When the going gets tough…

Posted: April 22, 2011 in Blogging, cock, Feminism, Freedom of Speech

…feminists get out their BIG HARD BAN HAMMER!

http://toomuchtosayformyself.com/2011/04/20/an-occupational-hazard/

SUCK MY DICK FEMINISM.

Comments
  1. Tim says:

    “SUCK MY DICK FEMINISM.”

    Are you talking about the honorary penis you have been awarded some time ago ? 😀

    • yes but also today on the thread I linked to, I got ‘outed’ again as ‘male born’! Incredible!

      • sofia says:

        that’s so incredibly insulting (!).

        • well of course they assume being called a ‘man’ is the worst insult possible.

          But it is pretty grim accusing someone of basically being a trans woman who has been hiding that fact, and whose whole political viewpoint stems from having been born with a penis. But you know, there are no ‘essentialist’ differences between men and women are there? except when it suits them.

          • Tim says:

            There is no brain matter with pre-stored political opinions located inside the penis, no matter how convenient that is from a political viewpoint.

            Anyway, if you ever feel like becoming a man, I’d totally throw you a welcoming party.

      • typhonblue says:

        If it helps, I’ve been called a man for ten years because of my stances on certain issues.

        There is one poster at feministcritics who would not even acknowledge I was female after I posted a picture of myself.

        Sigh.

        • It’s funny in a way. But it also proves that feminism relies on the gender binary that it claims to be trying to challenge!

          and, it is also annoying. a way of erasing a person’s identity.

          • typhonblue says:

            “But it also proves that feminism relies on the gender binary that it claims to be trying to challenge!”

            Of course it does!

            Feminism could not exist in an honest-to-god matriarchy. I’m writing a story to address just this conundrum.

          • mcduff says:

            Of course feminism can’t exist inside a matriarchy. But… so? If my grandmother had four wheels she would be a taxicab, albeit an unlicensed one.

            I’m not sure what it proves, or disproves, or indeed provides any new information towards understanding, by radically changing the starting conditions of the hypothetical universe so that they don’t resemble this one at all.

          • typhonblue says:

            “I’m not sure what it proves, or disproves, or indeed provides any new information towards understanding, by radically changing the starting conditions of the hypothetical universe so that they don’t resemble this one at all.”

            I guess you lack imagination. 😉

          • mcduff says:

            Yeah, that must be it. Because saying “if everyone had six arms then none of our shirts would fit” is pushing the intellectual boat out to hitherto uncharted waters, and pointing out that since nobody has six arms it’s completely irrelevant to the modern shirtmaking industry is me just being a tired stick in the mud. Damm my intellectual incuriosity. If it weren’t for people like me, people would be making six-armed shirts for imaginary people EVEN AS WE SPEAK! Think of all the imaginary dollars they’re losing!

          • typhonblue says:

            “Damm[sic] my intellectual incuriosity.”

            Wow. Well, that rant on why creativity and speculation is bad certainly showed me!

            BTW, six armed shirts could be viable in the future if we start adding cybernetic appendages to enable us to manipulate our environment in new ways.

            Hey, add in an old school tailor behind the curve because he believed ‘nobody has six arms it’s completely irrelevant to the modern shirtmaking industry’ and that has the makings of an awesome story about identity, change and the human condition.

          • mcduff says:

            Creativity and invention isn’t a bad thing at all.

            However, if you’re not inventing extra appendages for people, and nobody else is inventing them either, then you should probably not expect people to reward the time you have taken to invent a six-armed shirt. Necessity is the mother of invention for a reason, after all. What you have, there, is a useless shirt with too many arms.

          • typhonblue says:

            “Necessity is the mother of invention for a reason, after all.”

            If necessity really was the mother of invention then we’d still be riding around in a horse and buggy.

          • mcduff says:

            *sigh*

            Fine, blue. Go ahead and invent your six sleeved shirt. I look forward with eager anticipation to my meal of crow once you announce your first million.

          • typhonblue says:

            Naw, I’ll just continue on with the original idea that spawned your initial contempt.

  2. mcduff says:

    *double facepalm*

    Well that’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?

    For what it’s worth, I seemed to miss that whole “submissive” tweet debacle and think it was bang out of order from Baxter’s tweet onwards. I don’t agree with your characterisation of his column on the Daily Sport, but that is zero justification for using someone’s sexual preference against them in the argument, just as it would be unjustified for him to use orientation, race or gender against you.

    It does kind of cut to the heart of what I think you were trying to get at in that thread, where people in discriminated-against groups can fall into twin pitfalls of fetishising their own discriminated-against status and/or not recognising that privilege is a multi-faceted thing which can cause them to be blind to their own respective privileges. There’s a certain Matthew 18 aspect to the whole thing. “As she left, the raped woman fell upon the sex worker and said ‘your behaviour is what causes bad things to happen to women, off to prison you go!'” Something like that, anyway.

    By the same token, though, I’m struck by how the argument seems to be about whether a mountain is the same as a hill, with one side saying “they are different sizes” and the other side saying “they’re all places where the ground is lumpy in an upwardly-pointy kind of way.” It seems to be one of those issues where there’s an easy middle ground to occupy, if anyone was interested in it.

    • Yes but like you pointed out the person trying to occupy the middle ground most carefully, ‘Lucy’, was just tainted with the ‘QRG’ brush.

      • mcduff says:

        I know. You weren’t the one who came out of that exchange looking like the most unreasonable one.

        There remains an element of “all hills are mountains” in what you were saying that I still (you will be most unsurprised to learn) believe I disagree with, or at least believe you could have been more clear about. But the “you must join us in denouncing all aspects of the QRG entity or we will reject you out of hand” contingent were really quite ridiculous there.

        • Sure. but disagreeing with people is not a problem to me. It’s what debate is.

          We disagree on the major issue of whether or not women are structurally at a disadvantage in society. So all our arguments are in the context of that major disagreement. I don’t expect to agree with you often, due to that major difference in our viewpoints. I don’t expect to persuade you of my point of view either.

          And so, in some ways, my participation on feminist sites is ‘disruptive’. But I think dogmas that cannot take critique need to be ‘disrupted’ in a Derridean or Butlerian sense.

          • mcduff says:

            There are certainly aspects of mainstream feminism that I think need to be disrupted, and there are aspects of feminism in which men, as well as the wrong kind of women, are definitely at a structural disadvantage. But then I’ve told anti-sex work feminists to go fuck themselves with their own privilege before, so I’m certainly regarded as rude and disruptive by some people with whom I hope to share the “feminist” label.

            It may amuse you that while other feminists may rail against you for leaving their fold (I’ve met too many people who’ve personally rejected the label for valid reasons to have a problem with that aspect of your online writing) I’ve been told by some enthusiastic soul over there that it is actually impossible for me to be a feminist. I simply can’t win! 😛

            Nonetheless, I tend to think that where we disagree more than anything is in how big and influential “mainstream feminism” is within “feminism,” and how big “feminism” is within the culture at large. Possibly this is just a result of who we hang around with.

  3. sofia says:

    i mean, the post made me feel sorry for her a bit. but not the ensuing discussion. or the fact that she tried to shut down the webpage. (i myself have been featured in such a FEMINIST blog commentary.) it’s hurtful when you’re targeted on the internet, but they refuse to recognize the fact that they perpetrate the same kind of attitudes and behaviours to others that they ‘label’. i skimmed through the discussion (there were a lot of comments to go through), but from what i saw it was just a deliberate attempt on their part at repeatedly misunderstanding what you said so that they can all remain victims.

    • oh god i wouldnt have expected you to read all that!

      My main point was the same as yours- that feminists including the writer of that post, do also bully people online…which they then went ahead and illustrated perfectly!

  4. ‘Nonetheless, I tend to think that where we disagree more than anything is in how big and influential “mainstream feminism” is within “feminism,” and how big “feminism” is within the culture at large. Possibly this is just a result of who we hang around with.’

    no I think our differences are deeper than that and more based on a different analysis of society than ‘who we hang round with’.

    But yeah, good luck with staying in with the fold.

    • mcduff says:

      Fair enough. I don’t personally get how you don’t see systemic disadvantage for women writ deep in the culture, but then I guess you probably think I’m blind to all the iniquities faced by men on a daily basis. I’ll just point out again that the Mail outsells the Guardian 10:1 and countries like Iran outnumber countries like Sweden and leave it at that.

      “The fold” doesn’t really include the kind of people who believe men can’t be feminists, at least as far as my personal experience goes. Cliqueiness happens. I normally get more abuse from anti-sex feminists about pushing for Sex Workers’ Rights than I do about being a man.

      • My problem with you McDuff is you want me to have a ‘reasonable’ discussion here with you, or on your blog. But elsewhere, eg on Cath Elliotts blog and twitter, you basically refer to me as a troll and someone who is normally ‘the most unreasonable’ person on the thread. This I find insulting and contradictory.

        which is it to be? Do you want to discuss with me reasonably, my issues and yours with feminism? Or do you want to cariacature me as an irrational, angry, disruptive ‘anti feminist’ troll?

        I am not playing both roles.

        • Matt Volatile says:

          I’ve just read the thread… sheesh! I think McDuff got a sense of what it’s like to step over the party line. That “Sarah” is terrifying.

          Cut him some slack, Elly. I think he’s trying to be moderate and reasonable – and in being moderate and reasonable he seems to have gotten some first-hand-sense of exactly what you’ve been talking about recently.

          • this is the most slack I can cut him. He is quite often very rude to me and my ‘friends’ such as they are! On Mark Simpson’s blog he was really quite disrespectful and nasty for example. And on Graunwatch he has been heavy handed and rude and aggressive too. But I am cutting some slack hence we are still communicating!

            But yes I think Mcduff is finding out a bit about feminism in action but he is determined to think it is just a minor clique at fault. Not a structural problem!

          • mcduff says:

            Also, as a male pro sex work feminist, if you think this is the first time I’ve come across the crazy insular side of feminism then you’ve really got the wrong end of it. I just happen to have an immediately accessible support network of incredibly smart feminists all round me to provide me with balance and perspective. Not to mention being able to look out of the window and realising that they *really* don’t run the world.

            Perhaps that puts me in the clique?

        • mcduff says:

          I don’t think you’re a simple phenomenon.

          I think that you have the capacity to start off conversations very well and finish them in tremendous fits of pique. I’ve also seen you ride in to the most inappropriate places and accuse people of all manner of things.

          The thing is, I think had you not had the personal experience with the SteBax “submissive” twitter jokes and Cath’s joining in – and you’re right, Cath should have known better than to encourage a joke mocking your sexual preferences right from the start, just as she should have known better than to join in if someone interrupted an argument to mock their opponent’s race – it would have been another bit of playing to form and getting the time and place all wrong. Since your strategy is disruption it shouldn’t be much of a surprise to you when you disrupt people. You go into comment threads, raise something off topic, make what I consider to be a number of quite eyebrow-raising false equivalences, and then dig your heels in until people get all bothered by you. For example, I stil believe Baxter had no right to say what he did about you, but I still find it hard to believe that you had the guts to take a single line in his article about the Sport and use that to say that he was calling all sex “dirty”. Not really supported by the source text, IMO.

          On that thread over there, both sides dug their heels in and it was pretty fucking awful. I think you had a valid point as far as the privilege of certain people on the receiving end of discriminatory language blinding them to how they were capable of turning around and doling it out themselves. At the same time I think they take place in very different cultural contexts.

          Entire comment boards dedicated to bashing groups of women, or individual women, are the product of something much more bone-deep than what happens when an in-group rejects a member of an out-group who has come in, intentionally, to poke people with sticks. They’re a reflection of the horrifying way that cultural masculinity normalises and encourages male violence. And I’m not talking about the teevee culture, I’m talking about the things we teach to each other, the conversations we have with our children before we even know we’re having them. The thing about masculinity is that it teaches you self-destructive behaviours and contradictory things about yourself and about sexuality and about women, and so that kind of scenario where men one-up themselves as to who can be the most hateful towards any semblance of femininity, particularly femininity that doesn’t fit into a particular box, happens *all the time*. This perpetuates a culture where male-perpetrated violence is normalised, not by evil terrible feminists blaming men for being rapists, but by *men*, who train each other to be violent and police each other to ensure that they stay that way.

          True, a large percentage of that violence goes towards other men, be it for tribalist reasons, protection of status or as a demonstration of overt rejection of femininity. And it’s unlikely that most of the men in that thread about Cath would ever have gone further than being a hateful twat. But when you’re dealing with a situation like that, or when you get into the big leagues where whole boards swap around people’s home addresses, there’s no guarantee that someone won’t follow through on the threats. There is a difference between being “silenced” by being banned from a blog comments thread and being “silenced” because you’re worried if you post on your own blog (or write articles for your paper or appear on your TV show) that some nutcase will actually turn up at your house one day and murder you.

          As I said. I think you were insinuating rather than explicitly arguing that all hills are mountains. I think the other side were saying “hills are nothing like mountains at all.” I think the “middle ground” is also the right place to be – that hills come from a similar kind of process to mountains, but that mountains are bigger. Not because mountains are made out of rocks with an intrinsic “largeness” quality to them, but because the pressures and the environment have happened to pile up the same rocks into a bigger lump in particular areas.

          Now, if you weren’t saying anything like that, if I have completely misread you, then I apologise. But my reading of the situation over there was that your point about Cath’s complicity in the “submissive” tweets was very defensible (and very worth making), but without it your equivalence between different kinds of discourse would have slid even quicker into the kind of “whataboutery” territory I have criticised you for occupying before.

          Oh, incidentally, “troll” is a job description. If you’re going into places on the internet with the intent to disrupt, as you admit you are, you’re trolling. This applies if you’re a black guy posting on the Stormfront boards to piss them off just as much as anything else – it’s a function, not a value judgement. You can be entirely correct in every aspect and still be a troll. Although it’s rarely the most productive way of getting your point across, it can often be quietly fun. And, whether they like it or not, most communities need their tame trolls. Trolling is like pollution. Too much of it chokes everything up. The right grain of sand in the right oyster produces some lovely pearls. If anything, I’d say my biggest criticism of your trolling is not that you do it but that you need practice at it. Any kid from 4Chan can get banned all the time and call their opponents wankers. If you want to troll properly you need to finesse it a bit more.

          And I’m sorry this is so long. I haven’t even read what they’re saying about me on the other side yet.

          • that is a bit long mcd, and also from what I have read thus far incredibly patronising

            ‘my biggest criticism of your trolling is.. that you need practice at it’

            You fit right into feminism in my view. But I am glad for you that you are surrounded by your own kind. I don’t have that luxury.

            I have no desire to take on board any of your criticisms of me especially if they include tips for ‘improvement’.

            Thanks anyway

          • mcduff says:

            Welp. Tried my best. Failed. Again.

            Shorter version then: you go into feminist places with the intent to disrupt, succeed, and then complain that people have responded predictably. In-groups responding to disruption in that way is not unique to feminism, so it doesn’t prove anything particular about feminism except that it produces in-groups. Which, y’know, yes? Also: sun hot, water wet. My saying that you do these things is not saying that you are a bad person or someone with nothing interesting to say. It’s just saying that I understand how come you put people’s backs up all the time.

            I do think you have some valid criticisms of feminism. I also think you have many invalid ones. These are just my opinions. Also, despite our many, many disagreements, I’m curious as to where our respective points of inflexion happen. What is it that we both see about gender that makes our opinion curves diverge on the graph? It’s all very well saying that I think women are systemically disadvantaged and you don’t, but I’m genuinely curious as to why we have such divergent views. We can both see the same things. We both understand how gender normativity fucks both sides over. We both have access to the same elephant, albeit in different parts. We both have no time for the anti-sex, anti-porn, anti-any-women-we-don’t-approve-of bloc of feminism. What I can’t work out is what happens in between there and here to put us on opposite sides. Is it just that I see that bloc as being a small part of the whole and that you see it as being an intrinsic quality of feminism from the foundations upwards?

            My interest in it, of course, doesn’t obligate you to take part in the discussion, particularly if I annoy you. I’m just saying, that’s where I’m coming from. I don’t think people have to particularly like each other in order to have a conversation.

  5. Mr. Divine says:

    I got banned from Cath Elliot’s blog twice in one week! She’s so narrow minded, it’s incredible.

  6. Mr. Divine says:

    How about that Fab Libber one, she comes and tries to tell you off like a headmistress.

  7. Mr. Divine says:

    I follow what you say QRG but as yet I have nothing to respond to you. I haven’t worked you out.

  8. Mr. Divine says:

    We’re on two separate tracks to God Know Where and Never the Twin shall Meet.

  9. Mr. Divine says:

    I’ve got this impression that you were born a bloke and became a woman.

  10. You don’t have to like someone to have a conversation McD but you do have to treat them with basic respect. I sometimes get exasperated and say stupid things to you, but that is out of exasperation at your consistently, arrogant and condescending tone.

    Remember that conversation on Mark Simpson’s blog about misandry? I do. And I don’t like engaging with people who may at any point revert to that kind of aggressive tone.

    So I am hoping you can keep things nice and measured here. Thanks.

  11. mcduff says:

    I remember calling someone a “silly cunt.” I also remember you saying that Julie Bindel could suck your dick, and that other people who disagreed with you were wankers, and that feminism could suck your dick and…

    Well, y’know, basically, I don’t think I’ve ever said anything as rude to you as you are to other people on a regular basis. If the cut and thrust of debate can involve you telling people to suck your dick I think it can also tolerate a little bit of “you’re a silly cunt.”

    Perhaps I’m wrong. It does feel a little bit like a double standard though.

    • the reason you are ‘wrong’ is your refusal to acknowledge the ‘power’ dynamics involved. I am not going to explain them to you as if you are a child, as you explain what you think is obvious, to me, as if I am a child.

      I expect we just have a different perspective. I recommend reading Foucault, Norman Fairclough and Judith Butler though, on discourse and ‘power’. If you havent already.

      the sex work thing I am genuinely sorry about i had not seen you make any references in support of sex workers’ rights only criticisms of all my other views so I assumed you disagreed with me on that issue too.

      If you only ever blog to critique other people, and not to really express your own views, its hard to get a grasp of where you are coming from.

      • mcduff says:

        I’m pretty sure I’ve said the exact same thing to you.

        I understand about power dynamics, but I’m not convinced that they’re tilted the way you believe they are. I don’t have any intentions of explaining things to you like you’re a child. I simply don’t know where much of the common ground is and so try to be as clear as possible so as to avoid misunderstanding.

        Our philosophical languages are also entirely different. You’re steeped in Freud and Foucault, who I freely admit I find mostly intolerable. I’m much more comfortable with William James and Robert Pirsig, or Chesterton, the mechanistic philosophers who take the world apart and explain it for simpletons like me. I can easily imagine you finding their work annoying too. When there’s that much divergence I can’t make assumptions that you’re necessarily going to “get it” if I shorthand things the way I understand them. Not because you’re stupid, but because you’re obviously going to use a different framework to hang all your concepts on. So I try to expand as much as possible. If that comes across as condescending I’m sorry. It’s really not what I’m going for.

        On the other hand, if I do think you’re being unreasonable I think it’s fair enough that I say it. You can criticise me right back, after all. Particularly since this is your space.

        • when I said ‘power’ heres one example and then I’ll leave it for today.

          Julie Bindel has ‘power’ in discourse as she is a journalist on a national newspaper(s) and has a role as a spokesperson in mainstream/radical feminism. She gets platforms eg at conferences/on telly/in the media.

          Also she has ‘power’ because she has reinforced transphobia and transphobic hatred from a feminist perspective.

          My comment that Julie Bindel can ‘suck my dick’ was in response to her spewing her hatred of and to trans women, on twitter, where she blocks me from responding to her directly.

          The feminists on Caths Blog, went out to my twitterfeed, trawled through it, found the ‘suck my dick’ quote and brought it back to caths blog toshow everyone, to ‘shame’ me. And to use to threaten me with banning from their space. Apologise or be banned. I didn’t apologise. I was banned.

          That is different, in my view, from you going on Mark’s blog and calling one of his readers/commenters, a ‘silly little cunt’ or whatever you said.

          If you can’t see that basic difference I don’t know what to say.

          • mcduff says:

            I said, IIRC, “you’re clearly a silly cunt.”

            I understand why they were using their power against you, but then on the other hand they were banning you from their space. In that instance it was Mark’s space, and I was clearly in the minority. I had no power there whatsoever.

            I also don’t spend my time reinforcing hatred of women. I do spend my time with people, including women, who don’t see the word as being laden with intrinsic violence and who use it in daily conversation. I use it in my infrequent blogging history in such constructions as “Mark Steyn is a cunt”. It was possibly a little *harsh*, and potentially inappropriate (certainly inasmuch as it distracted from the point and focussed attention on the word) but I don’t quite think it is the same thing as brutalising people with the power of my discourse. I’m not above you in any hierarchies that we generally talk in, and in general you (and Mark) are much more influential and listened-to than I am. Not only can’t I ban you from my space, you didn’t even know about it till last week and don’t have an inclination to comment there anyway. What can I say? I really don’t see the power dynamic between us as being in any sense tilted towards me.

  12. no i didnt mean you and me mcduff.

    I meant the power imbalance between Julie Bindel and feminists on their own blog (though it is cath’s blog but it feels like a group affair)/ and me, compared to the lack of power imbalance between you and the person you called a ‘silly cunt’.

    Yes Mark S has more power than you on his blog. If you’d aimed that comment at him you’d have been banned in a shot.

    But he has no power on that feminist blog. He’d get banned for opening his mouth there. As I have been on a few feminist spaces. Its all contextual.

    • mcduff says:

      I know it’s all contextual. But wheras you might see calling people wankers and telling them to suck your dick something you do to redress the power imbalance, or because of the lack of power imbalance, that wasn’t the intent or aim of the use of the word.

      It’s because I thought he was a silly cunt. That’s it. It was everyone else who decided it was an aggressive tone.

      • yes and in discourse ‘everyone else’ matter just as much as you. if not more.

        I am a ‘troll’ to ‘everyone else’ who thinks I am a troll.

        and as part of everyone else, I often find you aggressive and disrespectful in your tone. But unlike ‘everyone else’ on Cath’s blog I don’t put this down to your gender identity!

        • mcduff says:

          Then this is yet another of these deep and fundamental things on which we, shockingly, disagree. Motive matters. Without it everything is far too surface-bound and far too concerned with the appearance of things.

          Accepting that mostly appearance is all we have to go on is not the same as believing that it should take precedence over substance.

          • that’s not what I am saying. I am saying your version of events is not more important than ‘everyone elses’. Why do you think I run my own blog? Because ‘everyone else’ doesn’t give me a look-in in discourse otherwise.

            That’s life. You have to accept you are in a social context and people will interpret what you say according to their own perceptions. You don’t have to agree with them. But you have no ownership of ‘objectivity’

          • mcduff says:

            I never claimed to own objectivity. I said that I mistook the importance that everyone else placed on the word “cunt”, causing them to focus on that and not on the intent behind the words. That doesn’t mean I got everything right. But it also doesn’t mean that I was actually aggressive.

            In that context I accept that miscommunication occurred. Water has since flowed under that particular bridge. This is now not that context and therefore the subsequent conversations we have had about that single use of the phrase “you’re clearly a silly cunt” should have provided additional information which it would be entirely lax for you to discard in favour of giving weight to “everyone else’s” assumption about it.

  13. Helen Adiba says:

    Hi QRG,

    I have read the entire post you linked to but only a few of the comments to understand your position.

    Um, wow.

    I’ve been noticing this backlash from a certain brand of hateful feminist a lot too and am really happy to see someone speak out about it. I identify as feminist, but sometimes my viewpoints contradict the mainstream feminist view, or sometimes I speak on behalf of men which doesn’t go down well. Worst case, I am told I have been brainwashed by the patriarchy, ha.

    You know I don’t mind if people think my ideas are rubbish, but there is no need to be insulting. The Internet is a powerful tool but anonymity affords some people the misplaced courage to attack people, not only that but the nature of online communication is fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings are so commonplace. This is why I chose not to blog my own thoughts often because I HATE getting into those endless discourses with people, whereas offline any misunderstandings can be explained within seconds or the right body language.

    Do you ever go to feminist seminars and conferences and espouse uncommon views? Do you get any trouble then? I avoid feminist groups for this reason, but perhaps I shouldn’t.

    • Hi Helen
      thanks for your comment and for braving that thread even as a reader!
      I dont think it is just anonymity. The blogger in question is not anonymous- which is partly why she got her photo put up by nasty people taking the piss out of her by the way.

      And many of those commenters aren’t anonymous. Yes it does add to the atmosphere of lack of accountability online but I dont think anonymity is the only problem.

      My days of attending feminist seminars are long since gone! But if I did I think I’d bring a flak jacket and a tin helmet. And plenty of booze to drown my sorrows at the state of feminism.

  14. Yes OK McDuff lets move on but if you ever call me or any other commenter on here a silly cunt I won’t be happy.

  15. Mr. Divine says:

    QRG: Were you born male and then had a sex change?

  16. mcduff says:

    Can’t escape the gender normativity even on here then?

    What is it with people? “Oh look, a woman is extroverted and aggressive in tone, therefore she must be secretly male in some way.”

    I mean, I know what it is. It’s just one of those things that confuses me the more I study it. It’s like, finding out the depths of its subconscious penetration into all aspects of people’s identity seems to go hand in hand with finding out what utter bloody nonsense it is. It’s a big collective blind spot where we’ve all agreed to not notice the fact that we’re wearing clown shoes and comedy red noses.

    • I think Mr Divine is reacting to how I have been called ‘a man’ and ‘male born’ on other sites, not just his own perception of how I behave online.

      And I don’t get called ‘a man’ on feminist sites for being ‘aggressive’ -most of those women are aggressive in discourse. I get called ‘a man’ because I go against the ‘rad fem’ dogma. Because they want to label me as ‘the enemy’ which is men.

  17. Mr. Divine says:

    Yes that’s right, I have heard you being called a man who has ‘transitioned’ into a women, and therefore your views are not as valid as a one hundred percent dinky die woman. I’m glad you’ve cleared that mix up in my head. So you were born a female and remain one… and you’ve become a woman.

  18. Todd says:

    I have no idea what the true lowdown is in terms of who has banned you and who hasn’t but, with all due respect, it seems to me that you have set up a situation here where you can be seen to win no matter what happens. If people give you the attention you want, you can dominate discussions and show off freely. If they ignore you, you can revel in your outlaw status and claim they are all crying about it.

  19. Todd says:

    I have yet to see anyone “high fiving” each other for ignoring you (your own words on Twitter) but please fill me in on the details if they really are.

    • you’re a little ray of sunshine aren’t you Todd?

      If you want to quote my tweets it would be polite to state your own twitter identity in doing so. thanks.

  20. Todd says:

    No intention to sound miserable here. It is indeed a lovely day and, again, I’m only saying what I see.

    I would say you had a point if you were entirely candid about your own identity on the web. You’re hardly in a position to bristle when I reference you here and preach about politeness when you’re happy enough to continue throwing your weight around on the web under a pseudonym. If what you say here is anything to go by it doesn’t sound to me like you care too much about being polite to people yourself. And why should you have to? But either you believe in free open debate without rules and stipulations or you don’t so I’d suggest you start practising what you preach.

    • OK dear whatever you say.

      your interest in criticising how I communicate is bizarre. I write a whole blog full of interesting posts and discussions and you only ever comment on the ones about me and online discourse. Maybe that is what interests you most but it just seems very odd.

      The tweet about feminists ‘high fiving’ was reference to an interaction on twitter between Dawn Foster and Sian from sian and crooked rib. If you love analysing discourse so much feel free to go and find it!

  21. Todd says:

    I certainly will so thanks for the heads up. But was that all? The way you said it, I was imagining loads of different feminists all engaged in congratulating each other in an “echo chamber” but it turns out it was just two. Not a very honest representation is it? It just seems that in your flurry to discredit a group you don’t like, you are simply indulging in the same transparent and disingenuous methods as evryone else.

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