Fifteen Minutes To Fame

About the Herr Doctor Professor Mr. FeMENism thing

sheelzebub:

I am not going to mention him by name.  He is actually not my concern at this point.

The mostly white “feminists” who continue to give him a platform to speak within the movement, who ignore the WOMEN he talks over and erases, the WOMEN tries to get removed from their positions, THE WOMEN he has abused and hurt…THOSE PEOPLE ARE WHO I AM FUCKING LIVID AT.

When Julian Assange’s defenders engaged in misogynist fuckery and erased the actual facts of the case, you all were the first to get outraged, as any decent person should.

When Roman Polanski’s defenders decided that his voice was far more important than some trifling rape of a 14-year-old, you all got pissed.

When Chris Brown’s defenders went off on Rhianna and said he deserves a second chance, you flipped your collective shit.

When R. Kelly’s defenders shrugged their shoulders over his sexual assault, you gave them the major-league side-eye.

In all of these cases, demands for forgiveness were rightly met with a giant-ass side-eye because, no. JUST NO. We have been putting aside our needs and our safety and our well-being since forever for the sake of the menz and that is not what this movement is about.

Yet these same people—these same “feminists,” continue to give a platform and megaphone to a man who tried to kill his girlfriend, who exploits the abuse he subjected the women in his life to as so much redemption wank fodder, who continues to center himself and his feelings in this movement.  You goddamn sellouts (yeah, I said it) are happy to give him space on your blogs, give him cred, fight alongside him against THE VERY WOMEN YOU CLAIM TO FIGHT FOR.

Well, I guess it depends on what color those women are.  What class those women are.  Because he can bark at Latina women that they’d better prove their allegations while never doing the same thing to a white woman.  And none of you gave two shits about that, did you?  You know how he went after MMM and other women of color years ago? Had they been white, I’m willing to bet more feminists would have side-eyed his inserting himself into an argument that had no need of his overprivileged ass.  If you’re actually a profeminist man, you’d shut the fuck up when there’s a conflict between women regarding feminism.  You would not try to pull rank or authority and bark orders at any of us.  Fuck that noise.

If you see him tweeting or FB posting about sanctimonious so-called victims and you do not call him on his shit, you are part of the problem.  If you commiserate with him over “call-out culture” and stay silent when he engages in it, you are part of the problem.  If you go on and on about forgiveness and what about the menz, you are part of the problem.  I don’t care if you like him personally and are friends with him—be friends with who you like! Go for it! But don’t mistake your acceptance of his friendship as carte blanche to give him a platform in this movement, to prioritize his voice over the voices of women.  Allies should be in the background—if he gave two shits about the movement, he’d step the fuck back and not continue to engage in this attention-grubbing fuckery. 

If you give him a platform, if you prioritize his voice over those of women, if you dismiss the WOMEN WHO ARE IN THIS MOVEMENT who do not want him speaking to or for women on the subject of feminism, then you are no ally of mine.  You are no fellow traveler.  I would not trust the likes of you fighting alongside me since you’ve made it doubly clear you’d stab me in the back to get the approval of a dude.  You’re nothing more than a trained dog who rolls over and plays dead on dudely command.

And if you’re a dude who claims to be feminist, who has decided that the anger about this whole thing is unjustified, who fought against straw men and misrepresented what people said, who decided that one person making a snarky comment about a Big Blogger meant it was a giant mob of people demanding her head, you need to SIT DOWN AND SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Here’s the cold, hard truth: Feminism isn’t about men.  It’s all very nice that it makes you happy that some things will be easier for your manly self if things become more feminist, but you’re deluding yourself if you think for one second that’s the point of the movement.

Because here’s the deal: You boys have it pretty good.  You guys can actually try to kill your girlfriend and know that the cops will assume that she was in on it even though she never was.  You can rape one of us and if you’re a good enough male feminist know that you can say your so sowwy and you’ll be welcomed back into the movement. You benefit from institutionalized misogyny and a lot of you benefit from institutionalized racism. 

You may feel terrible about sexism, but if you’re backing Mr. Feminism and you’re trashing the WOMEN who have had to deal with abusers let back into their communities and “forgiven” by the community, if you’re trashing THE WOMEN who have been erased by this shit and shamed for not being forgiving, if you’re erasing and shaming THE WOMEN WHO ARE IN THIS MOVEMENT WHO DO NOT WANT THIS MAN TO TAKE A LEADERSHIP ROLE, then you are part of the problem and you are no ally.

This movement is about OUR NEEDS.

OUR SAFETY.

OUR LIBERATION.

OUR SECURITY.

Not yours. OURS.

(via alexandraerin)

unasenoraviejaenfuego:

Also, the irony of Hugo calling his critics “sanctimonious” when that’s what white feminists used to call him all the time, when that used to be a charge he vehemently defended himself against, when the worst any feminist had to say of him was that he was a condescending, sanctimonious born-again Christian ruining everyone’s carefree sex-positive vibes—the irony of THAT word now being the one he throws against abuse survivors is … horrible.

Sociopaths are expert script-flippers. Expert, top-notch script-flippers.

Thank you, thank you, every feminist who united under the banner of Internet Takedown Culture Is the Greatest Threat Women Online Face Today. Thank you for making everything 1,000,000 times WORSE for survivors. I hope every rotten penny any of you ever earned decrying rape culture, gaslighting, and abuse corrodes your soul to the point that you can’t do this to us anymore. Hugo’s the tool, but you’re the ones wielding him—against those who have already been victimized once, twice, a dozen times.

So I think that’s actually a calm, measured, and reasonable thing for me to hope under the circumstances.

(via alexandraerin)

mmmightymightypeople:

salt-water-chardonnay:

mmmightymightypeople:

all the people who are “conflicted” about Mr.’s “memoir” writing style exposing so much deeply intimate shit about his ex wives—you need sit down.

the basic argument is—

it’s ok to expose so much intimate shit because it’s *memoir*—he’s following a genre style!

oh, that makes sense, but is it ok for him to do this? he’s a man and he’s revealing so much information about a woman!

well, that’s what you do when you write memoir! you draw on your life, and you’re actually *being brave* when you expose shit!

i’m so conflicted! i don’t like him exposing shit like this about women, but it’s a genre of writing and he has to be true to his craft!

all this came up over mr.’s recent article where he talks in graphic detail about pulling a tampon out of his soon to be ex’s body and getting a hard on over it.

my first question. who came up with the idea that mr. was a “memoirist” any way? was it all the pearl clutching feminists who don’t know which comes first, women’s lives or a man’s right to use a certain writing style?

or, even worst, was it mr. himself?

is this ok? is this ok that a man gets to redirect a conversation around abuse to a discussion on genre conventions? and true artists staying true to their art form?

do we really *care* about mr. maintaining his authorial credibility?

and has there really been NO feminist critique of the use of various types of art by men to falsely, incorrectly and even violently represent women?

is it REALLY up for debate again—whether or not women’s lives are more important than a man’s need to write? and is it REALLY up for debate based on a man *telling* us that it is?

also. was there a POINT to the tampon story? outside of mr. getting really sad cuz he’ll never see his wife naked again?

is that insight legitimately WORTH the price of a woman’s loss of privacy?

one of the most disturbing horrific stories i ever read was (massive content warning) about a boy who was masturbating with one of those pool drain and winds up sucking his intestines out of his body.

this story has graphic detail. graphic. disgustingly graphic. horrifically graphic. your eyes skim over places because you want so desperatly to look away. but you go back and reread. because this is a story where the insight the story leaves you with is *worth the price paid*—because it is a story being told using *craft*.

as an example—when the body details the contents of his intestines, it harkens back to the story The Things They Carried, by Timothy Obrien. But it doesn’t just harken back, it also recontextualizes and complexifies how we understand boys and masculinity and “going to war”—

in other words, there is a *POINT* to the intensely graphic storytelling. the intensely grahic descriptions and use of detail helps a reader to understand not just the narrator, but the *human condition*.

i ask again, what is the point of mr.’s story?

what was the point outside of xo getting a massive uptick in hits?

mr. is NOT an artist and he doesn’t have a *craft*.

he is a blogger who uses shock and outrage to stay relevant. and *F*eminists are willing to buy that shock and outrage he offers even if the price paid is a woman’s privacy.

there used to be a *F*eminist critique of shock jock radio djs who used women to get attention—is there a *F*eminist critique of shock jock bloggers? or is the power of the click to mighty for *F*eminists to turn away from?

^^From what I’ve observed, a lot of the women talking about being conflicted also profess to practice memoir in their own right and to think that criticizing Huge Ego for violating his ex-wife’s privacy means necessarily that they then cannot discuss intimate details in their own writing. It is this hideous hybrid born of reading too many how-to-write tracts and too much feminist fluff that doesn’t bother with analyses of power.

That said, I think the point of his story was that he got turned on by her humiliation. I know he explained it away in the text as basically reflex-like, but this is the subtext—and I suspect that it is a deliberate subtext put there because he *could* put it there. It’s a kind of boasting. Look what he can get away with it and still be adored.

It’s exactly what the worst of my exes (now dead—I’d dance on his grave if I knew where to find it) would have done.

That’s the thing about abusers: they’re not special. Not one bit. Not at all.

i agree TOTALLY. i’m not going to go into detail, cuz i know there are people who are deliberately not reading it, but there are sections—where i’m like, the sad, soft spoken, quietly humiliated woman and mr.’s hard on just appear in too many fucking stories of his for this NOT to be like you said—a kind of boasting. and a kind of boasting is NOT anything that I feel needs protecting or understanding.

I really get the impression that basically, and crudely, his writings are wankfests for him.  On more than one level.  Truly seminal writings, if you get my drift.  And part of the kick for him has almost definitely got to be that it’s mostly women who are reading what he’s written because it’s ‘feminist’.

(Bizarrely, I have Mary Daly to thank for that understanding.  Just because she was a transphobic, racist bigot doesn’t mean she didn’t actually have some useful cultural insights, like on men and writing.  I am happy to not have suffered through all of Gyn/Ecology for nothing more than realising it’s transphobic throughout.)

(Source: iinventedeverything, via thecurvature)

TW: violence, rape, Hugo Schwyzer

madgastronomer:

alexandraerin:

Also, I just… I’m amazed that all the interview has to say about Hugo Schwyzer’s failed murder is that it happened and he can’t talk about it “for obvious legal reasons”.

You know what? Any interviewer who doesn’t ask him about that is not conducting a legitimate interview. When you acknowledge that you’re talking to an attempted murderer and then you brush past that to ask him if he thinks women should trust him, you are not a journalist conducting an interview, you are a public relations consultant doing pro bono work.

This is the second piece on Hugo Schwyzer this week that’s taken a “teach the controversy”/”fair and balanced” approach to dealing with him and as long as they keep generating page hits I imagine we’ll be seeing many more like them, but let’s be very clear about something: when you’re communicating with a man who slept with students he was supposed to be chaperoning, who has committed gendered acts of partner violence up to and including attempted murder, who has admitted to “having sex his partner didn’t want to have” (we actually have a much shorter way of saying that, and I’d think any feminist thinker would know what it is) and you’re asking him what he thinks about the role of men in feminism there is something deeply wrong with the scenario.

That’s like asking Charles Manson if he sees room for himself in youth counseling or home security… oh, and don’t ask him about any crimes because he obviously couldn’t comment on them.

I don’t know if either of the interviewers consider themselves feminists and I don’t even know if they consider themselves to be journalists, but… ugh. 

Lesley Kinzel, at least, isn’t a journalist at all. She started out as an FA blogger, and then started writing more broadly (pun not intended). She’s done some really problematic stuff in the past, too. I used to really enjoy her work, but then she put up a piece on xoJane that used “lady-born-lady” for cis women, repeatedly. I called her on it on Twitter, and she insisted she was going to keep using it because her trans friends told her that “cisgender” made cis people feel like special snowflakes, or something.

I was discussing this with others on Twitter last night, and someone said she didn’t identify as feminist at all, because she had issues with the movement, but she’s replicating a lot of those issues in her own work. So. Take that for what it’s worth.

I don’t know who the other interviewer might be, the piece I saw only had Kinzel’s name on it, so I can’t say anything about that. But I no longer read Kinzel’s work myself. Just too frustrating.

(via karnythia)

And

alexandraerin:

thecurvature:

In that article, Hugo states how he has faced accountability and consequences for his actions and has stepped down from “leadership” positions in feminist organizations as a result of those actions …

He was FORCED out of those roles. He’s ONLY no longer in them because WOMEN, the same women he talks shit about, raised a big enough stink to push him out, to force him to resign. Very, very recently.

He did not say to himself “hey, I just tried to kill my ex, I really have no right taking on this kind of role,” because he didn’t take on those roles until long AFTER he fucking did that.

And saw no conflict of interest for YEARS until it was very, very loudly pointed out.

He did not “resign” as a result of his own ethical position and principles.

Hugo has NEVER acted out of his own sense of accountability and ethics. EVER. He has only responded very belatedly, with much whining, to other people attempting to hold him accountable.

AND THEN TAKEN CREDIT FOR THEIR FUCKING ACTIONS.

Here’s the other thing. I know I reblogged this before, but I’m having thoughts and I want to get them down, so here’s the other thing.

All of these transgressions against women that he’s supposedly faced accountability for… they all came out in his writing. He wrote about them in ways that were both off-hand and masturbatory, in the way that the tampon story that’s giving him another 15 minutes right now is.

He went into his most lurid description of his attempted murder in a story about how he understood how his friend felt about letting a dog get out. Yeah. It was his “topper” story about how He Knows What It Is To Do Something Maybe Irrevocable.

He revealed that he’s had sex with people against their will in part of a piece about how he had to man up and take some of the blame for it.

And at every step of the way, all of these mentions of misbehavior were tied into this mythical construct of his, the “pre-sobriety past”, when he was a different person. He takes about taking responsibility, but what he’s done is taken all responsibility and stuffed it into a wastebasket labeled “well I was doing drugs then”.

And he has a core audience that eats it up because it’s secular intellectual redemption porn, it’s the kind of great “Come To Jesus” conversion story that evangelical preachers use to keep their audiences hanging on every word: Lord, oh Lord, I have sinned, but I am born again. Everyone loves a reformed sinner.

He didn’t put these stories out because he was taking responsibility for anything. He put them out because he saw a use for them. When they spread too widely beyond his intended audience and the backlash became too great to be ignored, he seemed surprised that anybody would hold these things against him. 

And his response was to try to figure out the bare minimum response that would be acceptable, that would make it go away, that would allow him to continue his career as a feminist thinker and hang on to the respect of the white feminist world. 

For him to take accountability for his actions, he’d need to show that he understands how his “pre-sobriety past” relates to his present instead of acting like there’s eighteen inches of reinforced concrete separating them.

TW: violence, rape, Hugo Schwyzer

alexandraerin:

Also, I just… I’m amazed that all the interview has to say about Hugo Schwyzer’s failed murder is that it happened and he can’t talk about it “for obvious legal reasons”.

You know what? Any interviewer who doesn’t ask him about that is not conducting a legitimate interview. When you acknowledge that you’re talking to an attempted murderer and then you brush past that to ask him if he thinks women should trust him, you are not a journalist conducting an interview, you are a public relations consultant doing pro bono work.

This is the second piece on Hugo Schwyzer this week that’s taken a “teach the controversy”/”fair and balanced” approach to dealing with him and as long as they keep generating page hits I imagine we’ll be seeing many more like them, but let’s be very clear about something: when you’re communicating with a man who slept with students he was supposed to be chaperoning, who has committed gendered acts of partner violence up to and including attempted murder, who has admitted to “having sex his partner didn’t want to have” (we actually have a much shorter way of saying that, and I’d think any feminist thinker would know what it is) and you’re asking him what he thinks about the role of men in feminism there is something deeply wrong with the scenario.

That’s like asking Charles Manson if he sees room for himself in youth counseling or home security… oh, and don’t ask him about any crimes because he obviously couldn’t comment on them.

I don’t know if either of the interviewers consider themselves feminists and I don’t even know if they consider themselves to be journalists, but… ugh. 

And

thecurvature:

In that article, Hugo states how he has faced accountability and consequences for his actions and has stepped down from “leadership” positions in feminist organizations as a result of those actions …

He was FORCED out of those roles. He’s ONLY no longer in them because WOMEN, the same women he talks shit about, raised a big enough stink to push him out, to force him to resign. Very, very recently.

He did not say to himself “hey, I just tried to kill my ex, I really have no right taking on this kind of role,” because he didn’t take on those roles until long AFTER he fucking did that.

And saw no conflict of interest for YEARS until it was very, very loudly pointed out.

He did not “resign” as a result of his own ethical position and principles.

Hugo has NEVER acted out of his own sense of accountability and ethics. EVER. He has only responded very belatedly, with much whining, to other people attempting to hold him accountable.

AND THEN TAKEN CREDIT FOR THEIR FUCKING ACTIONS.

(via thesliverparty)

redlightpolitics:

“I have kept my mouth shut all these months out of fear of retribution but I no longer have this fear so I am going to go ahead and ask this. Schwyzer states: But this notion of “making room” in the blogosphere is based on a faulty premise of scarcity. If that is indeed the case, then I have to ask: why then did Schwyzer attempt to have me removed from certain feminist spaces when I vehemently wrote against him? If indeed there is no scarcity, then why attempt have ME (a Latina feminist blogger) removed and publicly scolded, all done through backchannels hoping these maneuvers would not get back at me? why try to execute some character assassination to silence me against his obvious racism and sketchy politics? I cannot be the first one (or last one) over whom he attempted these dirty tactics. But I no longer believe it is fair that I have to remain silent about it because otherwise I’d been seen as a trouble maker. I am a Latina, South American feminist. I AM A TROUBLE MAKER. I believe no other kind of feminism is possible. Schwyzer tried to have me silenced. I am setting the record straight.”

—

The comment I left on this piece on xoJane. Nine Questions for The Controversial Hugo Schwyzer | xoJane

(via thesliverparty)

Why radfems?

fucknoradfems:

genderbitch:

freedominwickedness:

cannedkitty:

freedominwickedness:

cannedkitty:

I know it’s just easier to pick on women, but does anyone genuinely believe that eradicating radical feminism and silencing every radical feminist would save even one trans* person from being assaulted, raped or killed?  Because the misogyny and homophobia that make up transphobia would continue to exist if radical feminism were eradicated.  But if we erase radical feminism then we would have perhaps erased the very last defenses against those very ideologies. 

You’re willfully ignoring the fact that radical feminists are solely and directly responsible for a lot of the discrimination against trans* people. One of the primary objectives of radical feminism, as clearly and unapologetically laid out by its founding mothers, is to to exterminate all trans* people by — in their own words, “morally mandating the problem out of existence”.

Radical feminists have achieved tremendous success in not only reinforcing existing forms of oppression against trans* people, but creating entirely new ones. For example, if it wasn’t for radical feminists medical treatment for trans* people would have been covered by federal healthcare mandates since the 1970s. It was solely the opposition of radical feminists which prevented this, and this opposition was entirely based on the ideological demand that trans people “need” to be denied medical care.

Only in the delusional world of trans activism would “moral mandating a problem out of existence,” be interpreted as murder (extermination.)

There is absolutely no question what they meant; they explicitly stated that they believed that medical treatment for trans people should be legally prohibited without exception, and furthermore that any country which provided trans people with medical treatment should face United Nations sanctions for “human rights violations”.

And only in the delusional world of trans activism would women…much less feminist women—much less the obscure, oft-maligned, RADICAL feminist women—would have the authority in society to make such a wide social impact on transgender people. 

Name-calling does not change the fact that Janice Raymond’s report to Congress, ““Technology on Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery”, was solely and directly responsible for the removal of medical coverage for trans* people from federal and state healthcare aid programs, and also contributed to the removal of trans* medical coverage from private insurance coverage.

Cannedkitty sure likes to throw around the word delusional, despite having no grasp on reality. Irony poisoning?

Here we have someone, yet again, pretending that they are “initially open” to not being specifically anti-trans, but then, in the next response, they reveal that they always have been.

Conservative technique, they’ve learned it well.

Just to be clear It’s not that they learned conservative technique while not being conservatives themselves.  They’re conservatives in their own right.  They are indistinguishable from conservative religious people in areas of sexuality, including kink, sex work, porn, trans* people, etc.  Only the reasons they use differ.  The ends are the same.  Patriarchal control of people.

(via kittensandscience)