Tag: misogyny

BOOK REVIEW: Love yourself enough to not read “The Hope Circuit”

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The Hope Circuit by Martin Seligman is like reading a Wikipedia article about someone accomplished enough to have their own entry but not so much they can resist editing it themself.

Also, that article continues for 400 pages.

Subtitled A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism, surely it’s the amount of unpleasant reading that makes the experience most unpleasant, but to be fair, Seligman — or “Marty” as he’d prefer his coed undergrad students call him — also establishes himself as an unlikable person very quickly. That is a truly remarkable accomplishment for a memoir where he controlled the entire narrative and reached me as a blank slate with no prior knowledge about his life.

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Steve Bannon, NAMBLA, and free speech: when ‘neutrality’ is picking a side

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‘Steve Bannon Accepts Invitation to Speak at the University of Chicago’

HUMAN 0
This is bullshit.

I’m calling the administration to register my displeasure, and I suggest you do too if you’re an alumni.

I’m not going to ask the University to block the invitation, but I at least want a statement that he does not represent the University’s views.

If you’re an elite foreign student, someone who’d create a successful business but aren’t white, Bannon doesn’t want you in the United States.

“A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

The exact quote starts around 17:40, but the link starts earlier than that for full context.

HUMAN 1
You should listen to the whole context. It’s a much more narrow scope than you are representing it to be:

“What do you think about this situation where you have American companies, particularly technology companies, that are letting go highly-trained American IT workers, blowing them out, having them train their replacements and hiring foreign workers. Just generally what’s your sense of that?”

That being said, I still disagree with his comment, but I don’t think you are being fair to it either.

Continue reading “Steve Bannon, NAMBLA, and free speech: when ‘neutrality’ is picking a side” →

BOOK REVIEW: The airing of grievances in Donna Brazile’s “Hacks” comes at her true crime memoir’s expense

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Source: This Week/ABC

Given her media blitz leading up to the release of her 2016 campaign memoir Hacks, Donna Brazile’s recollection of what it was like to be on the receiving end of the Russian cyberattack against the Democratic National Committee was far more enlightening than I’d had any expectation.

That’s because, ahead of the Virginia state elections in November 2017, Brazile’s press interviews and excerpts tended to be internecine and conspiratorial, focusing on how the Hillary Clinton campaign had unethically bought the DNC at “Bernie’s” expense, or how Hillary didn’t call Brazile for a while after she lost the Electoral College, or how staffer Seth Rich’s murderer still needed to be found.

Now, this is not what most of the book, subtitled The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House, turns out to be about, but the strategy was successful. It reached No. 5 on the New York Times bestseller list, sold out on Amazon, then was subsequently completely forgotten.

The modern political memoir and tell-all has become the publishing equivalent of Hollywood’s superhero and sci-fi franchise films.

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Ironic misogyny is a lot less ironic than misogynistic

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Lorenzen Wright’s ex-wife Sherra Wright arrested in California, charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy

HUMAN 0
Bitches ain’t shit

I don’t understand why people are reacting so negatively to people disagreeing with these sorts of comments.

Empirically, women are five times as likely to be victims of intimate partner violence like simple assault, sexual assault, and aggravated assault than men are.

Murder, specifically, is nearly as stark:

In 2007 intimate partners committed 14% of all homicides in the U.S. The total estimated number of intimate partner homicide victims in 2007 was 2,340, including 1,640 females and 700 males.

I had trouble finding the detailed data for the FBI’s more recent Uniform Crime Report, but this is a pattern that holds true year after year.

‘Bitches ain’t shit’ ain’t just a meme, a joke, or commiseration: It’s a widespread idea that gets women abused and killed in the thousands each year. Continue reading “Ironic misogyny is a lot less ironic than misogynistic” →

‘America: a dangerous blend of diversity and racism’

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HUMAN 1
Not all diversity is good diversity.

It’s like you heard someone say, ‘This smoothie is a mix of powdered glass and fruit’ and you felt the need to say, ‘Not all fruit is fresh fruit’.

HUMAN 1
Actually, that’s not what I meant.

What I meant was hiring somebody from Saudi Arabia, praising yourself on diversity, then finding out they hate women and LGBT people.

Not all diversity is good diversity — there are plenty of people who come from diverse backgrounds who are bigoted as all hell.

As contemporary events seem to make more apparent by the hour, I don’t think one needs to scour as remote a place as Riyadh to find examples of those things.

The pews of rural Iowa and suburban Houston often underwhelm in their diversity though remaining overblessed in their capacity for hatred of vulnerable groups.

If I say some ‘diversity is bad because it may contain religious bigots’, and to make that meaningful I use it as an excuse to oppose diversity, it’s more likely I’m upset with the diversity or foreignness of them than the bigotry they may share with domestic homogeneous folk. Continue reading “‘America: a dangerous blend of diversity and racism’” →

‘Why is masculinity so fragile?’

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Masculinity is a default or orthodoxy like whiteness or straightness or, in the southern United States, evangelical Christianity. It’s a standard you’re measured against that at best can be complete but is easily made incomplete.

American orthodoxy is based on one-drop rules.

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‘Feminism is not a stick to beat men with’ — because it isn’t a stick

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A MAN SAID
I saw someone post a thing, “Feminism is not a stick for women to beat other women with.”

I super like and agree.

I also wanted to comment but decided to post my own thing, so I’m not just appropriating someone’s message to women. Feminism is also not a stick to beat men with. Laughing at and demeaning (individual) men in the name of feminism is not feminism. Don’t get me wrong, I do it all the time, but it’s not feminism, it’s just mean.

To your first point: sure. To the second: Maybe? But patriarchy is a gigantic club that beats people up even when left to fall with its own weight, and in most contexts, feminism is more like a ruler.

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‘Anita Sarkeesian did nothing wrong’, or ‘Violence against women in media, cont.’

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Part One: ‘Where does the idea that “women have impossible standards for violence” come from?’

Human 4

I didn’t really want to get into this to be honest, but quickly since there’s a real contribution here, I think what’s being understated is hyperviolence against women in edgy videogames or other media generally isn’t just an incidental product of trying to titillate, it’s a natural result of the cultural ideas the work is reproducing.

Continue reading “‘Anita Sarkeesian did nothing wrong’, or ‘Violence against women in media, cont.’” →

‘Where does the idea that “women have impossible standards for violence” come from?’

adavidjohnson1 Comment

Human 1:

I’m watching Angel and women get brutalized exactly like men do all the time.

It’s the same with Buffy, and, going back in time a little bit, same with Battlestar Galactica, Kill Bill, Spartacus.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone claim “no violence should befall fictional women”, and yet redhats and gamergaters routinely claim that women want all the benefits and none of the disadvantages.

How did this claim come to be?

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No one cares how beautiful you think someone else is—especially them

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“When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She turned out to be witty and bright as well.”
—Steve Martin

HUMAN 1:
Can you BELIEVE how utterly SEXIST Steve Martin is?

In the year of our lord 2016 I can’t believe women are still so OBJECTIFIED

It’s getting to the point where even the most innocuous thing is setting people off because the in thing to do is get offended and cry foul.

When men die, their attractiveness as youths is rarely if ever included in a retroactive assessment of their life.

That’s why it’s sexist. Steve Martin felt the need to mention his approval of her figure and how much he wanted to bang her 40 years ago as a precedent to a more substantive compliment.

Being outraged about that is not useful or productive except selfishly to feel like you’re maintaining purity. Sure.

And yet that’s an entirely separate issue from pointing out what’s ‘problematic’ about that tweet.

Continue reading “No one cares how beautiful you think someone else is—especially them” →