Yourish.com comments: No flames, please.
France?
You know what this whole conversation keeps reminding me of? That old line "Oh, you're a feminist? Well isn't that cute."
Like you said it's all about respect. You need at least a little before you can even realize you don't have enough. There's also no way you can make somebody see their lack of it when they don't have it.
Laurence kills me.
Personally, I'd ask if James was offering to send correlating personal pics for donations....
And, thank you for putting your finger on what's been bugging me about the feminism discussion lately - its not about equlity, its about respect. Granted, the whole respecting your fellow man has gotten short shrift 'round these parts lately...
Meryl,
This argument doesn't make much sense. You seem to be saying that because women had a difficult time getting taking seriously in the professional world a generation ago that men aren't allowed to comment on the attractiveness of women now. It's a non sequitur.
My post discussed the substance of the discrimination issue and argues that, while there are fewer women than men writing political blogs, there are still a number of well respected women bloggers. And I don't think I've seen any sexual innuendo beyond "Wow, she's pretty" directed at any of the purely analytical female bloggers I identified--McArdle, Postrel, or Kinsley.
My description of your satire of Hawkins' post was actually perfectly accurate, even if tongue in cheek. Why is it "satire" when you do it but sexism when others do?
(cont'd)
As to the Michele sitatution, I never saw her comment. I get several hundred comments a day and don't see all of them--especially since starting the new job where they block the POP ports so that I have to check my OTB account via Yahoo and it's a pain to read and delete messages.
The "boobies" thing was a reference to a post on Dean Esmay's site a few days ago when the competition started up. The "logo" business was confusion on my part, having skimmed a series of the seemingly endless posts hawking the contest. Michele was designing logos for people to put on their sites and offering, separately, to dedicate a post to the individual donors. I conflated the two into her designing logos for sites. Big whoop.
Laurence - LOL. :-)
The issue that most challenges feminism is its own future. Feminism's meaning has been misunderstood and distorted, but unfortunately by other feminists. What I came away with from school was that there wasn't one feminism anymore, but rather multiple feminisms, and they don't all share the same point of view.
I can't and won't pretend I know what was going through anyone else's minds when they wrote what they wrote, but here is my take on the situation.
Having spent a lot of close, interpersonal time with a total of three wives and two daughters, not to mention a few female co-workers, subordinates and bosses, I can unequivocally state that I don't understand the female of the species. I don't say that as a euphemism for "they're too weird" or anything like that. I'm just saying that I, as a representative of human males, don't think the way that women think. We follow different thought processes, have different outlooks, pursue different priorities.
[Cont...]
To illustrate half of the inter-gender problems here, consider how guys frequently interact with each other. We toss around friendly insults, stated openly, to get a laugh. Maybe we laugh at the supposed accusation itself, or maybe we laugh at the discomfort it causes the intended target. Frequently, competitiveness spurs a similar response. The interlocutors view this as a pleasant pastime, and any audience is amused.
It doesn't work out quite so well when a guy does something similar to a woman.
[Cont...]
I won't even begin to speculate on why, how or anything else, other than to say that women and men think differently and all that other stuff I said above. It's not better or worse, just different.
Some guys haven't figured this out yet (it took me several decades to recognize the "third-rail" aspect of this), and others have learned it, but forget it in the heat of the moment, trying to have a laugh and a display of camaraderie.
I suppose sometimes it could be considered disrespect. But I believe there are more occasions when it's just Mars colliding into Venus, with the predictable bad ending.
I think that the problem arises from the sentence that you used
"That some fringe lefties hijacked feminism does not negate the fact that
the cause was, and is, a good one."
This is the same problem that has arisen because of the "loonie left" (emphasis on the loony highjacking a number of valid causes.
I remember the original struggles for civil rights and the "loonie left" turning "affirmative action" into something to be resisted.
Similarly, I can see the "racis right" turning a valid attempt at real equality and nondiscrimination into an attempt to go back to the 1880's.
In either case we have to be careful exactly what we are doing and how we are fighting for the right (in its meaning of correct not a political wing).
My argument makes perfect sense, James. You were arguing about something else. And you were writing it before I so much as wrote a single sentence here. I didn't tell you to go set up straw men for my argument.
On the other hand, you go right ahead and tell us how Wonkette (a.k.a. Kerry Butt-Sex Girl) rising to the top of the blogosphere is a GOOD thing for women.
And, oh, nice tap-dancing about your "Michele's boobies" post, but it's now over an hour since you wrote that comment and your post is still incorrectly claiming that Michele will give out boob shots for donations.
Big whoop, I suppose.
James,
Nice way to back out, but no dice. I get about 300 comments a day, throughy my yahoo mail, at work, and I manage to take a look at each one of them because if someone takes the time to leave a comment on my site you can be damn sure I'm going to give them decency of reading the comment.
Thanks to you, I still have people a) asking me when I'm going to post my boobs and b) calling me a hypocrite because of the whole Wonkette thing. But, hey. Don't let that keep you from correcting your blatant lie.
Oh, I better stop complaining before I get called a feminist bitch.
By the way, how the hell did you derive from a comment on Dean's site about his wife posting her tits for donations that I would do the same?
You can post pictures on these blogs?!
how the hell did you derive from a comment on Dean's site about his wife posting her tits for donations that I would do the same?
Wishful thinking? That's what I'm betting, anyhow.
Actually, I believe that I was the one who initially said I'd pledge my allegiance to Michele's Victory Coalition if she were to post naked pictures.
Gee, guess that makes me a chauvinist.
Boyd,
I'd agree with you if you could point to a few examples of male bloggers interacting with each other the way crude guys do.... but we don't do that.
Big time rightwing bloggers do not say that X is trying to be Glenn Renyolds's prison bitch. Or that Jeff Jarvis got slapped around and then squealed like a pig. That's too crude and it simply isn't done. On the other hand, we are less careful when it comes to female bloggers.
So yeah, i think that there is a lack of respect at work here. As well as a sniggering childishness that is disappointing.
Meryl,
Spot-on about the benefits of feminism in terms of making education available for women. I work for the Encyclopedia of Jewish Women (due out on CD-ROM a while from now) and have seen far too many articles about women who had to overcome incredible odds to get an education.
Here's just one illustration of such a remarkable woman.
I still remember the story of an acquaintance of mine, a Navy veteran, told about how her boss denied her a raise because, in his opinion, her male co-worker needed the money more than she did. It's injustices like these that feminism was meant to correct.
Of course, the issue of respect is very important too. It depresses me to see how many men make adolescent jokes about women and then make lame excuses for their behavior when called out for it. It seems an impossible task to educate such people.
Craig, considering my opening caveat above, I stand by my statement.
Oh, and be sure you understand my position: I'm not trying to give anyone a pass for anything, nor am I addressing anyone's particular posts. I'm just talking about what I believe lies under the circumstances everyone is talking about.
Another factor is the inherent shortcoming of writing as a means of communication. It can be extremely incomplete in getting the thought across.
Respect comes down to civility, a value that is often all too rare in this world. And it is ironic that some of the same conservatives assailing liberals for destroying traditional values themselves seem all too gleefully ready to cast away not just chivalry but basic civility with a smirking fratboy attitude at the whole thing.
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