Thoughts from Bluepillers?

myfriendscantknow · 2014-06-05T19:58:33+00:00

I'll give the whole article a read later when I'm less busy, but some initial thoughts from a blue-piller: Hashtag activism from feminists is often super cringey, and Suey Parks is a fucking idiot. That's coming from a feminist.

IIHotelYorba · 2014-06-05T22:29:07+00:00

I think feminism has the same problem the republican party did. They're kind of stuck between two things that are pulling them apart- they're getting big momentum by these huge pushes for bringing more extreme ideology to the forefront. The problem is how few people wind up matching up with these great sounding new standards of ideological purity.

You wind up with a circular firing squad, everyone accusing everyone else of fucking up the movement, and feeling justified because they tie their moral system with it so directly. No one simply disagrees, everything is settled by a showdown to the death where we figure out who is more privileged, who is more considerate, more educated, etc. All of this is figured out by bizarre alchemy that changes with the mood of the demagogue speaking. And the circle of "good people" just keeps getting smaller, and smaller.

I never thought I'd see a day where huge female celebrities would come out as specifically non-feminist. And what do articles about them talk about? How "troubling" it is, and in others, that these women are practicing "misogyny" against other women. It isn't just their opinion, it's troubling that they question feminism.

Personally, I doubt that most of them just started expressing doubts about feminism in the press. I would not be surprised at all to find out that they had some kind of questions about feminism between them and their acquaintances/friends, and were judged harshly and excluded for it.

Basically, feminism is going from an inclusive movement to an exclusive movement. I hope they all really enjoy the validation of knowing that they are 13.5 microfems better than their former ally.

myfriendscantknow · 2014-06-06T03:45:13+00:00

That was a completely fascinating article that opened my eyes to a lot of things I didn't know. I call myself a feminist as an homage to all the great men and women throughout history that fought for women to have a real place in this world, and also as an acknowledgment that women still need advocacy in this world, but the culture frustrates me so much sometimes. Oh and

Will I be immediately labeled (by RPers) the second coming of Andrea Dworkin for even using the word 'misogyny'? Probably, yes.

No fucking kidding.

Edit: typo

johnadreams · 2014-06-06T04:52:15+00:00

There's this idea called the "narcissism of small differences" that theorizes we dislike the people who are almost like us more than we dislike the people who are nothing at all like us.

That's usually what I think when I see feminists spending so much energy fighting each other. If you give them a 100 question quiz they would probably agree on 99 of the answers but over that 1 last answer they differ on they're going to fight each other to the death.

This isn't restrained to just feminism of course. You see it all over the man-o-sphere with it's various factions, who largely agree about a bunch of things, and still want nothing to do with each other.

southwer · 2014-06-06T01:48:25+00:00

I like feministing.com.

Feminism has always had this problem. Lots of infighting. Lots of judean people's front/people's' front of judea. Although, there are a lot of big disagreements- like views on porn.

Right now, intersectionality is more important than before. It used to be a movement made by white upper class women for white upper class women. They were representing themselves and the problems they faced.

Now it's much more inclusive. But also varied.

Sheryl Sandberg wrote a feminist manifesto of sorts for career minded women who wanted to also have families. She got lambasted from all sides for not writing for all women. She didn't write for all women. But there is a demographic of women that would find her advice useful, regardless.

I wish the in fighting wasn't so vitriolic. But what can you do? Its politics. It's a large movement. That many people aren't going to agree. I don't think the infighting is any worse than among political groups.

Overall, I like what's going on. For a period of time, people though we didn't need feminism. But we do still. Feminism is making a comeback, which is good. I like the discussions I am seeing.

And I'm enjoying the results. They're changing the national conversation about numerous topics, as they have in the past.

Also, appropriate for your topic, I got banned from r/feminists and r/ask feminists.

Judean People's Front!

wuboo · 2014-06-06T12:19:13+00:00

I think of myself as a feminist though I don't read feministing. I've ran into these 'rules' on occasion and they are a pain to deal with.

One such rule is a prohibition on what’s called “tone policing.” An insight into the way marginalized people are punished for their anger has turned into an imperative “that you can never question the efficacy of anger, especially when voiced by a person from a marginalized background.”

If I tell someone to calm down, I may be told I am tone policing. If I don't let someone do whatever it is they want, I may be told I am an oppressor. I don't think I can ever voice or show excessive frustration, because even with being calmly against some of their beliefs gets me labeled as someone upholding societal patriarchal heteronomative capitalist cisgender norms. Idk their heads may explode if I yelled. Thankfully I've only encountered two such people so far out of hundreds of feminists.

there’s a norm that intention doesn’t matter—indeed, if you offend someone and then try to explain that you were misunderstood, this is seen as compounding the original injury.

Geezus. If a person didn't know then a person didn't know. It's what they do once they know that matters to me. It's not as though their lack of knowledge caused a bridge carrying a class of small children to collapse.

offended Internet feminists urged people to stay away, arguing that emphasizing “vaginas” hurts trans men who don’t want their reproductive organs coded as female.

Abortions directly impact anyone who happens to have a vagina and a uterus independent of gender identity. The world is heavily stacked against trans people. I just don't know. Would changing the vocabulary of abortion rights do anything? I don't think so.

MissCherryPi · 2014-06-06T14:48:14+00:00

Here's my comment when this article was first published:

I don't understand how women criticizing #FemFuture ruined it. Why didn't Martin et. al engage in good faith and continue? I suppose it's easy for me to say because I'm not the one who organized a conference to talk about the future of feminism and then got called a racist by a lot of people on Twitter, but I think if you want to be an ally you must be able to take constructive criticism.

If you remember, this happened a few years ago with the call for contributions to "Yes Means Yes." It was hugely criticized, and then Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman apologized, took it down and rewrote it and went on to publish a GREAT book. Why couldn't that have happened with the #FemFuture project?

I legit don't understand how white women feminists who deal with a million misogynist trolls a day can't handle a black woman saying "Hey, check your privilege, that thing you said was out of line." I don't think that Mikki Kendall or Sydette Harry or any other big name WoC feminist on twitter is a bully.

And like I said on twitter, I am a HUGE fan of Michelle Goldberg, I've met her in person a few times, she autographed a book for me and we talked about when I was a clinic escort. I think that valid criticisms of many WW feminists don't negate everything else amazing that they do. Activism isn't a zero sum game.

That being said, there were women of color who participated in #FemFuture, and who do participate in other large feminist blogs and websites. I want to know more about why their participation wasn't considered to be valid. It's not my place to weigh in on conversations occurring exclusively between WoC. But if they are speaking to a larger audience, and asking me as a white woman to listen, and not to read, link or participate in sites that exclude WoC, I have to admit I don't understand why Anna Holmes, Samhita Mukhopadhyay etc. don't count.

weirdlemonade81 · 2014-06-05T22:01:09+00:00

Yes.

I wish I had more to add, but this article exemplifies why I checked out of feminism. Also, I got too old for that shit.

jacks1000 · 2014-06-05T19:24:30+00:00

People who complain about "misogyny" and "misandry" and "hate" are virtually always projecting their own issues on to other people.

They aren't much different than the church ladies going around finding "sin" everywhere, it's just the modern leftist notion of "sin" - sexist, racist, misogynist, transphobia, etc.

Title	Thoughts from Bluepillers?
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	10
Comments	42
Date	June 5, 2014 6:47 PM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/27ekao/thoughts_from_bluepillers/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/thoughts-from-bluepillers.285592 https://theredarchive.com/post/285592

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