Hypocrisy and shouting on all sides as r/anarchism tries to purge its ranks of the dreaded Manarchist scum! Misogyny and misandry accusations thrown around like confetti while the reasonable kids cry in the corner wondering why it has to be this way.... (self.SubredditDrama)
SubredditDrama
115 ups - 49 downs = 66 votes
And so it was on 22nd January 2014 that a gender riot broke out on that most balanced of discussion boards, r/anarchism.
I can’t believe this thread hasn’t been successfully posted yet and after enjoying digesting this lovely popcorn over the past few days I just had to share with everyone!
It all started with this rather vague post and u/feminazgul_ bravely declaring 'I'm not sure how much more of this shit I can take.'
There is so much drama all over this thread that I don't know where to start, I will pick out a few threads that I think make some interesting reading.
Does joking about Male Tears hurt the feminist cause?
This strawman is a real matriarchy!. Bonus comment is this follow up where u/imparted_feelings becomes the strawman/woman. Strawception achieved!
Another anarchist is downvoted for saying that he disagrees with extreme ‘feminism’, even puts the quotation marks in to show that he doesn’t think these things apply to real feminism. Denial is made that these points are even real until sources are provided
Usual Reddit questions with an anarchist slant! What is SRS? And What is MRA?
My own personal feelings about this thread are summed up in this comment. Especially sad is the downvoted reply simply stating ‘Hate is Hate. All hate is bad'.
I'll take my liberal pretenses and hope that we can all get along somewhere else then....
119 comments submitted at 15:10:16 on Jan 27, 2014 by WorseInPerson
> Men can certainly be harmed by patriarchy, and feminism addresses those issues.
Forgive me if I don't buy this while you complain about "male tears."
The feminist movement has been damaged beyond all others by the Internet age.
I'd argue it's less this and more cherry-picking. Someone hears that feminists are crazy (to be honest, that's not exactly a new belief, conservative assholes the world over have perpetuated the "lol hairy dykes" stereotype for decades), and then says "yo, let's look this shit up." So they Google something like, I don't know, "crazy feminists" and have their preconceptions validated by people that have an agenda in collecting all the crazy tumblr bullshit or bitching about feminism 24/7.
I mean, it used to be that you were hundreds of times more likely to run into a real life woman (holy shit) who called herself a feminist, or take a Gender Studies class, before you came across some inconsequential tumblr full of man-hating 16-year-olds.
It's really easy to validate your prejudices about a political movement when there's plenty of people who are super dedicated to making sure that they ferret out all the crazies and dangle them in front of the world -- despite their complete inconsequentiality to said movement -- to prove something about their own political views.
I'm sorry, but those people masquerading as feminists are legitimately hurting your movement. You should demonize them more than the people who are scared away by them.
To give what I'd call a similar situation, most Christians actually do a very decent job of demonizing groups like the Westboro Baptist Church. And for good reason, those lunatics are poisonous.
Conversely, I rarely see feminists address those of their own spouting WBC-style rhetoric, and there's an image out there that, if legitimate, attributes some incredibly vicious sexism to numerous big name feminist leaders over the years.
Why the fuck should I care?
"Oh, I'm sorry. Instead of dedicating this lecture to teaching you all about what actual feminists said and wrote a hundred years ago, just like any academic course, we're going to dedicate 40% of this class to roundly denouncing inconsequential fucks that have zero impact on public policy and what they said yesterday on tumblr."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Instead of sending out this email to Emily's List subscribers urging them to donate to pro-choice and pro-woman candidates in the next election, we're going to bombard our subscribers with disclaimers about how we're not radical leg-beard manhaters. Make sure the disclaimer takes up at least 60% of the email, because we cannot do any sort of constructive activism without first satisfactorily denouncing strawmen to people that wouldn't donate to us if we had them at gunpoint."
"Oh, instead of trying to book Malala Yousafzai for this conference, I need to call back this guy and make sure he knows I don't actually hate men. That's more important."
"Oh, instead of putting this Texan woman who needs an abortion on a plane to Washington, I'm going to round up all the 16-year-old girls in my neighborhood and give them a stern talking to about how to be on their best behavior on the internet so people don't cherry pick their dumb fucking ramblings."
Said absolutely nobody.
Thanks for the cherries.
They make you look bad and ostracize you from people willing to help you. That's why I'd care, anyway.
I sincerely doubt that anyone who dedicates their entire online persona to cherry-picking bullshit to confirm their own bad opinion of something is going to change their mind if feminists denounce what they cherry pick.
Because, guess what? They already do. Feminists critique each other and criticize the failures of past activism all the time. And cherry-pickers give less than zero fucks. Because they're not looking at NOW or Emily's List or taking Gender Studies course. They're high and mighty up in their echo chambers, constantly reaffirming their views with endless streams of cherry-picked bullshit.
So criticism aimed at people that have already made up their mind is pretty much pissing in the wind. They're not around to listen.
I think you're misguided if you think the only people scared of online radical feminism are the ones who set out to find it.
Recently, a group of real feminist groups got together and named ~~Robert~~ Robin Thicke as their greatest enemy. I guess pro-choice activism takes a back seat to complaining about a man who participates in a sleazy music video.
If it's about Blurred Lines, it's Robin Thicke.
Thank you.
It was my privilege. (ha!)
Catchy as the song is, it was only because of the hysterical feminist response to it that I visited its YouTube page on a daily basis for awhile. I mean, I doubt Thicke intentionally set out to irritate the radfems, but the fact that he's not retreated from their campaign to smear him earns him a zillion points in my book.
Personally I don't like it. I'll give feminism some credit, it was really sleazy. Also, lyrics and video aside, I still find it unpleasant to listen to. But the amount of time feminists have devoted to denouncing it is strange, especially if they're claiming not have time to devout to male issues, condemning all those man-hating feminist blogs, etc.
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Oh no, a group of activists was guilty of hyperbole. Let's completely ignore what they say, and use their hyperbole to discredit everyone under that banner, ever. All hundred or so years of it, completely shit.
That's some nice cherry-picking.
It's not really hyperbole, they chose him over dozens of worthier candidates.
Come on, with the amount of time and effort feminists have spent denouncing Blurred Lines I don't think they can't devout some time amount of time to the swarm of man-hating feminists.
> It's not really hyperbole
Wait, you're talking about hyperbole, but you said they named them their "greatest enemy." Whoops, they named him "sexist of the year."
Oops.
"Greatest enemy" "sexist of the year." Six of one, half dozen of the other.
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>Why the fuck should I care?
I'll have to go digging and see if I can actually find the sources - for now, here's an article from the last US presidential election about Romney trying to shift the focus from the more extreme beliefs held by certain Republicans to gain votes with moderate undecideds.
I am fairly sure I have read somewhere that most (if not all) US presidents elected have been more moderate than other presidential bidders from their parties.
The point I'm hamhandedly trying to make is, extremists (in this case people who circlejerk over "Lol mael tearz" and "what about teh menz") are seen as extremists. Most people are "moderates" - more or less neutral people who are not actively misogynist or hateful in any other capacity.
I guess the problem in this context is that moderate / regular / whathaveyou feminists have a hard time getting heard on reddit. The discourse is an obstacle, which means that the voices people hear are the shrill Tumblrite teenagers / radfems, instead of the sane ones.
Look, "moderate" feminists dominate politics. They dominate organizational hierarchies. They've dominated academia for the better part of a century.
They're the mainstream. If people are ignorant of the mainstream, what is the mainstream to do?
I'm moderate as fuck, and people still downvote the shit out of me and accuse me of hating men. If only they could see my own voting patterns, where I downvote the odd radical dipshit who crops up.
>They're the mainstream. If people are ignorant of the mainstream, what is the mainstream to do?
I think this is mostly a non-issue, to be honest. I think the people who honestly dismiss feminism as only the Tumblr crazy man-hating shit are just as confined to the internet as the Tumblrites they hate.
>I'm moderate as fuck, and people still downvote the shit out of me and accuse me of hating men.
I'm not about to go digging through your post history, so I can only speak from seeing your posts in SRD (so massive confirmation bias and stuff :p)...In general, I often see you posting in a combative manner. That's fine, totally your prerogative. But the same internet-the-sky-is-falling-look-out-teh-feminist people will see that as an attack, possibly much more so than intended.
I think the thing to do for moderates is to try to ignore internet drama, and focus on real life instead :)
>I think the people who honestly dismiss feminism as only the Tumblr crazy man-hating shit are just as confined to the internet as the Tumblrites they hate.
Do you know any conservatives? The GOP has been pretty dismissive of feminism for a long time... before even the internet.
>I think the thing to do for moderates is to try to ignore internet drama, and focus on real life instead :)
I'm on SRD. Drama is my life.
> before you came across some inconsequential tumblr full of man-hating 16-year-olds.
Problem is, it's not only tumblr. I mean, look at this shit, or this (I don't know what's up with Canada, lol). And there's a shit-ton of absolutely crazy shit coming from the academia. I understand that that's heavily affected by selection bias too, but that's definitely not just 16yos on tumblr.
Consider this statement: "there are few women in Computer Science because it has been traditionally dominated by male values such as emotionless, formal reasoning" -- who might say that, a feminist or a redpiller? Last time someone brought up the distinction between tumblr and academia I asked them this question, even reminded them three days later via a PM, but they never answered me :(
> look at this shit
Which the entire college denounced. But let me guess, all the virulent bullshit MRAs say is just indivudals, not indicative of the movement as a whole. Especially when no one denounces them, let alone an entire college. Clean house before you bitch about my dust bunnies, dude.
>or this
Which they pointed to specific views the group they wanted to ban held that were antithetical to the university's policies. What, should a university not move to disallow the KKK on campus now?
And you're not giving me the context of that statement. Why the fuck should I pull context out of my ass?
Also, considering your posting history, the chance of anything I say being interpreted as anything other than "I hate men" is zero.
> Which the entire college denounced. But let me guess, all the virulent bullshit MRAs say is just indivudals, not indicative of the movement as a whole. Especially when no one denounces them, let alone an entire college.
Wait, that entire college was not feminists, those deluded people in the council were, and those who deluded them were. Of course everyone else in that college freaked out.
> Which they pointed to specific views the group they wanted to ban held that were antithetical to the university's policies.
According to them. I was also amused by the mood-watcher language.
> And you're not giving me the context of that statement. Why the fuck should I pull context out of my ass?
What context do you need for a seemingly factual statement?
> Also, considering your posting history, the chance of anything I say being interpreted as anything other than "I hate men" is zero.
WTF is wrong with my posting history o_O
> WTF is wrong with my posting history o_O
The classic ad hominem. Personally I recognize your username and remember having massive objections to your positions in the past... but none of that affects the truth of what you're saying now.
Then again, Fiddler appears savvy enough to realize your query was going to make her positions look like those of an utter fool, so perhaps she considered awkwardly dodging the question to be her only recourse.
> The classic ad hominem. Personally I recognize your username and remember having massive objections to your positions in the past... but none of that affects the truth of what you're saying now.
The hilarious part is that I was (and still am) engaged in an argument with some mras regarding the "right to financial abortion" right in this post, so I was all like WTF dude.