Only Dead Fish Go With the Flow

This makes me really really sad

Go ahead and dig through the background if you want, but I’ll give a short rundown, which is probably more biased than it should be:

Tekanji writes a post about how feminists have a tendency to use “ableist language” (read: “crazy”, “retard”, “lame”).

Mighty Ponygirl responds by explaining that 1. Internet bloggers are not necessarily as well-trained as womens’ studies people, and 2. If you tell people in a nice way they will respond better to your complaints.

I think the first few paragraphs of the comment should have been omitted, because people are not going to read through the whole thing and they will honestly mostly listen to the first sentence (see the post here, which is awesome) And the first thing she says seems like a weird argument for using strong words like that, rather than her real, main point.

Tekanji takes personal insult at this comment (though my reaction was, “Is she reading the same thing I am reading?”) and tells MP that she is no longer within the bounds of the posting rules on that site.

Regardless, there is an eventual followup from Mighty Ponygirl on Feminist Gamers regarding feminists in general (but pretty obviously aimed at this argument).

And finally, Tekanji blasts Mighty Ponygirl and makes a bunch of fun assumptions about her character and how she is an “easy” feminist vs a big scary one like Tekanji, which stuck me as about as patronizing as they come.

But here’s the thing. Feminists on the internet are never going to be well trained and well-versed in feminist theory. I, myself, was biased against the womens studies as an academic discipline forever because when I went to (a land grant university) college at 16, they told me I couldn’t take any womens’ studies class because I was not mature enough because of my age. Wait, what?

Sure, I’ve called myself a feminist forever, but for a long time it was just a sense of “Holy shit, rape and abuse are terrible. We should do our best to prevent it.” Unfortunately, my experiences never really gave me the ability to deal with my issues with men and whatever else nearly as well as more well-trained feminism did. Now I can channel all that anger and frustration into something useful, like volunteering at a rape crisis center.

So, basically, what I am trying to say here is that feminist bloggers have to teach people like me to recognize my privilege and how to understand what feminism is and what feminism means. I really only became interested in feminism in any real way after reading Feminist Gamers, and it has snowballed from there tremendously.

I mean, I deal with this attitude all the time. I live in a co-op, with a democratic system for deciding policies. Unfortunately, this means that every time a bunch of new co-opers move in, we have to try everything over again. The old co-opers sigh and groan because they know it’s not going to work as planned, but you have to let the newbies find their way.

I understand that there are a lot of people who really cannot be convinced of their own privilege. I think it’s a hard hurdle for everyone to get over, especially when you’ve spent so much time concerning yourself with someone else’s. Unfortunately, this is something that absolutely everyone who is involved with an issue like feminism eventually has to confront. It’s not something which is particularly obvious at first, and only by raising awareness can we work to change that level of awareness.

The thing that kills me, though, is that I really do feel like MP’s intent was not cruel, but the backlash was 10x more than I would have expected if I were in the same situation, and god I don’t want to think about how much that hurts.