People don’t seem to understand why I find the following post (and so many more like it) to be injurious and disgusting:
I don’t know what asshole invented the idea that teenage girls are the cause for all evil, but I really hope that person never has to raise one. I don’t want him to see her dissolve in his fingers as society tells her to eat less, be thinner, be the damsel in distress, be something for a man to fix, be different but not too different, be special but never ever a special snowflake – I don’t want him to watch as she realizes that no matter what she loves, she’ll be made fun of for it. She can simply like her coffee from Starbucks and suddenly she’s vapid and thinks herself poetic. She’ll want to play video games but be called a fake nerd, particularly if she poses in any remotely flirtatious way because for some reason despite the entire community playing games with poorly dressed women they still hate it when a real girl wears less clothing, she will be seen as trespassing in a specifically male space – but when she falls in love with a female-based television show for children, she’ll watch as men step on themselves to sexualize it.
(There is a lot more at the link, of course.)
In college, I used to know somebody who’d say the most insulting anti-Semitic things to me and my Jewish friend. These messages were always accompanied by, “I can’t believe how vicious those anti-Semites are. They say. . .” and a torrent of abuse would follow. My friend and I were young and we couldn’t really identify what was bothering us about this way of denouncing anti-Semitism.
Today I’m older and I see this fake concern for what it is. And I prefer an honest woman-hater, anti-Semite or any other kind of jerkwad who declares his or her hatred openly and directly to a fake progressive who hides behind imitating concern while pounding people over the head with vicious insults. The quoted text literally drips with enjoyment of female degradation. But it’s presented as an attempt to vindicate women, so nobody dares to criticize. Nobody even wonders why a supposed vindication of women is coming from a person who sees womanhood as so relentlessly horrific.
This is such a convenient role to assume. You can say any number of sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. things but as long as you preface your offensive rants with, “Nasty evildoers are, of course, completely wrong when they say. . .” you will be immune from all criticism.
Have you noticed how every initiative aimed at discriminating against women today disguises itself as coming from a place of concern for women? “No, it’s not victim-blaming. And no, we are not the ones trying to make women believe that leaving the house puts them in mortal danger. It’s just that there are all those nasty rapists around, it’s all their fault.”
So the answer to the linked post’s question as to “what asshole invented. . .” is obvious. Such covert woman-haters reinvent these pernicious messages every time they engage in their “defense of the downtrodden.”
Clarissa's Blog 
There’s a very apt meme put out on Facebook by some folks calling themselves “Urban Intellectuals”. Actually the group seems to be African Americans as it were. The poster says, “I’m not interested in what others are saying about me. I’m more interested in why they were so comfortable saying it to you.”
Certainly if someone wants to play to both sides of an issue, their actions do become obvious to a skilled observer. I wasn’t able to articulate it before, but I knew a colleague at work was playing to both sides when she said, “I only told them what they NEEDED to know [about you].” Then I knew immediately that she had told them what she thought they ought to know about me to make herself look relatively good by comparison. After all, there is nothing about my private life the bosses NEEDED to know.
But so it goes. Some people are cowards. As for me, I now understand how this game is played, so I am particularly dangerous.
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Oh, but I don’t mean gossip situations (although the question you raise is a good one).
I mean interpretation: I tend not to think people have low motives, and when others point it out and it’s true, I find it helpful.
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Was I speaking of a gossip situation? Ths situation was thus that the management was spying on the workers and trying to catch us out with something. It was very ANIMAL FARM.
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Yes, I mean anything involving reporting.
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The reporting was to tighten the noose around certain people by making them more controllable and fearful. That was the management’s agenda and people in contemporary society are either incredibly naive about this or thing nothing of selling their colleagues out.
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I see your point. I am just somewhat dense and find it useful to have some of these things explained (as in, recently someone pointed out to me that no matter how nice I was to person Y, person Y would continue to feel affronted [even more affronted] because s/he needs to see if notme as evil; because I do a, b, and c while being a woman — and it explained a lot, despite being bad news and somewhat insulting, and helps because I now understand the situation and can stop feeling inadequate or mean for not being able to reassure them, and realize they are the one with the aggressive attitude … had I not been informed, I would have wasted more time and energy being confused about the behavior).
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As Nietzsche says somewhere. Sometimes thinking attains something higher [than mere thought?] — cynicism.
Actually it pays to be cynical is most of one’s dealings, at least until one comes to know someone better.
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I am very non cynical, almost to a fault, although it is an outlook I prefer.
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I don’t mean a mood, as in a cynical or gruff disposition, but genuine transcendence. It’s closer to Buddhist non-reactiveness.
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Aha…
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When one has enough knowledge, everything changes at last and one does not need to enter relationships in such a way that they make one vulnerable to others.
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/shamanic-self-knowledge.html
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Excellent piece.
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ta.
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I have tried several times to express what you said here. Masterfully done.
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Ah. I appreciate the explanation. I would not have thought to read it that way, but I can see it.
I don’t know. Life at the moment brings me into proximity with a mentally ill teen girl, and this quoted link captures one dimension of the kinds of things she seems to be wrestling with.
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Love everything about this post. Thank you(: Great blog! Care to check out mine? Downwiththenorm.wordpress.com
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Of course it’s not a complaint. It’s instruction and a set of talking points.
It’s ammunition to convince oneself (and others) that one’s failures aren’t one’s own but rather an indictment of society.
It turns simple survival into an accomplishment.
It elevates unexamined emotions into higher consciousness and a fine-tuned morality.
This is where the moral high ground lies in contemporary mainstream US feminism: Non-stop victimization and suffering and a complete lack of personal responsibility.
It’s also just a reformulation of tiresome Victorian platitudes about suffering being a woman’s lot in life.
It also (knowingly? unknowingly?) casts men as stronger by their very nature and therefore having a special responsibility to tame their unreasoning animal ids in the service of caretaking womens’ delicate flower psyches.
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If you bring a case of actual patriarchal aggression to the attention of a feminist, and it is the slightest bit complicated or you express anguish over how to act, they will dismiss you as being not at all feminist, because you did not take the easy way out, which is moral condemnation and self-righteous posturing. It’s those qualities they identify readily with “feminism”. But to try to understand something more deeply, or to try to handle things without laying the blame, even whilst still intellectually identifying patriarchal dynamics as the enemy and this they will reject..
Instead, they demand extreme emotionality and great moral posturing as proof of a “feminist” identity.
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The old name for this commenter is “concern troll”. They have been around since USENET. Hit delete, and if your browser allows you to skip particular individuals, take advantage of the feature.
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