Okay, we get it. God is angry that we moved daylight savings time up three weeks (or whatever that thing was that we did), and he's punishing us with weeks of overcast skies and freezing rain in April. Does anyone know anything about blowing up the sky?
The internets can be an ugly place, no? No, wait, check that, a damn fugly place. There were the death threats against tech blogger (yes, tech blogger) (there's been a whole bruhaha in response to that that I don't have time to discuss and link to; if you're curious, see , and ).
For another innerwebby emetic, see the first update to . (In the words of Kim Gordon, which just came through my speakers, "I took a look into the hate. It mad me feel very up-to-date.
" Meanwhile, if The NY Times reports on any of this, it will no doubt be just to blame it all on Al Gore for inventing the internet.)
Anyways, in response, I'd just like to link to two especially brilliant posts I read today dealing with some of this. The first is by Sylvia at The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum.
I think it's a really powerful and compelling post, dealing with the perspective of women and women of color to threats against them on the internet.
So when I see insults and threats to my existence extolled under free speech, pardon my skepticism of your reason. When I’m told that allusions to my dehumanization throughout history functions merely as humor — solely as humor — pardon me if I question your estimation of my fear.Because personally? With a history of rape, abuse, degradation, silencing, marginalizing, and flat-out scorn for women of color? With a knowledge that even as we experience
success society can remind us with its icons and its dregs how easily we can be raped, how quickly we can be lynched, how they view us as animals, how much value we lack in the eyes of our oppressors, the oppressed, and even ourselves?It scares the
shit out of me. With reason.
Meanwhile, Twisty Faster, radical femininst blogger, gentleman farmer, amateur entymologist, foodie, and chronicler of the public cans of Austin, writes this in response to people criticizing Kathy Sierra for behaving like a victim:
But look here.
Who are they trying to kid. Women can be kept in line with intimidation, and the whole world knows it. Aren’t people who have been raped and intimidated and harassed and threatened with death “victims”?
What the fuck is wrong with that word? It describes the situation perfectly.
Do you guys get, I mean actually get, that our society is a patriarchy?
Patriarchy isn’t just a gimmick for a blog. It really exists. There are actual implications.
Do you get that a patriarchy is predicated on exploitation and victimization? It’s not a joke! It’s not an abstract concept dreamed up by some wannabe ideologue making up catch-phrases while idling away the afternoons with pitchers of margs.
Exploitation and victimization is the actual set-up! A person is either an exploiter or a victim, or sometimes both, but never neither..
.
If, by some Stone Age fantasy-world turn of good fortune, our society had not been permitted by the clumsy aliens of the planet Obsterperon to devolve into a patriarchy, Kathy Sierra wouldn’t have done anything wrong. The Rutgers basketball team wouldn’t have done anything wrong.
They would have just been human beings, doing whatever the fuck they felt like doing.
But it is a patriarchy. And in a patriarchy, where women are the lowest caste, a public woman is always wrong.
Which is why Sierra and the basketball players and lard knows how many others over the millennia have been victimized by a gazillion patriarchy-enthusiasts. These women attempted publicly, in a society in which they are devalued as dirty jokes, hysterics, babymommas, and receptacles, to behave as sovereign human beings. It is one of the first laws of patriarchy that insubordinate females should be jeered at and harassed, from the moment they dare, as members of the sex caste, to step into the gray subumbra of proto-celebrity, to the moment the last blurb is written by some feminist blogger who criticizes their behavior as victims-who-let-the-terrorist-manbags-win.
. Some of you will no doubt find it too bleak (I'm not sure we can "never" be neither victim nor exploiter) or too "radical," but she's a very talented writer, and this is one of the best posts I've read at her blog.
CNN will spend the afternoon surveying the career of , says the talking head while people are being blown up in Iraq. I've just been watching the Rutgers women's impassioned self pity over how their magic has been stolen.
All as if nothing else were going on. As if Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News and Jerry Fallwell and a host of comedians, congressmen and religious leaders are not making careers out of disparaging people for their ethnicity and beliefs and opinions. No one calls a news conference when Dave Chappelle says he's tired of having his racist comments edited.
No one has suggested that Mel Gibson should be "banned" from making movies or talking about them in public and I imagine the millions that some entertainers are making by calling women bitches and whores, nappy headed and otherwise, aren't coming from white racists. I'm not calling for the burning of the Gospel of John even though it insults me and my ethnicity and I'm not anxious to live in any place where people get to ban speech just because it isn't reverential enough or is actually insulting toward women, minorities, basketball players or other people.
Face it, it's time to be women and not little girls whining to mommy.
You won some games and that doesn't make you special or worthy of my admiration or give you special protection against being insulted. If you think your "moment" was taken away because somebody made a bad joke or called you a name, then your moment wasn't worth much anyway; certainly not enough to make a slur into slander. Sooner or later you will have to leave the nanny state and face a world that some college administration can't control.
People say stupid and ugly things and sometimes . People tell lies and get millions killed. I'm a bit less concerned about the fragile self esteem of young women who think basketball and their ephemeral achievements are more important than the First Amendment.
If one really wants to call, as the Rutgers women's basketball team is doing today, for the lifetime ban of Don Imus from public commentary, one has to ask who in a free country has the authority to do it. Certainly the US Government is denied that power and for good reason. If any self appointed guardians of propriety think they can claim the right to regulate public dialog or to ban anything and everything they found offensive and without regard to law and liberty, they will succeed, as much as I dislike Imus and hate racism, only over my dead body. posted by Capt.
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