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Thunderf00t: Feminism versus FACTS (Part 3, RE Damsel in distress II)
June 6, 2013 — xanthippaWhen I was about 14 years old, my parents hosted a dinner party. One group of their guests was a family much like ours: mother, father and a daughter, an only child. Except that the other family’s daughter was about 5 years my senior and, while I was in High School, she was already attending University.
During the meal, the matriarch of this guest family, with an indulgently patronizing smile, responded to something my dad had said with: “How can you say that, with two fine young feminists sitting at the table?”
Well, that got my hackles up!
I immediately responded with (loosely translated to English): “I am no such thing as a feminist! Please, don’t insult my intelligence by calling me one!”
Which seemed to puzzle my parents’ guests (both of whom [the parents] held doctorates in Physics): they could not possibly imagine a young woman who isn’t driven by her immature teenage rebellion into the foolishness that is ‘Western feminism’. Their own daughter was, indeed, a full blown feminist and a Marxist to boot – and, to the best of my knowledge, has remained so till now…
OK, it was one of my Aspie moments, I had embarrassed my parents and all that. Jaws dropped all around – perhaps due to the passion with which my statement was delivered – and, looking back, my parents had a hard time getting the conversation back into the ‘safe’ zone.
Yet, even at the age of 14, I recognized and despised – to the core of my being – the hypocrisy of modern-day Western feminists who, far from attempting to create a ‘level playing field’ where every individual is treated equally, regardless of where they fall in the demographics game, were all about a power/money grab for a specific snotty elite…a corruption of an ideal if there ever was one!
I, for one, considered myself ‘an equalist’ – someone who despises special privileges for anyone. for any reason. The rules of life (aka ‘the laws of the land’) had to apply to everyone equally!
After all, that is why we came to Canada: so my family would no longer be persecuted because of my father’s beliefs (not actions, just beliefs). Where teachers would not regularly single me out because of my pigmentation, my pale skin and hair and eye colour – ‘just the king of kid the Nazis would have liked – unlike the rest of my classmates, whom they would have gladly have exterminated’: a statement my grade 3-5 homeroom teacher made, in class, several times week, and which inevitably led to a school-yard beating for me…at least, until I learned how to fight back…
So, I guess I learned the hard way to wish for the rules to apply to everyone equally – even to pale freaks like me! And, I had expected that immigrating to a country with a heritage of liberal democracy, like Canada, would provide that!
How very Aspie of me…
The Cultural Marxists – led/bullied by the ‘feminists’ – had corrupted the spirit of liberal democracy in Canada long before I got here.
It saddens me to see so many smart people fall for their scam.
Yet, I am glad Thunderf00t is not one of them!
Amina Tyler, the Tunusian Femen, is missing
April 15, 2013 — xanthippaAccording to her family, Amina has left the house and not been seen or heard from since.
Considering her family had had her committed to a mental institution following Amina’s typically Femen topless protest, I do hope she is getting herself to safety in one of our oppressive capitalist countries. But, given all the death threats and fatwas against her, the possibility of foul play cannot be discounted, either…
UPDATE: Amina ran away and is now safe!
H/T: BCF
Donglegate…
March 26, 2013 — xanthippaIf you have not heard of ‘Donglegate’, you are likely not plugged in to the IT world – because anyone even remotely connected to the tech world has not been so lucky.
In a nutshell – Adria Richards, a non-technical person whose job was to make life easier for socially-awkward software developers (her actual job title was ‘developer evangelist’) eavesdropped on a ‘big dongle’ joke by a couple of socially-awkward software developers at a Python software developers conference and made such a public spectacle of just how offensive that was that she managed to get the guy who told the joke fired from his job. Anonymous – the hactivist group – took exception to her actions and targeted both her blog (where she continued to make a big fuss over the dongle joke and revealed herself to be an even more unstable flake than before) and her employer with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks – until, that is, her employer realized that Adria was not, after all, very good at evangelizing on behalf of developers, making the world a nicer place for them… and fired her.
Here is a most excellent account of the event and its fallout.
And, since he’s been talking about feminism lately, here is Thunderf00t’s take on it:
Frankly, I think people like Adria Richards should never work in a position of influence or power over anyone – and hope she never does!
UPDATE: A couple of days before she overheard the ‘dongle’ joke, Adria Richards Tweeted a sexist joke about a male friend stuffing a sock down his pants to appear to have a larger penis.…’Nough said!
Thoughts on the state of feminism…
March 18, 2013 — xanthippaIt seems timely that, just after publishing Thunderf00t’s critique of a particularly silly feminist and the comments to it (one of which, CodeSlinger’s, I had turned into a post of its own), I came across an interesting article.
In it, a self-described feminists recounts a talk by a former radical feminist, attended by (among others) feminists from modern academic circles. Her article is titled ‘Why women’s studies needs an extreme makeover’. It is a most interesting read…
In it, the author, Emma Teitel, quotes the speaker, Janice Fiamengo, as well as gives her own opinions on the evening. I’d like to pique your curiosity with little quotes from both (or, rather, Teitel quoting Fiamengo).
The discipline has devolved into an “intellectually incoherent and dishonest” one, she argued, replacing a “callow set of slogans for real thought.” It’s man-hating, anti-Western, and fundamentally illiberal. “It champions a “kind of masculinity that isn’t very masculine at all,” and shuts down freedom of debate, hence the fire alarm. [the fire alarm was used in an attempt to cancel the event]
…
She referenced the male to female death ratio on the Titanic, and declared that “self sacrifice and heroism are not exclusive to men,” “but they are distinctive to men.” Students scowled behind their wayfarers. She railed against affirmative action, a family court system skewed unjustly to favour mothers over fathers, and the deep vein of anti-Western sentiment running through academic feminism that makes it okay to decry gender inequality in the West, and keep quiet about vaginal mutilation and honour killings in the East. [my emphasis]
The women’s studies crowd looked constipated. Fiamengo’s arguments weren’t going down easy, this one—her best—in particular: women’s studies “can’t be about the pursuit of truth” because it has an “ideological base.” Its goal is to push the ideology that women are victims and men are perpetrators. Therefore, any evidence to the contrary, regardless of its veracity, is unwelcome. In other words, ideology censors truth. “If you believe you are righteous,” she said, “you don’t challenge other views.”[my emphasis]
She also writes about the Q&A that followed:
Almost every pro-women’s studies person who approached the mic last night, spoke another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific–only the words they used weren’t shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they were used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality. It was pure obfuscation, 1984 with tattoos and septum piercings. Some of the students couldn’t even string together a single lucid sentence. All they had were these meaningless, monolithic words. I felt like I was on a game show, the exercise being how many times can you say patriarchal, phallocentric hegemony in 45 seconds or less. It was frankly, for a feminist, depressing.
A thoroughly thought-provoking read!
H/T: BCF
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 