Thursday, November 16, 2006

"____is inherently ____"

So riddle me--that is, us--this:

How is

"[name yer sexact] is inherently sexist, and therefore preaching against it is for womens' own good"

different from

"gaysex is inherently degrading, and therefore preaching against it is for the poor deluded souls' own good."

?

Oh, that's a totally rhetorical question, by the way. We realize some people may want to come along and protest, but we are pre-emptively dismissing them because as we understand it, they all belong to a posse of some sort, and have an Agenda, and are generally up to no good.

Further, they might want to introduce such things as context and nuance into the discussion, and we hate that shit.

So when we say,

"Shaking your finger at other peoples' sex lives is inherently homophobic*,"

we aren't terribly interested in hearing your arguments to the contrary. We are all about the empathy here, and the empowerment and self-respect of You People; which means, "you listen to us, if you know what's good for you, and stop whining as though we're trying to take your toys away." LALALALALACAN'THEARYOU

Also, we observe that your fly is undone, and you have a grease stain on your tie.


*oh yah, and: inherently sexist. And misogynist. And puritanical. And proto-fascist. And just plain assy. -Inherently-.

35 comments:

Renegade Evolution said...

I wonder if bob's ears are burning...

Rootietoot said...

now you don't even know if he's wearing a tie.You're just making assumptions based on preconcieved notions. You're unenlightened and need self actualization n stuff.

antiprincess said...

I replied to that comment over at my place. I don't normally like to, what do they call it, "fisk" people, but that seemed to be the only way to say everything I had to say.

ben said...

america's real national pastime is the critique of other people's sex practices. why do you hate america?

belledame222 said...

butbut he's a RADICAL FEMINIST. hence, it is okay for him to be a smug paternalistic fuckhead.

whereas that woman over there who's trying to talk about her own body and desires, she's just clearly a tool of the patriarchy, and really, she is trying to silence this...guy...which is very Bad. anti-feminist! boo! hiss!

you really don't get how this works, do you?

belledame222 said...

piny: you can try, but i bet you'll just be dismissed as part of the pro-porn posse.

which is kind of cool in that it's all alliterative 'n' shit.

belledame222 said...

there you go.

well, let's tawk, as they say.

belledame222 said...

> where we had this whole non-discussion about how class theory didn't marginalize class-complicated groups at all, thankyouverymuch. >

how d'you mean?

i'm amazed he even stepped off his own blog long enough to have the non-discussion somewhere else.

wait--do you mean jensen or goff? or does it even matter.

so creepy. they're like Dim after an upwardly-mobile makeover or something.

belledame222 said...

You know, some people, eventually there's really no possible response other than

*poke*

Whadda maroon.

belledame222 said...

wait, I -like- CS Lewis.

William Bennett, maybe.

and yeah, Dim resembles Tim in more ways than one.

Alon Levy said...

Give me "sex outside a relationship shows lack of commitment" over that any day.

Anonymous said...

things that really piss me off:

"You clearly missed whateveritis 101 and I am not here to educate you. Read the list (500 strong) of must-read books I listed and then we can talk."

means: don't think I'm going to let your intellect anywhere *near* my presuppositions.

"You can't analogize between X and Y with regard to A. because that would mean that they were the same with regard to B. Everyone knows that's not the case, asshole"

means: I have no, absolutely no intellectual self respect, but as I own this blog/am beloved of its owner, there's no fucking way you're going to win this one.

"Thank you so-and-so for that moving testimonial. Anecdotes like that are worth all the reasoning in the world. You certainly let Mr. WhoeveritwasIwasarguingwith have it more eloquently than the most penetrative analytical acumen could have managed."

Means: he's stopped posting, so we might as well all pile on...

belledame222 said...

And you know, I wouldn't even mind the whole anecdotal thing; it's just, again, it's rather -selective.- Someone who -doesn't- take the party line tells an anecdote and not only is it dismissed as either 1) irrelevant in the greater scheme of things 2) probably not true anyway, this person is trolling, but sometimes you even get people now taking the "anecdotes don't matter; we are talking about FACTS and DATA and STATISTICS here."

and if it's a very emotional story, as opposed to just, "say, I really like pudding! (and by the way, Tom, i was actually using the Pudding Metaphor -before- the discussion between you and rootie wrt puddings: wooooo), the response ranges from -crickets crickets- to, not often, but occasionally, something along the lines of, "big deal. now let me tell you about MY pain..."

and, too, 'course, sometimes in the very same place, someone might come along with data or stats that run counter to party line, and, particularly if it's a man doing it, "oh, typical, you with your PALE and MALE logic; can't you see so and so has just poured her heart out??"

and/or, furious dismissal of the study as bullshit because blahblah, which it may well be, but the thing is people have been uncritically accepting authoritative-sounding "studies" all along, here, even though clearly -no one- here knows the scientific method from a grease-proof paper bag, assuming they even openly acknowledge that yes, IN fact, that's what most of them there statistical-type studies actually rely on: the scientific method. The ones that are, you know, taken -seriously.-

Anonymous said...

BD

What do you mean pudding "metaphor"? I am getting really tired of the exploitation of what is, after all, a very serious issue in its own right - the status of suet in the society we live in - by people who don't really give a fuck about it, but think that it can be made to serve their turn. I'm sure Rootie agrees with me.

As to you getting the idea first - frankly, I probably just (subconsciously) stole it. Or maybe it's a question of idle hands thinking alike?

And that little rant of mine in the last post shouldn't be taken too seriously - I recently got into a horrible squabble on another blog, and I've been quietly venting ever since.

belledame222 said...

wait, which rant? and now i wanna know what the other horrible squabble was about. especially if it involved suet.

so, do they still really use suet Over There? i thought the whole "saturated fat" deal had pretty much put paid to its use. anyway it did over here, i think. now they're working on getting rid of the trans fats.

Anonymous said...

The squabble was on this thread:

http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/?p=444

Oh yes, we most certainly do have suet over here. The American students at my college are always complaining about it, and the fact that coffee, for instance, is normally served with whole milk here rather than the snow-white chemical emulsion they're used to. I heard one of them groaning over dinner last night: "why does English food always make your heart hurt afterwards?" This country is not culinarily correct.

belledame222 said...

"non-dairy creamer"=whiteout.

belledame222 said...

ohhhhh, good lord. Jimmy Ho, AnahandraD, Sam, and zomg, g-m-r, She Whose Name Must Never Be Posted Aloud. and good ol' loopy Infidel and a couple of ( seem to remember) kind of choadly dudes just for good measure, and Violet slipping into...whatever mode that is, the one that had her shutting down a thread after one too many people called her on racism (not before being really patronizing and grossly mischaracterizing them as a clique of friends who're all just out to cry "racism!"); the one I decided I really don't much care for, finally. no frigging wonder you've got forehead-shaped dents in your desk. dude. my sympathies. take two suet puddings and call me in the morning.

p.s. Sam as a "voice of reason" -dies-

Amber Rhea said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
belledame222 said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Amber Rhea said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Am I right in thinking that GiGi's name must never be posted in full because she runs elaborate internet searches to see whose saying bad things about her today?

Reclusive Leftist is still worth reading, if only for Cicely's persistently good posting; and to be fair to the Good Doctor, she can write and think well enough so long as she keeps away from certain triggers. But her powers of rationcinaton seem to evaporate when pornstitution comes up. And of course one of the reasons she's so keen to have the posters you mentioned on such threads is that they make her look rational by comparison.

I'll need a prescription for those puddings.

Anonymous said...

That should be "who's saying" not "whose saying". There goes my gold star for grammar.

belledame222 said...

I was friendly with VS for a long time, and yes, she is smart and sane and usually thoughtful; and truth be known, I'm not entirely comfortable with my feelings now. I'd -like- to feel like I want to reconnect, sometimes, but...

actually you know it's not primarily the pronstitution business with her, so much, that's bothered me; she is, as you say, at least on the moderate side of that position; and she has actually apologized and reconsidered thoughtfully when I once objected to what I saw as a heterosexist remark, which counted for a lot with me.

but there were a series of other problems i had, sort of related, again, to heterosexism, which, in and of themselves, i could and did let go, individually.

then there was the business where She Who Shall Not picked a fight with me on VS' boards, and, though it took me a while to process it, ultimately i was seriously pissed at VS for what i see as enabling the woman (she's "combative") when she's so obviously an abusive fuckhead, I mean in -so- many contexts and in with -so- many people; what, just because she agrees with you here, and she fought the good fight, she's on the side of the angels?

and yes, you guess aright. viddy:

http://fetchmemyaxe.blogspot.com/2006/05/trumps.html

and then

http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/?p=282

start around post 60.

and then i have friends who have other problems with VS, and i took that into consideration, although, again, by itself, i don't usually let that be the deciding factor;

but the last straw was the gender/race business, as I was saying.

entry points:

http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/?p=370

http://guyaneseterror.blogspot.com/2006/09/me-and-my-ass.html

http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/09/06/unacceptable/

http://bintalshamsa.blogspot.com/2006/09/another-example-of-privilege-existing.html

As with others of this sort of eruption, and as I've said several times, by my lights it's not the original gaffe that's nearly so offensive as the way she dealt with it when people came in to challenge her. I'd rarely seen her actually -shut down- a thread before; certainly i've seen get -way- more rancorous and generally pointless than this one. And dismissing everyone as "Shannon's friends" is imo completely unacceptable; it would've taken two minutes' worth of trackbacking and reading at other peoples' sites to see where they were actually coming from. I just lost a ton of respect, there. And to my knowledge she's not acknowledged any of that or sought out any of the players therein in the interim. (if she has, I apologize and recant). She did however go very righteous about the Alas business, and, well, yeah, that kind of clinched it for me. We're just clearly not coming from the same place at all.


So, yeah. Maybe I should've said something directly before delinking, since we'd at least been on cordial enough terms to be emailing each other; but, you know...well, i just get tired, sometimes. And really, what can you say in these situations? Ultimately i'm not sure it'd change anything.

cicely rocks; she knows she's welcome over here anytime.

belledame222 said...

as per the g-m-r thing, you know--it's not just that i had an ugly fight with her and VS is still friendly with her, or didn't take sides in that; that in itself, i totally get. hell, i don't expect all my friends' friends to like each other. and you know, we were still friendly when she knew I couldn't STAND Twisty; and I knew she'd knocked Bitch Lab. sometimes it happens. she's defended TF to me; I've defended BL to her; we tacitly agreed to disagree; that, well, i have my -strong- opinions and no doubt she hers, but okay fine. At the time i mean.

but g-m-r...i mean, the woman is so COMPLETELY, OBVIOUSLY INSANE. i mean, not just eccentric but MEAN-insane; and how can someone as generally lucid as VS genuinely not see this? and how can someone who lauds her for her "feminist creds" just blithely ignore places where she goes ranting all over other women with shit like "bitch, stupid cunt, you're that professional virgin who had her hymen embalmed" ? I think, only if you don't -want- to see it; and the subsequent shit with the racism thread clinched it for me. disagreeing, even passionately, is one thing; but i have a really hard time with people who have that much invested in floating down Denial. about -behavior,- i mean, not ideology. i -really- have a problem with people who go, "oh, that's just how so and so [who's being an EPIC asshole] is." Aren't we all just how we are?

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the links - all very educational.

The Shannon thing - I'm pretty sure that VS'sreaction was due to her finding herself in what must have seemed a topsy-turvy situation: she's used to being the perhaps helpless but certainly well-intentioned accuser of other people's wrongdoings. And I think that, by and large, she has been that. But she's been so long in the role that she can't easily cope with having her own behaviour or judgement questioned. Hence the peeved bewilderment: "doesn't everybody know that *I'm* the good guy? Ungrateful bastards."

As far as her middle position in the matter of pornstitution is concerned, I think that it's more apparent than real. She concedes that such shenanigans might, in a perfect world, be relatively harmless: no harm in Captain James Tiberius Kirk paying Lt. Uhura for a hand-job, for instance. But she is perfectly clear that in the world we inhabit and that of the forseeable future pornstitution is nigh universally detrimental to womankind. She's been trying to get the other rads (I'm using the word as short-hand for "anti-porn internet radical feminists")on her site to sign up for this - that pornstitution is theoretically ok but always in practice an abomination - but most of them have found even this concession unacceptable.

The Sam-Cicely exchange on the "Worms" thread is very revealing of the kind of contributor VS is favouring these days. Sam's final efforts (at the end of the thread) - against a magnanimous opponent who is clearly anxious to find common ground - are a disgrace.

belledame222 said...

>doesn't everybody know that *I'm* the good guy? Ungrateful bastards."


Oh yah, that's been a common thread among all the "butbutbut how DARE you insinuate i might be RACIST?? i am NOT a racist! YOU'RE the racist! you hurt my feelings! i'ma go bite my pillow now" blowups (there have been many) this past while.

thing is, again: one has opportunities to attempt to make it up at any point.

and while shannon herself works my last nerve in other respects--i recently had a big fight with her on feministe, wherein she called me a whiner and i told her to go fuck herself, among the lowlights--she was right about this. and Bint, who can be and later was fierce as hell, was more than gracious at first, even going out of her way to say, "look, this doesn't make [you] a bad person, but..."

but no dice. and lumping all of them together as some sort of hysterical "police" was just so offensive on so many levels, and then the "cut his mike" move...

yeah, i'm sure that's exactly right, your interpretation; thing is, if one is smart and interested in evolving, one, how you say, examines oneself, and perhaps reassesses, once in a while.

this doesn't seem to have happened. like, at all. and as i've said, as "flamewars" go that one was a frigging tea party. so i don't have a whole lot of sympathy in this case. we all get our egos bruised; hopefully, we deal with it.

and as i also said, the fact that -all- of those names were completely unknown to her hitherto said something to me as well; they're not -that- obscure, at least some of them, if one is willing to explore a -little- bit, and one would like to think that any leftist worth the moniker would be.

-shrug- look, it doesn't take particularly keen insight to observe that it's really, really white in there. if one is okay with that, then okay; but then one ought not to be surprised when one ventures outside one's chosen focus to talk about, say, -race,- and people take exception. the audience is listening, you know?

belledame222 said...

and then, too: I probably wouldn't have said anything about this bit if it hadn't ended up where it did; but truthfully, why even post such a thing at all? I mean, seriously, why frame it like that? Why is this important? Yeah, swear up down and sideways that no it's not in fact a more genteel way of saying "gender trumps race;" but again, nuanced or not, why even say it? I just don't get it. Like I said, though, really different worldview, apparently, I think. which was a surprise, considering how similar i thought we were and i guess in many ways superficially we still are, but...

belledame222 said...

>Sam's final efforts (at the end of the thread) - against a magnanimous opponent who is clearly anxious to find common ground - are a disgrace.>

zomg, they're hilarious, that bunch.

well, delphyne's kamikaze run at Amanda, I was particularly entertained by, partly because I had serious gripes with Amanda as well as delphyne & co; i thought, well, this is fascinating! Here is one of the Interwebs most popular feminist blogger's who's, over the past year or two, slowly been coming around -toward- your position; okay, not nearly there yet and possibly never will be entirely, but, the -direction.- Wouldn't you think that the -last- thing you'd want to do is hurl yourself at the woman going, "no, you are NOT in the middle; you are NOT; you are one of THEM. Go! Go be with them! Go!"

well, I would've; but what do i know. i mean, if one is more concerned with staying totally pure than actually, you know, accomplishing anything, then I guess it makes sense. which, i was like, please, don't let me get in the way of that!...

as per AM, given what had happened with Random Bird and a few other things, all I could think was, "live by the radfem, die by the radfem."

that, and, "pass the popcorn..."

Anonymous said...

thing is, if one is smart and interested in evolving, one, how you say, examines oneself, and perhaps reassesses, once in a while. - BD

A lot of rads seem to have this problem: they don't know how to pick their fights, and they never back down. They'll be like little Jimmy Ho - arguing about something peripheral like an etymology as though their lives depended on it; or like GiGi, running down their reserves of public credibility on some pointless personal vendetta. Often the sticking-point will have nothing to do with feminism at all, never mind the particular variety they claim to espouse.

I think that it's very much the case that a certain kind of dogmatism attracts a certain kind of personality; but the obduracy and want of ordinary sympathy (pretended aspirations to a greater good notwithstanding) don't stop at the party line, and in the end they end up compromising it.

By the way, BD, nobody's reading this long-forgotten thread but us, right?

belledame222 said...

-shrug- probably. hard to say, really. eyeballs are everywhere. ew.

anyway: o, Jimmy Ho, bless his giblets.

"Alas a Blog is dead to me."

i am never gonna forget that one, some kind of award for that, really.

>I think that it's very much the case that a certain kind of dogmatism attracts a certain kind of personality; but the obduracy and want of ordinary sympathy (pretended aspirations to a greater good notwithstanding) don't stop at the party line, and in the end they end up compromising it.>

yes, that's well put.

well, and you see this with gigi (hee! that is excellent), going into meltdowns over, y'know, something or other wrt fan fiction, or Israel-Palestine, or just plain someone looked at her funny, or...

Anonymous said...

"Alas, poor Ampersand, I knew him, Cheryl...
but when I found out that he was a pander to the patriarchy, I walked out on him, slamming the door behind me. Cheryl, nobody should ever speak to him again!!!."

By the way, BD, I was under the impression that "Jimmy" was a woman.

belledame222 said...

oh, really? i don't think so; not just because of the same either, from things sie's said; but i could be wrong, i suppose.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps I jumped the gun when s/he wrote this:

"Anyway, I can understand that you feel very comfortable being a man in a patriarchal society. That is not my case, and I don’t argue for the pleasure of it"

which could be taken to mean that Jimmy is a guy but isn't comfortable in a patriarchal society, or even one who doesn't live in a patriarchal society at all. I assumed that I'd been arguing with a woman. But then, male rads are the most perfidious of them all!

belledame222 said...

i bin sayin'. except for the perdifious part. "assy" was one of the words i think i was using.

yeah, they are strange birds. they seem to be working out some extra shares of self-loathing, for whatever reason(s). i keep wondering how often people turn to politics when really therapy would be the better -first- option, at least.