able to make and break last-minute plans without too much difficulty.

Bring someone with a kid into that and it’s totally different.  At least, I’d assume it’s different.  I mean, I have a dog.  I can’t go anywhere without putting some amount of thought into the question of, “What will I do with Daisy?”  If I’m going to the store I just let her run around and play with her toys.  If I’m going to be gone for a few hours I have to crate her.  If I’m going to be gone longer I have to make arrangements to take her somewhere.  You can’t leave a child alone for any length of time (or, at least, you can’t do it without risking a visit from your friendly neighborhood DCFS case worker).  So something as simple as a coffee date ends up being a major investment (at least, I assume).

If I were to date someone with a kid I’d have to be aware of that and sensitive to it.  If it were to get more serious than a couple dates and then an, “I don’t think we’re really compatible,” I’d then have to be willing and able to incorporate this woman and also her offspring and also all of the baggage that comes with this woman and her offspring into my life.  That might be a major sacrifice on my part, too.  Am I dealing with someone who has an actively involved father who pays alimony or am I suddenly taking on the burden of paying for all the kid’s needs when I’m accustomed to blowing my extra money on craft beer and chicken schwarma at Naf Naf?  Am I going to have to start putting my pita money towards a college fund?

Am I, in short, prepared to be both a boyfriend/husband and father when last week I wasn’t sure if I was even ready to be a boyfriend?

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I bring all of this stuff up because I saw one of the most absolutely dickish things ever at Fred’s place last week.  He’s been doing this ongoing series called “Chick-fil-A Biblical Family of the Day” in which he copies passages of the Bible about families that look nothing like the Cleavers from Leave it to Beaver.  The whole thing is a satire on the concept of “Biblical families” pushed by Evangelical Christians as an attempt to fight against things they don’t like by saying, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

Last Friday’s Chick-fil-A Biblical Family of the Day brought a commenter called Eric the Red.  His first comment went thusly:

Are we really supposed to take family advice from an unemployed mangina raising a fitter man's seed? I bet you even think your wife's not cheating on you.

Everything about that comment set off every single one of the various, “Oh, holy hell, what kind of an asshole are you?” alarms in my head.  Several commenters called him out for it, but a couple asked if he was responding to Fred’s post or Fred himself.  At that point Eric the Red proved that, yes, he’s a complete and total shitheel:

Of course I was talking about Fred. Truly did Heartiste speak correctly of his kind (and the other snivelling manboobs here) when he said:

Your typical outrage feminist and limp-wristed manboob flirts dangerously close to the monster threshold. Humans recoil from manjawed, mustachioed, beady-eyed, actively aggressive women and chipmunk-cheeked, bitch tittied, curvaceously plush, passive-aggressive men as if they were the human equivalent of dog shit. The farther your feminist or manboob deviates from the normal human template, in physical and psychological form, the more monstrous it becomes to the average person.

Now imagine you stomp through life as one of these howling feminists or putrid nancyboys, like Grendel disturbed by the sights and sounds of normalcy all around him. You sense, in your darkest secret thoughts, that most people are repulsed by you, want to have nothing to do with you, would be embarrassed to be seen with you. How do you think that would affect your mental state? First, you would seek out others like you. Monstrosity loves company. Then, you would lash out at anything normal, elevating the wicked and deviant while eroding confidence in the good and beautiful, twisting cherished moral standards that work adequately to sustain a normal population into bizarre, exaggerated facsimiles manufactured solely to do the bidding of your freak cohort.

So…first of all…all of the italicized word salad is something Eric the Red was quoting from somewhere else.  I’m not going to include the link, since, well, fuck that misogynistic asshole, that’s why.  But, seriously, this guy is a total and unrepentant shitheel.  And the guy he quoted with much admiration has all of the writing ability of a brain-damaged orangutan who has been handed a smartphone with a particularly glitchy autocorrect.

That said, there’s a certain horrible beauty to the awkwardly strung together words above.  It’s almost a form of beat poetry, really.  I imagine John Lithgow would do amazing work with “Then, you would lash out at anything normal, elevating the wicked and deviant while eroding confidence in the good and beautiful, twisting cherished moral standards that work adequately to sustain a normal population into bizarre, exaggerated facsimiles manufactured solely to do the bidding of your freak cohort.”  It’s not exactly a Newt Gingrich press release, but it’s still potentially pretty in its self-important incoherence.

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I think it’s important to talk about things like this.  Divorce is a reality in our world.  Extra-marital sex resulting in pregnancy is a reality in our world.  Single parents are a reality in our world.

Those single parents, whether they had sex outside of marriage, got divorced, or had to bury their biological co-parent, meanwhile, shouldn’t be expected to suddenly stop looking to love and be loved.  To expect that is folly.  To mock someone who then decides to love a single parent and invite that person and that person’s kid(s) and all of the complications of biological parents and grandparents and all of that into their life a lesser being is the height of unabashed assholery.  It’s also an admission on the part of the mocker that they don’t have anything close to the level of character of the person they’re mocking.

Of course using the word “mangina” in all seriousness is also the height of unabashed assholery.  But that’s a story for another day.

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It’s one of those things that goes back to my discussions of bullying and my theory that people end up choosing between empathy and resentment and that choice guides how they react to others.  The example offered by Eric the Red above is obviously one of someone who has chosen resentment.  It’s weird, too, since he obviously reads Fred’s stuff enough to know that Fred is currently unemployed and the husband of a woman who has children from a previous relationship.  That means that he’s been sitting there, seething in his resentment about Fred for a while.  That’s pretty sad, really.

There’s another level where it fascinates me.  When I ask whether I could date a woman who already has a kid the question basically boils down to this: am I a good enough person to deal with this?  Could I drop my basic self-absorption and accept a whole constellation of complications into my life without switching from empathy and love to resentment and hatred?

It seems to me that mocking someone who has made that choice and calling him a lesser being for doing so is a pretty good way to advertise that you’re a pretty massive jackhole.

In Which Geds Talks About Feminism, Part 3

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.

In Which Geds Talks About Feminism, Part 2

Amanda Marcotte has been on fire lately.

Okay, in truth Amanda Marcotte is usually on fire.  I tend to miss it, though, since she’s one of those blogger types who I only see when other people link to her.  That, in and of itself, is weird, since I have Pandagon on my RSS feed.  That particular issue is one of technology.  Most of my RSS stuff is an actual feed that says, “Hey, look, here’s a new post by this guy.”  Pandagon, or, really, Raw Story, doesn’t seem to work that way.  So I tend to forget that, yes, Amanda Marcotte writes things. But then I end up hitting, like, six posts in a row, which can be kind of awesome.

That’s really too bad, since Amanda Marcotte regularly catches fire.  I mean that in a good way, by the way, not a spontaneous human combustion way.  Because that would be bad.

In fact, let’s make that a blanket statement: Geds thinks that it’s bad when people are actually on fire.  Done.

Either way, the thing in question that causes me to make the statement in, re: Amanda Marcotte and fire is five posts in a row at Pandagon that made me say, “Hell, yeah!”  Several of them are directly related to things I want to talk about with the whole feminism bit, so let’s get right down to it.

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The first time I came into contact with the notion of anything even closely resembling the term I now know as “rape culture” was out at Western Illinois University.  It was a relatively innocuous flyer on the wall of my dorm next to the elevator.  I have zero recollection of the exact wording on the paper but I remember the gist, which was basically, “If you have sex with someone without their consent you’re committing rape and here are indications that consent haven’t been given.”  What then followed were things like, “She’s not awake,” and, “She’s too goddamn drunk to know what’s going on.”

I, it should go without saying, was not sexually active at the time.  I was a good little Evangelical and being a good little Evangelical meant that I wasn’t going to have sex before marriage.  Still, the whole thing struck me as being somewhat Byzantine.  I mean, really, I thought, what if I was in a position where I thought consent was given, then it was followed by drunkenness and then suddenly, boom, someone is calling me a rapist?

I am now genuinely embarrassed to admit that I had thoughts like that.  I am also willing to admit that I had thoughts like that because I knew fuck-all about relationships and sex and, well, women in general at the time.  That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.  It’s also a good excuse, since I was one o’ them no sex before marriage virgins at the time, which meant that I’d never given any consideration to the notion of consent before as it wasn’t even a remotely important issue to me.

Have I mentioned that feminism wasn’t really a thing that we talked about in church?

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I stand by my theory that the MRA-types prey on guys like me.  I think that in issues of sex and consent there are four general male camps: there are those who naturally don’t worry and don’t need to worry about such things because they’ve gotten laid a time or four and generally understand the difference between yes and no.  There are those who don’t think about such things very often.  There are those who don’t really know anything and can be swayed through their ignorance.  Then there are those who are rapists or just general rape-apologizing assholes who want to muddy the whole thing up for their own nefarious purposes.

It’s that fourth category that needs to be dealt with.  More importantly, it’s that fourth category’s influence on the second and third categories and, to a lesser extent, the first category that needs to be dealt with.  Asshole rapists, I firmly believe, are a small minority.  They need a critical mass of people in the not-asshole but also not-fully-cognizant-of-the-issue majority to hold sway in the conversation.

That’s where I get into the “Amanda Marcotte is on fire” stuff.  To wit:

With all attention being paid to rape culture lately—which is good!—I’m seeing a not-so-good consequence of it, which is a number of people, some well-intentioned, perpetuating the myth that rape frequently occurs on accident. This myth has grown up in place of the discredited (though still popular) myth that women “cry rape” to cover up for their slutty choices, and it goes a little something like this:

A man and a woman drink a lot of alcohol and have drunken, consensual sex. In the morning, the woman—who, being female, is hysterical and quick to jump to conclusions—feels that she wasn’t fully consenting, so she calls the cops. The man, who innocently believed it to be a consensual encounter, gets charged with rape and sent to the clink because of the SCARY FEMINIST laws that say that women with a blood alcohol limit over X cannot consent, so any sex with them is rape. The moral of this story is that innocent men are raping women left and right because they sincerely thought they had consent, but (because of hysterical, probably anti-sex feminists) drunk sex is now illegal. But only for men. Because of all-powerful, man-hating feminism.

My expertise on drunk sex is approximately zero.  My expertise on being drunk and hanging out with drunk women is higher, however.  As such I can say with a certain amount of authority that the scary-ass drunk-sex-leading-to-rape-accusations shit is pretty highly exaggerated because drunk people still know what they’re doing.  Someone who goes out and says, “I wanna get shitfaced and laid!” will probably then go forth and do exactly that.  This is where we get stories of embarrassing drunken hookups and walks of shame.  This is not where we get stories of rape.

As such, I’ll again let Amanda Marcotte take over the narrative:

Call it the Legend of the Accidental Rapist, if you will, but it’s horseshit. This is not what rape under the influence looks like. I link the Yes Means Yes post “Meet the Predators” constantly, but it’s time to do it again and keep doing it until people actually read it. Because it tells a very different, social science-and-actual-experience-backed story about rape and alcohol. Let me tell you that story:

There is a man who really likes raping women. It gets him off, the power and control he has, as well as the fear in her eyes as she realizes yes, this is really going to happen. He enjoys doing this as often as he can. But he doesn’t want to go to jail for it, nor does he want people to ostracize him socially if they discover he’s a rapist. (If nothing else, that makes it harder to find new victims!) So he attacks drunk women. He may even ply them with alcohol to get them drunker. He does this for two reasons: 1) They are easier to overpower and 2) No one believes them because they were drinking. After the rape, if the victim says she was raped, all you have to do is refer to the Legend of the Accidental Rapist, and everyone will rally to support you while dismissing the victim for being a sloppy drunk and a hysterical bitch who is too hopped up on feminist horseshit to think properly. Even better, most victims know that’s how it will go down, so they probably won’t say anything at all, leaving you to keep raping without much interference.

Amanda linked to a post called Meet the Predators in the block quote I used up there.  Here it is.  Go look.

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The truth, as they say, will set you free.  That’s something I needed to know as a rather naïve undergrad a decade ago.  Rapists prey on guys who are like I was back then, though, too.  They need guys like past me to operate.  It’s blatantly obvious to me now that someone who is too drunk to stand up or actually unconscious can’t consent.  It’s also blatantly obvious to me that there’s a difference between someone using drunkenness to rationalize a bad decision and someone being too drunk to consent.

That, really, is the fine line that the rapists and rape apologists want to walk.  “You’ll never again be able to make a drunken hookup at last call,” they say, “Because then she’ll cry rape in the morning.”  That’s not where the line is drawn at all.

More importantly, it’s obvious to me that this isn’t where the line is drawn.  It’s really a collection of attitudes that allow that.  Primarily the idea is the old one that men are uncontrollable horndogs and women are all frigid bitches who only use sex because they want to snag a man.  So when they get drunk and cry rape what they’re really saying is that you, man-who-doesn’t-understand-women, is that you didn’t pass the test and you’re about to get fucked for life by those damn predatory bitches.  That, and I say this as someone who has basically zero working knowledge of how these things work, isn’t how it works.

Here, I’ll let Amy Shumer tell you how that works.

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My point is this: it’s both far more complicated than the posters I saw on the wall at WIU and far simpler.  It’s more complicated in that there’s no clear line that drunken hookups = nonconsensual sex.  It’s simpler in that most people are already aware of that but the people who see that as an opportunity want to blur that line and make it so that everyone who’s ever been a bit buzzed and a bit excited and heading home with someone at 2 am suddenly has to think, “Oh, shit, now I’m gonna get accused of being a rapist!  I can’t have that!”

That’s where rape culture comes into play.  It’s far easier to say, “Hey, let’s say this isn’t a thing and then maybe blame it on the victims for being slutty-ass bitches,” than to say, “Maybe we need to be aware of the situation and I, myself, need to be more careful.”[1]

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The fact of the matter is, at least in my experience, guys know when other guys are skeevy assholes.  Ask any guy and he’ll tell you that he knows some guy who gives off that rapey vibe.  They don’t use that particular term, though.  They’re most likely to say something like, “I wouldn’t leave Biff alone with my girlfriend.”

Sometimes they’re just saying, “Biff is a pig who hits on every woman in sight.”  Sometimes, however, they’re saying, “Biff is a sex offender list registry waiting to happen.”  Generally, too, guys know the difference there.    It’s really not that hard, either.  Believe it or not, but women know it, too.  If you as a guy who isn’t a skeevy pig, are willing to sit down and talk to the women you know about it they’ll tell you, too.

I’m going to throw this suggestion out there to all single guys who are worried about it: do so.  Sit down with the women in your lives – whether they’re family, friends, or potential future sex partners – and talk to them.  If you aren’t a skeevy rapist type who they instinctively avoid they’ll fucking tell you what’s going on and what guys in your social group are guys about whom they’re concerned.

It’s not quite as easy as walking up and saying, “So, who do you think is a rapist?” though.  I mean, that might be a worthwhile conversation starter if everyone is worried about Biff and wants to make sure that he’s kept in check.  But don’t just assume it will be that easy.

For instance, I recently ran into a female acquaintance.  We were talking and I mentioned a guy we both knew.  She told me that he hits on every woman he sees.  That merely confirmed something I suspected about him, since the first time I met him he was making a woman I also first met that night uncomfortable with his attentions.

That said, I’ve always considered him harmless (part of that was because I watched the woman in question react to him, which was more along the lines of annoyance and pity than anything even approaching fear).  He was basically that kid in high school who is so socially inept that he’ll ask every girl at the lunchroom table if she wants to go on a date with him.  The conversation I had about him the other night confirmed that for me.  He didn’t seem to register as a threat so much as an annoyance.

What makes the difference in the lines between the well-adjusted and socially normal not-rapists, harmless but socially maladjusted and somewhat pathetic dudes, and actual rapists is that there’s a concerted effort to blur those lines.  The blurring of the lines only serves to help one of those groups.  If you haven’t figured out which group it is yet, I’ll give you a hint: it’s the rapists.  They have a pretty good chance of allying themselves with the harmless but socially maladjusted guys, though, because those guys might not be rapists but they’re likely to worry that someone might accuse them of being a rapist just because they’re hitting on every woman who comes in their line of sight.

I guess that, again, it gets back to my all-encompassing theory of women: they’re people, too.  Treat them as such and you’ll be fine.  Sometimes that means not having sex with them when they’re drunk and passed out (because, really, duh).  Sometimes that means talking to them about other people you both know and making a mental note about who to keep an eye on in the future.  Sometimes, and I suggest this with absolutely no flippancy whatsoever, it means discussing books or football or dogs or TV shows or whatever.

Because, again, women are people.  They have actual, honest to dog interests and they might just enrich your life by sharing them with you.  And that, my friends, is the best way to stop the whole rape culture bullshit.  If men would stop thinking of women as nothing more than mobile vagina deployment platforms it would help everything immensely.

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[1]This, by the by, seems like something that’s also applicable to the gun control “debate” in this country.  There’s a vast gulf between “outlaw drunken hookups” and “try to stop rape” that’s pretty much the same as the gulf between “ban all the guns” and “put reasonable rules in place that limit who can have guns and what kinds of guns they can own.”

It occurs to me, though, that we don’t live in a society here in America that wants to have a reasonable conversation about guns.  The reasoning, such as it is, is probably pretty much the same as why we can’t seem to have a reasonable conversation about rape.  A reasonable conversation, after all, might require someone, somewhere, to curtail their activities and we can’t have that as long as the person being asked to curtail their activities is part of the privileged class.

And, yes, I’m drawing a direct parallel between the gun owners who refuse to even entertain the notion that maybe there might be a time and a place to sit down and talk aobut guns as an actual integral part of the whole issue of gun violence and rapists.  If anyone who’s reading this can’t see how the previous paragraph creates a reasonable space to compare the two, feel free leave a comment and expose your own lack of critical thinking skills down below.

Oh, and I’d say that asking someone to think before they attempt sexual relations with a potentially-non-consenting partner is right up there with asking someone to eat more vegetables or brush their teeth, too.  It really should just be an expected act from a responsible individual.  Hell, I could draw a parallel to the idiots who think that CFL lightbulbs are a break on their personal freedom.  But I won't, because I don't have that kind of time.

In Which Geds Talks About Feminism, Part 1

I’m basically done with the Being Me stuff.  That doesn’t mean that I’m done with the thought processes behind it, though.  There’s just a bunch of stuff that kinda-sorta fits in context but didn’t fit in the narrative I chose.  That doesn’t mean it’s not important.  It just means that I’ve been working somewhat harder on composition and not throwing all the shit I could find against the closest vertical surface.

Part of it, too, is that there are a couple of topics that I think are important but that I hesitate to say anything about except in a roundabout way.  The big one on that list is feminism.  That’s one of those things that privileged suburban white boys don’t talk about much on the internet unless they’re the type of privileged suburban white boy who wants to go to feminist sites and tell the people there that they’re all feminazis and they just don’t get how hard it is to be a privileged suburban white boy, man.

There’s also the bit where I came to the party kinda late and in a kinda sidelong fashion.  I lacked a language to discuss the topic outside of things that had been fought and re-fought long before I arrived.  As such, I defined the whole thing for myself to my own satisfaction and then I pretty much moved on.  It wasn’t my fight, it wasn’t my place, it wasn’t my thing.

This was further complicated by the fact that feminism and discussions of feminism hit me at about the same time I was withdrawing from Christianity.  I needed something to continue to fuel my neuroses in regards to my relations to the female gender in the absence of all the Jesus stuff.  Rape culture, male privilege, the notion of the male gaze and all that other stuff fit the bill perfectly.  I basically replaced, “Oh, shit, Jesus gonna hate me if I have sexual thoughts about women,” with, “Oh, shit, that woman is going to assume I’m a rapist if I so much as look at or talk to her in any way, shape, or form that isn’t completely and totally on-the-level professional.”  So, hey, rationalization for the win, amirite?

So let’s say that’s not a thing anymore.  Let’s say I want to talk about something that I consider to be damn important.  Since my circulation on this blog is decidedly small, anyway, I figure I can go right ahead and do that.

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Back in December I wrote a post about Soundgarden that ended in a bizarre little aside about an early ‘90s Christian surf rock band that went by the moniker Dakoda Motor Co.  I ended up comparing Dakoda Motor Co. to No Doubt and making this observation:

What Dakoda lacks in bare midriffs and pointed social commentary compared to No Doubt they make up for with, um, happy Jesus-y stuff.  So they’ve got that goin’ for ‘em.

It turns out that this comparison was less apt than I thought.  The true secular match for Dakoda was Letters to Cleo, which I’ve called the most tragically underrated band of the ‘90s.[1]  But that’s not my point at all.  My point is the observation above.

One of the things that occurs to me, and this post of awesome songs by ‘90s bands fronted by women kind of confirms it, is that I came of age during the golden years of riot grrrl feminism.  That particular golden age did not make its way past the doors of my church, however.  The difference between the Dakoda videos and No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” that lead to my statement quoted above wasn’t really an observation about one obscure Christian band against one major secular band.  It was an observation about the Christianity in which I grew up against the larger world in which I grew up.  We simply did not talk about important social issues in church.

Okay, that’s not actually true.  We did talk about social issues.  What we talked about, though, was how awesome it was going to be when everyone accepted Jesus and made Jesus the center of their lives and Jesus fixed all the social ills of the world.  It should surprise no one anywhere, ever, that Jesus’s fix for the world would be to make everything look exactly like the church thought it should look.  As such, in a weird way, Dakoda Motor Co. was making a social statement.  The statement was just, “Jesus is awesome and will make everything awesome.”  That’s a fantastic sentiment.  It’s also completely and totally wrong.

So let’s talk about feminism.

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Actually, I’m gonna yield the floor to the honorable Gwen Stefani, Esq. to make a few remarks.





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I really don’t have that much to say about feminism as a personal thing, now that I think about it.  It all boils down to the statement that I began using in college when I was introduced to the idea of feminism as a thing to be embraced and celebrated as opposed to a thing to be feared and ridiculed.  Mostly, though, it boils down to why I hate using that statement.

The statement I started using was, “Women are people, too.”

The statement I would have preferred to use was, “Women are people.”

Actually, the statement I would have preferred to use was nothing.  It seemed pretty obvious to me that women are people.  However, it strikes me that in a world where we talk about how, say, President Obama fared in elections with women and minorities that we’re saying two things: first that women are a minority and second that neither women nor minorities truly count.  Post-election Republican rhetoric certainly followed that logic.

Looking back I realize that I didn’t get that idea from the Bible or church.  I got that idea from Shirley Manson, Nina Gordon, Louise Post, Sarah McLachlan, Kay Hanley, and Gwen Stefani.  Hell, I even got it from Alanis Morrisette and Courtney Love.[2]  It was simply an accepted part of my life that there are women out there and that women have something to say and that what they had to say was valid because it was part of their experience and their existence.  That didn’t necessarily mean I had to care what they wanted to say, but I don’t think that’s really a litmus test.

There are lots of white guys who say stupid shit that I don’t feel the need to listen to, after all.

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The problem that I have talking about feminism, I think, is how feminism fits into my Unified Field Theory of Group Dynamics.  Whenever you get involved with a group there are a collection of self-proclaimed gatekeepers.  Those gatekeepers think that it’s their duty and sacred mission to keep the riff-raff out and make sure that only the properly informed and vetted are allowed into the discussion.

This, by the by, is why I love the feminist book store sketches on Portlandia.  I don’t really see Fred and Carrie making fun of feminists there.  I see Fred and Carrie making fun of a certain variety of feminist.  For that matter, they’re making fun of a certain variety of atheist and a certain variety of Christian.  They’re also making fun of me.

Part of my Unified Field Theory of Group Dynamics requires me to admit that I’ve appointed myself as a gatekeeper of something, too.  In my specific case it’s music.  I am a proud child of the ‘90s.  I judge all music based on how it stacks up to the music I started listening to in the ‘90s and, more specifically, how it stacks up to the music I liked in the ‘90s.

To that end when I run into one of those people who says that there hasn’t been a single good album since 1979 I say, “Man, you’re out of touch.  Soundgarden and Pearl Jam are so much better than Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.”  Then I turn around and shake my fist at the damn kids listening to their Biebers and their One Directions and their Taylor Swifts.

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If you have two brain cells to rub together you’re looking at my example above and saying, “Whoa, wait a minute.  There’s a difference here.”  You’re correct, there is a massive difference.

My boss might be a Black Sabbath fan.  There’s a reasonably good chance that he’s not going to fire me for being a Soundgarden fan or make sure that I get paid 75 cents on the dollar, either.  If I were to get elected President in 2016 there’s pretty much zero chance that it would be declared historic on the grounds that I’m the first Soundgarden President.  I probably wouldn’t get death threats for it, either.

On some level I’m a fan of Soundgarden because that was the world in which I came of age.  If I were a 13 year-old in a van in 2004 I might have ended up with Nickelback as my band of choice.[3]  If we go back to 1984 it might have been U2.[4]

What I’m saying is that context matters.  We find things when we find them.  Self-proclaimed gatekeepers, however, tend to think that’s not the case.  They don’t want anyone to join a group unless the new people join in exactly the right way and with exactly the right motivations.

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The reason I bring all of this up is because it occurs to me that being a child of the ‘90s did actually equip me to discuss feminism in 2012.  I couldn’t tell you what the difference is between 1st wave and 2nd wave feminism.  I’m still a little fuzzy on the difference between Gloria Steinem and Gloria Allred.[5]  I’m a little baffled at people who find it necessary to label themselves as “sex-positive,” because who the fuck isn’t sex-positive?[6]

I think I’m properly equipped because I heard No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” about seven thousand times between 1995 and 1999.  No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” is pretty much a perfect introduction to what feminists are talking about in 2012, what with the rape culture and the slutwalks and the notion of white male privilege.

The reason I tossed “Sunday Morning” into my bit where I gave the floor the Stefani was because that, too, encapsulates a central point of my theory on feminism as asserting that women are people.  I don’t know if it’s intended to be a statement about how women are treated like “Just a Girl” is, but I do know that I like what it has to say.

You're trying my shoes on for a change
They look so good but fit so strange
Out of fashion so I can’t complain

Seems about right.

Meanwhile, though, this is already much longer than I thought it would be.  So let’s make it a two parter.

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[1]I’m not gonna lie to you, Marge.  That’s probably based 90% on the fact that, holy shit, Letters to Cleo was way too amazing to be a marginal one hit wonder and 10% because I want Kay Hanley to find my blog while doing random Google searches for Letters to Cleo.  Because Kay Hanley is awesome and right up there with Louise Post and Shirley Manson in my book o’ kick-ass ‘90s rock frontwomen.

[2]I’ve never really liked Morrisette.  I’m not that big a fan of Courtney Love and Hole, either.  That said, I was having a text-based conversation with a friend about ‘90s music the other day while listening to a Pandora station with Letters to Cleo, Garbage, Veruca Salt, Republica, and the Breeders as seeds.  I made my standard, “But Hole still sucks,” statement.  My friend pointed out a couple songs he thought were good from them.  Then the station threw “Celebrity Skin” down my earholes and I had to admit that, yeah, that song was pretty good.

Also, too, it’s probably important to bring country music into this one.  I started listening to mainstream country in the late ‘90s because I made some terrible decisions during my sophomore and junior years of high school.  There were a bunch of really good country singin’ women in those days.  So, y’know, there’s that.  I still like Terri Clark.

[3]Ugh.  Kill theoretical me.  Kill theoretical me now.

[4]Totally okay with that.

[5]Okay, I’m not.  I mean, I fucking linked to stuff about them.  But it seemed punny to me at the time.

[6]This one actually does genuinely baffle me.  My sole interaction with someone who labeled herself as “sex-positive” was on o’ them online dating things.  And I tell this story because it amuses me to no end.

I got an email from someone who lived a thousand miles away.  The email said, and I paraphrase, “I’m going to be in your area next week.  Want to get a drink?”

I, it should be noted, am I proper dipshit.  So I went to her profile and looked around for some indication that, like, she was planning to relocate and looking for friends or something.  Such things were not forthcoming.  There were, however, keywords like “casual sex,” and “kinky,” and “sex-positive.”  So I was genuinely confused and sent back an email that said (and, again, I paraphrase), “Sure.  But why?”  The response then pretty much spelled the whole thing out and the gist was that I should have been paying more attention to the “casual sex” bits.

Needless to say, we never did get that drink.

Being Me 4: Resentment

The first time I lost weight I had a somewhat incorrect interpretation of what it would mean to no longer be the fat kid.  Life for most people is pretty much event based.  We all think that when A happens then B and B means that I have arrived.  So when you’re the fat kid who gets picked on you think things like, “When I lose weight everyone will like me.”

The harsh truth of life (or, maybe not, depending) is that nobody chooses to like or dislike you based on your weight.  Well, most people don’t.  Some people are shallow assholes like that.

Still, I did not know that.  Or if I did know that I chose not to believe it.  That might be one of those six one way, half a dozen the others sort of things.

With my goal in mind I worked obsessively.  I dropped 110 pounds in about nine months.  If my weight went down by less than 3 pounds a week I started to worry.  If anyone presented me with food outside of my narrow limits I got mad (including birthday cake, might I add.  On my own birthday).  I also worked out five or six days a week, generally by riding my bike twenty to thirty miles.

I’m naturally athletic to a certain extent.  I’m coordinated, I’m physically capable, and I can generally pick up a sport pretty easily.  I’m never the best player in any given game, but I’m usually not the worst by a wide margin.  That said, endurance athletics really aren’t my thing.  Once I get in the groove I can take a bike for 20 to 30 miles pretty easily.  I just can’t do it fast.  And by the end of my rides I’d be huffing and puffing.  This, of course, is the goal of exercise.

Everyone needs motivation when there’s a little ways to go and they just want to die.  When I needed motivation I thought about my friends.  Specifically, I imagined that my friends were laughing at me and telling me that I’d fail.  My motivation came from wanting to say, “Fuck you, I did it in spite of you,” to my friends.

That’s…that’s a little weird.

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Like I said, life is pretty much event based.  That isn’t really a good thing or a bad thing.  It’s just a thing.  It’s an inevitability of the human condition and the way we think about time.  We want to see a beginning, a middle, and an end so we invent them.  Then we tell stories about them.

My events, being the social outcast loner type, were all of the events that said, “You’re accepted,” or the seemingly far more common, “You’re not accepted.”  Generally the future ones were places where I could, theoretically, finally say, “I have arrived and people like me,” and the past ones were all places where that had explicitly not happened.

I didn’t really get invited to parties.  In high school I found that out because I’d hear people talking about their parties the following week.  In the few years after high school I thought I’d left that behind.  Then I started hanging out with a bunch of people who I met at church and hung out with at least two to three times a week at officially sanctioned events.  I thought we were really good friends.  Then it gradually dawned on me that I was still the odd man out.  I learned about it the same way I learned about it in high school: by hearing people talk about stuff they did when I wasn’t around.

It hurt.  I didn’t know why I wasn’t being included and, more importantly, I didn’t know how to ask.  To this day I don’t know why I wasn’t included in things.  I don’t think it’s because they didn’t like me.

I do know, however, that when I needed motivation to accomplish my own things I was able to summon more than enough from imagining proving them wrong.  I reserved all of my spite for the people I called my friends.

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When I first ran across the Pick-Up Artist community it seemed like it was just a bunch of people tossing around truisms that I’d picked up over the years.  That’s the funny thing about the internet.  There are all kinds of people who have all kinds of ideas and they generally present said ideas in such a way as to seem pretty reasonable.

So when I first ran across the idea that the way to get women was to treat them like shit it made a certain amount of sense.  The logic was fairly inescapable.  It’s common knowledge[1] that chicks dig bad boys, after all.  So the idea of finding a woman, treating her like shit, and thereby getting her attention and lovin’ made a certain amount of sense.

I didn’t pay that much attention, though, because being a jerk to get my own ends really wasn’t that high on my list of things to do.[2]

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Eventually I realized that the PUAs were basically a sub-set of the Mens’ Rights Activist groups and those guys were self-evidently assholes.  I also realized that there was a specific and familiar air of resentment that fueled both groups.  I recognized it because, well, it was a message that resonated with me.

See, when you’re the socially maladjusted nerd you wait for those moments that offer you validation.  The best person to provide that validation is the most attractive girl you can find.  If you date the most attractive girl in your class it must mean that you’re cool, right?[3]

If you pay attention to how the PUAs and MRAs talk about what they do (and, y’know, who they did it to) it’s obvious that they literally do not give a shit about women.  All they’re doing is making sure they can brag in front of the other guys.  This is the irrevocable mark of the guy who is still smarting from rejection and doesn’t know any healthy ways to deal with it.  So he takes it out on someone else.

If anyone then tells him he’s being an asshole about the whole thing he resorts to bullying.  It’s that same high school locker room level of bullying, too.  The PUAs will say that anybody who criticizes them must be an inferior specimen of manhood.  Or gay.  Or a quisling trying to curry favor with women who will never sleep with them.

It’s pathetic, really.

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The only way to defeat resentment is through a combination of self-sufficiency and empathy.  I believe that resentment and empathy are opposing forces.  The tie breaker in the tug of war between the two is how the person making the choice views him- or herself.  If you’re confident in who you are it’s much easier to choose empathy.  Empathy requires vulnerability and powerlessness to function.  Resentment covers up vulnerability and trades powerlessness for the feeling of power that comes from lashing out and causing pain to others.

Resentment, in short, allows a form of bullying.  It’s why one of the common responses of the bullied is to become a bully.  It’s much easier if you’re the sort who overcomes some bad thing to then see that same quality in another and resent them for it or to see people who you believed could have helped you escape it but didn’t and resent them for not taking action.

Resentment, in short, is a gateway to hatred.  That’s why it’s the opposite of empathy.  And we’re going to talk about that next time.

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[1]”Common knowledge” and “accurate notions about reality” are often non-overlapping magisteria, after all.

[2]Being a jerk in general, though, is always an option.  As is being a jerk for the lulz.  What’re ya gonna do?

[3]This, I’m convinced, is the source of all of the TV shows and movies and whatnot where the big, fat, selfish slob is dating/married to the hot chick in spite of the fact that all the slob seems to have going for him is a long-suffering companion and (generally) a sense of humor.  Although I will say that the trope got subverted in Superbad between Emma Stone and Jonah Hill.  That one at least set up Jonah Hill as the loveable loser who managed to learn how to not be a selfish slob.  I think.

I feel like I need to go watch Superbad now.

Because I Haven't Linked to Charles Pierce In At Least 24 Hours

And because it's completely and totally applicable in the great, grand scheme of things I've been writing about for the last week.  But also because I could do a daily segment of "things I want you to read by Charles Pierce."

You may have noticed that Augusta National and its boss, fake good-old-boy Billy Payne, has gotten its green polyester-pantsed ass in a crack now that a woman named Virginia Rometty is running IBM, and the boss of IBM traditionally gets a membership into Confederacy Acres, but Virginia Rometty lacks the essential penis, so the club's retrograde policy toward half the human race gets another airing. Only this time, it's not just some bothersome activist that they can ignore, it's a dues-fully-paid member of the corporate elite.

Confronted with these facts, New York Times golf writer Karen Crouse opined that she'd rather not cover the Masters until it moves its withered hindquarters out of the 1850's, thanks.

So far so good, right?

Contacted by The Associated Press, Times sports editor Joe Sexton said the comments were, "completely inappropriate and she has been spoken to."

Obviously a woman saying she doesn't want to cover golf at a sexist institution is being inappropriate.  Also obviously the men folk must put that uppity little lady back in her place.  If we don't do that now, who knows what will happen next?  They might go out in public and start careers and even vote.

Hell, they might start to think that they're people.  People who are even equal to the men folk.  We certainly shouldn't allow that.

Tellin' it Like it is...Again...

Cat Valente is one of my favorite fiction authors, mostly because, holy shit can that woman turn a phrase.  I believe I've mentioned that from time to time.

The SFF corner of the internets had a blow-up last week.  If you want to know what happened, Scalzi (who also had something to say on this sort of thing a while back) has the history and various weirdnesses available.  Here's the basic story, though: a respected male writer took a giant dump all over the slate for the Clarke awards and the internet went into a frenzy of (mostly good-natured) craziness.  Because that's what the internet does.

Valente made the point that, sadly, gets made after every one of these things happen.  I don't say "sadly" because it's tired and, geez, why won't these women just shut up about it.  I say "sadly" because I'm genuinely saddened that we keep having to see these things at all.  I wish people could figure out that a woman who voices her own opinion isn't a bitch or a harpy, but a woman with her own goddamn opinion.  I wish people could figure out that, "You deserve to be raped, you bitch," is not now, not ever, and will never, ever, ever, EVER be a correct response to anything, especially someone simply stating her opinion.

I also wish that all the men that then say that the woman in question is complaining about nothing and really should just leave everything well enough alone would do the world a favor and count the number of times random strangers have threatened to rape them for the sin of publicly stating an opinion and shut the fuck up until the reach the number, oh, say, 1.  That would solve a lot of problems right there.

Either way, Cat Valente, folks:

I’m frustrated. I’m tired of the disparity of voices, of who gets written off and who gets their blog posts discussed in The Guardian being dismally predictable. I’m tired of still having the “when men say it it’s awesome and when women say it it’s bitchy” conversation that was supposed to be sorted in 1985. Not because I have a whole bunch of horrible shit about awards that I’d like to say. I don’t. But I have to tell you that I don’t, so that you’ll think I’m a nice girl, so that I don’t come off as threatening, so that you’ll listen to what I say and not just write me off as an angry feminist…what? Bitch. Because feminist bitches are not to be listened to, don’t you know. They are not to be considered, not the way Priest was considered, even by people who disagreed, even by people who thought he went too far and too personal and too much.

It's not exactly as flowery as the Dirge for Prester John, but that'll preach...

Once Again, Scalzi Proves He's a Mensch

He's given a doctor friend his platform for an anonymous guest post on one of the current big women's health issues.

Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.

Read it.  Pass it on.