Lindy West Resigns From Twitter

In my pantheon of online annoybots, Lindy West is fairly far down the list. Unlike, say, Anita Sarkeesian, she hadn't proposed a centralized censorship regime for the Internet. However, she has endorsed the unprovable standard of "affirmative consent" in rape cases, has a history as a victimhood miner, and I suspect a bunch of other fairly middle-of-the-road (for modern feminists) policy nostrums. For a number of reasons, West has largely flown beneath my radar. So when I found a Vox piece on her voluntary exit from Twitter, I was not terribly surprised, given what I had read of hers. What interested me about that Vox piece was this passage (emboldening mine):

Rather, her breaking point — what made her feel she could no longer participate in the platform’s “profoundly broken culture” — was that Twitter has failed to acknowledge and deal with the alt-right’s use of the social network to spread its racist ideology, leading to severe, real-world repercussions:

The white supremacist, anti-feminist, isolationist, transphobic “alt-right” movement has been beta-testing its propaganda and intimidation machine on marginalised Twitter communities for years now — how much hate speech will bystanders ignore? When will Twitter intervene and start protecting its users? — and discovered, to its leering delight, that the limit did not exist. No one cared. Twitter abuse was a grand-scale normalisation project, disseminating libel and disinformation, muddying long-held cultural givens such as “racism is bad” and “sexual assault is bad” and “lying is bad” and “authoritarianism is bad,” and ultimately greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the US presidency. Twitter executives did nothing.

Which is to say, she very expressly wished Twitter would have shut up those mean people over there with the temerity to disagree with her, in public, even.  This is not a surprise, and in fact there was at least one significant "tell" previous that she very much wanted her own echo chamber: her response to the Washington Post investigations showing the Rolling Stone story about a gang rape at U. Virginia was a hoax:

Turns out that the real #UVA rape "truthers" are @AmandaMarcotte, @JessicaValenti, @thelindywest and their hivemind pic.twitter.com/fPykKBZbVJ

— Yeyo (@YeyoZa) December 6, 2014

Or, you could just take her word for it:

Whenever I advocate for the safety of marginalized groups on the Internet, some genius always pipes up to say, “Oh, so you just want to live in your echo chamber?” And YES. OF COURSE I JUST WANT MY ECHO CHAMBER, DINGUS. If by “echo chamber” you mean “a space online where I can communicate in good faith with informed people who don’t derail every conversation with false equivalencies and rape threats,” then yes, I’m dying for a fucking echo chamber.

In fact, maybe that’s what we’ll call it: Echo Chamber, the first feminist social network.

Given that presumptive bestie (or at least sister-in-arms) Marcotte is on Twitter's Orwellian "Trust & Safety Council", her kvetching here takes an interesting color. The subtext is a bitter complaint that, if they can make Milo Yiannopoulos go away, why can't they get rid of all these other people she doesn't like, too? In that, it amounts to a positive sign for the beleaguered Twitter, which continues to struggle to find profitability. Chasing those eyeballs out en masse makes no sense. Bon voyage, Lindy, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

The Shocking, Totally Gross Victory Of Donald Trump

• Donald Trump won the 2016 election 306-232, which leads to a Nate Silver postmortem on why the polling data turned out to be so wrong in predicting a Hillary Clinton win. The only interior states Clinton won were Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Clinton's home state of Illinois, Minnesota, and Vermont. All the others went to Trump. She won the coastal states, but no states of the old Confederacy save Virginia.
• The Los Angeles Times/USC outlier polls turned out to be right, and most of the others wrong, predicting a surge of support for Trump. Polling is increasingly difficult for a number of reasons, so it's no surprise a lot of the pollsters clanked. (And see also.)
• Given the vile nature of Trump's very public remarks ("grab them by the pussy" particularly), it seems reasonable to assert this was less a victory for Trump than a categorical rejection of Clinton; despite those incredible remarks, she couldn't win over white women without a college degree. It appears that Obama's coalition was never the Democrats' categorically; Clinton lost a sizeable number of black, Hispanic, and female voters, which should not have been surprising, considering Obama's historic status for blacks especially (source).
  
  
  
  Especially surprising: the uptick in Hispanic female voters. Clinton lost a lot of white Obama voters, too.
• My Own Two Cents: Hillary was a terrible candidate, and her flaws were the flaws of an inexperienced campaigner. She is the worst public speaker of any major party candidate of my lifetime not named Donald Trump, with the demeanor of a third grade teacher talking down to her class. Her "basket of deplorables" remarks, idiotic and inflaming (which Hillary-supporting site Slate still excuses as a nothingburger in context, even after the election), amount to public virtue signaling and spleen-venting. That is to say, it's the kind of tyro mistake one expects of a candidate for a school board seat, not President. Her contempt for everyone who disagreed with her, and disagreed with the left more broadly, risked a ferocious backlash, as suggested by Robby Soave in Reason:
  

  I have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the wrong thing. And ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP presidential primaries, I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man who stood in opposition to it.

  Clinton had none of her husband's political acumen, had no real history of stumping for office amid a possibly skeptical electorate, and historically negative ratings. Only running against Trump would she even begin to make sense. And even then she couldn't pull it off, despite getting a thin majority of the popular vote.
• Maybe Salon will want to rethink shaming blue-collar Americans for even thinking about voting for Trump?
• Making Arkansas Proud (Not): Lest anyone think I am stumping for Trump: Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton is pushing to eliminate proscriptions on waterboarding, and might end up with a cabinet seat.
• The problem for those thinking Trump will attack political correctness is that he conflates it with politeness, and could easily inflame it by presenting such a large and polarizing target.
  

  When a man who behaves this way is held up as a fighter against political correctness, it lends credence to the leftist fallacy that the alternative to PC is unabashed bigotry and male chauvinist pig-erry.

• Don't look to coastal elites to figure out what they did wrong anytime soon:
  

  By a margin in the millions, Californians overwhelmingly rejected politics fueled by resentment, bigotry, and misogyny.

• Amanda Marcotte Is Still A Horrible Person:
  

  No one should be surprised that it was men, especially white men, who handed Trump this election. It’s been exhaustively established that the majority of white men in this country are consumed with resentment at being expected to treat women and racial minorities as equals, though of course some liberal journalists — usually white men themselves — kept valiantly trying to claim that it was “economic insecurity” that somehow drove the most prosperous group of Americans to kick angrily at those who objectively make less money and have less status than they do.

  Wow, you mean telling people they're horrible just because of an accident of birth and then expecting them to vote for your candidate doesn't produce the desired result? Imagine. 

Update 11/11:

•  An interesting postmortem from Annie Karni at Politico (as always, emboldening mine):

  And some began pointing fingers at the young campaign manager, Robby Mook, who spearheaded a strategy supported by the senior campaign team that included only limited outreach to those voters — a theory of the case that Bill Clinton had railed against for months, wondering aloud at meetings why the campaign was not making more of an attempt to even ask that population for its votes. It’s not that there was none: Clinton’s post-convention bus tour took her through Youngstown, Ohio, as well as Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, where she tried to eat into Trump’s margins with his base. In Scranton and Harrisburg, the campaign aired a commercial that featured a David Letterman clip of Trump admitting to outsourcing manufacturing of the products and clothes that bore his logo. And at campaign stops in Ohio, Clinton talked about Trump’s reliance on Chinese steel.
  
  But in general, Bill Clinton’s viewpoint of fighting for the working class white voters was often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map. At a meeting ahead of the convention at which aides presented to both Clintons the “Stronger Together” framework for the general election, senior strategist Joel Benenson told the former president bluntly that the voters from West Virginia were never coming back to his party.

• I Know, Let's Be Even More Polarizing:

  “The Democratic establishment had their chance with this election,” said Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “It’s time for new leadership of the Democratic Party — younger, more diverse and more ideological — that is hungry to do things differently, like leading a movement instead of dragging people to the polls.” 

  
  
• File Under, Things That Haven't Aged Well: Hey, you guys, Ezra Klein in Vox thinks Hillary is an extraordinarily talented politician. 
• ... And, Things That Have: Ross Douthat in the NYT, September 21:
  

  On late-night television, it was once understood that David Letterman was beloved by coastal liberals and Jay Leno more of a Middle American taste. But neither man was prone to delivering hectoring monologues in the style of the “Daily Show” alums who now dominate late night. Fallon’s apolitical shtick increasingly makes him an outlier among his peers, many of whom are less comics than propagandists — liberal “explanatory journalists” with laugh lines.
  
  Some of them have better lines than others, and some joke more or hector less. But to flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape.

• A nice apologia from Frank Bruni:
  

  Donald Trump’s victory and some of the, yes, deplorable chants that accompanied it do not mean that a majority of Americans are irredeemable bigots (though too many indeed are). Plenty of Trump voters chose him, reluctantly, to be an agent of disruption, which they craved keenly enough to overlook the rest of him.
  
  Democrats need to understand that, and they need to move past a complacency for which the Clintons bear considerable blame.
  
  It’s hard to overestimate the couple’s stranglehold on the party — its think tanks, its operatives, its donors — for the last two decades. Most top Democrats had vested interests in the Clintons, and energy that went into supporting and defending them didn’t go into fresh ideas and fresh faces, who were shut out as the party cleared the decks anew for Hillary in 2016.

Susan Brownmiller's Refreshing Views On Rape Prevention

Susan Brownmiller long ago wrote Against Our Will, a largely fact-free jeremiad that has since informed modern feminism's belief in rape as a political tool. That this is true only in distant lands populated principally by itinerant goat herders has not much changed the canon; if anything, it's gotten shriller and even more untethered from reality. Yet, despite her book's foundational status, Brownmiller seems to have views on rape that diverge wildly from modern feminist orthodoxy. Uncovered in a recent interview in New York magazine, they come as an utter shock to anyone aware of her earlier work. She recoils from developments in the theory she originated (emboldening in Brownmiller's responses are due to me):

I was wondering if you have been following the discussions of rape activism on college campuses.
Yes, very closely. In the 1970s we had an extraordinary movement against sexual assault in this country and changed the laws. They [the campus activists] don't seem to know that. They think they are the first people to discover rape, and the problem of consent, and they are not.

They have been tremendously influenced by the idea that "You can drink as much as you want because you are the equal of a guy," and it is not true. They don't accept the fact there are predators out there, and that all women have to take special precautions. They think they can drink as much as men, which is crazy because they can't drink as much as men. I find the position "Don't blame us, we're survivors" to be appalling.

Also, they [college women] are not the chief targets of rapists. Young women and all women in housing projects and ghettos are still in far greater danger than college girls.

Holy smoke, did you hear that? Men and women are different! Yikes! And the last, at least,  comports with empirical Bureau of Justice Statistics data showing young women off campus are much more likely to be raped than college students. And then, this:

And my feeling about young women trapped in sex situations that they don’t want is: "Didn’t you see the warning signs? Who do you expect to do your fighting for you?" It is a little late, after you are both undressed, to say "I don’t want this."

Interviewer Katie Van Syckle makes a weak attempt at a late save:

I guess the hope is that young men would respect [a naked woman in bed telling them "no"].
That would be nice. There is not much attention on them is there?

Predictably, Amanda Marcotte tars her with the epithet "former feminist hero". Break out the popcorn:

There's a real irony here, because our cultural allergy to focusing on men who actually rape also prevents us from having a productive conversation: one that should be had with both men and women—ideally starting when they are boys and girls—about why rapists rape. We would talk about how our culture valorizes male domination. How some men learn to feel big by putting women down. How both men and women often stand aside and let some men express toxic views about women without being challenged.

 This is, of course, the purest bullshit, because she's been one of the principle drivers pushing for an expansion of rape away from coercive sex. That is to say, while she presumably cares about men who actually rape, she's also eager to inflate the charge to include regetted and even imaginary sexual encounters, despite her own denials. Whether it's the Rolling Stone hoax set at the University of Virginia or Emma Sulkowicz's sordid lies ("rape apologists", LOL), she's only ever prepared to believe the "victim", even if the accuser has but a fleeting grasp of reality. To force everyone else to adopt the correct, guilt-stricken pose, she plans on "having a productive conversation", which we assume starts young and is indistinguishable from harangue.

She goes on to discuss the Steubenville rape case, which is rather atypical for her because it has actual perpetrators, clear evidence (along with video confessions), and a real victim.

If you want to see the cause, you have to look at the culture around the assault: the guys who made a video laughing about it, the spreading of the images, the unwillingness of anyone to interfere, the congratulations for domineering, abusive behavior. That is why assault happens, not because some girls drink too much. We need to help young people, both men and women, spot predatory behavior for what it is, and to push against it instead of laughing it off.

But having that conversation requires talking with and about men. As the Brownmiller interview shows, even for feminists, policing women and talking about their choices is just a lot easier to do. It's comfortable, like an old nightgown (one that hopefully doesn't show off too much thigh!). We've tried the woman-policing route for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years now. It's time to switch it up and start focusing on male choices instead.

 A number points worth mentioning here:

1. The sort of "culture" she describes derives from a number of poor choices by men. This is an ancient problem, and one that appears to have no ready solution, despite it being of obvious import. No OECD country has a per-capita rape rate of zero, though they vary quite a bit. This suggests the "just teach men not to rape" silver bullet beloved of modern feminists has been tried everywhere and found wanting. While she doesn't come out and say it, that's the only solution she appears to know.
2. I suppose we should be grateful she wants to talk to men at all.
3. The large majority of men do not, in fact rape. So her "don't rape" message there will do no good. In fact, it is liable to result in the opposite: contempt. This will likely have negative consequences in the jury box.
4. For the minority that does commit rape due to some combination of hormones, alcohol, drugs, poor impulse control, and misplaced or nonexistent empathy, this message will fall on deaf ears.

Because she does not understand male behavior and its underlying driving factors, she cannot reasonably prescribe preventative courses of action. (Indeed, it's unclear that there is much that can be done, outside of women taking defensive measures.) It has nothing to do with idiotic "men are taught to" nonsense, and everything to do with male nature. This is, of course, no excuse for rape, but modern feminists seem utterly incapable of distinguishing advice to minimize exposure to potential rapists from victim-blaming. That Marcotte savages the iconic Brownmiller for suggesting otherwise signals just how unhinged from reality she and her fellow third-wave sisters have become.

Everything Is Bullying

I ran into Julia Shaw's two year old essay on why marrying young was a good idea (at least for her):

Marriage wasn’t something we did after we’d grown up—it was how we have grown up and grown together. We’ve endured the hardships of typical millennials: job searches, job losses, family deaths, family conflict, financial fears, and career concerns. The stability, companionship, and intimacy of marriage enabled us to overcome our challenges and develop as individuals and a couple. We learned how to be strong for one another, to comfort, to counsel, and to share our joys and not just our problems.

Marriage, as she sees it, is a strength in her own life. So, go, her, though it appears her marriage just proves a rule from recent research that there's considerable evidence that marrying or cohabiting before age 23 is likely to result in a breakup, while marriages/cohabitations set up after that age are statistically much stronger. But mostly, what I wanted to treat was Amanda Marcotte's predictably silly reaction to Shaw's essay, and in particular, this:

Not that any of this matters anyway. Watching conservatives desperately try to bully women into younger marriage with a couple of promises and a whole lot of threats is highly entertaining but clearly not persuasive.

The word I take issue with there is "bully". How is Shaw "bullying" anyone? Is she harassing Marcotte, or anyone else for that matter? Or is it simply that arguing in favor of a life you have led and love that has brought you happiness you wish to share with others amounts to contradicting Marcotte's third-wave feminist narrative, and thus wrongthink? Feminism has become totalitarian and expansionist in its dotage, as witness this cartoon about makeup (!); "the personal is the political" is really just another way of saying, "get in line, you".

Amanda Marcotte's Fake Feminism Problem

I briefly wrote on Wednesday about a Vox poll showing only 18% of the population self-identify as "feminist". I was somewhat (positively) surprised to read Amanda Marcotte's reaction:

The sample was a little over 1,000 adults, nationwide. We’ve seen similar polling data in the past, so this seems to be a pretty accurate assessment. This sort of thing frustrates the fuck out of feminists, because, by definition, if you believe in gender equality, you’re a feminist. So why is there this disconnect?

One big theory is that a lot of people are, in fact, feminists, but they don’t know it, because they’ve been scared off by negative stereotypes about feminists promulgated by opponents of women’s equality. Call it the “I’m not a feminist, but” phenomenon and it’s certainly a big factor, but I don’t think it fully explains the situation. Another huge chunk of it is likely due to the American fetishization of individualism, which leads a lot of people to shun labels in an effort to show what special snowflakes they are.* This is why, for instance, a lot of people who self-identify as “independents” are actually consistent Republicans or Democrats. There’s also some truly feminist men who avoid the label, because they don’t want to be mistaken for one of those creepers who calls himself a feminist to get female attention and cookies, but who is secretly a pig to women.

I say "positively" because she's at least interested, even at a very superficial level, in why people might find the label "feminist" a pejorative, as many in the HuffPo/YouGov 2013 survey did. Marcotte backs away — as she must — from the self-examination that might conclude that public recoil from the label "feminist" is self-inflicted damage; claims that conservatives and others have successfully framed the dialogue only go so far in their explanatory power. "You only have yourselves to blame" is not a message that will go over well, especially when you think you rest on the side of the angels. As Ken White observed, most label-based analysis is bullshit, so arriving at a mutually agreeable definition of "feminist" and "feminism" is very nearly impossible. One of the standard responses to definitional difficulties is to cast feminism in uncontroversial terms:

Reluctance to use the F-word may be more about education and information than the word itself. When respondents to the 2013 poll were given the dictionary definition of feminist — "someone who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes" — 57 percent of respondents, including 67 percent of women and 47 percent of men, agreed that, yes, they were feminists.

But dig a little deeper, and you will discover that a great deal of what gender feminists propose is outright dangerous to men when it isn't being deeply insulting:

• The uncritical belief in the truth of rape accusations.
• Idiotic affirmative consent laws that reduce sex to the level of a bank transaction.
• The existence and ubiquity of "patriarchy", "rape culture", and "male privilege" which benefits any and all men.
• Championing of bogus statistics about rape and wage differentials.

Scott Alexander, lifting from Nicholas Shackel (PDF), calls this a "motte and bailey" tactic (his example 3 here), a bait-and-switch in which the speaker claims one thing (feminism is the mere equality between the sexes) but substitutes other things entirely for them later (specific theories and proposals that are in fact quite controversial). Interestingly, Marcotte appears to at least partially reject such a motte-and-bailey; either you use the label and are a feminist, or you don't and aren't. That, at least, represents a weak form of honesty. I have little hope she or other dedicated feminist partisans will take the next step from there and look in the mirror.

"Jackie's" Last Defenders

With yesterday's unapologetic (to those that mattered) retraction in full of the Rolling Stone UVa hoax story, I thought it would be useful to review some of the reaction from that cluster of modern feminism exhorting us to "believe" all charges of rape, regardless of merit. I first turn my attention to Shakesville, which once upon a time called the opinions of "Jackie" skeptics "[not] worth a smudge of dogshit":

Earlier this week, writing for the Washington Post under the headline "Rolling Stone whiffs in reporting on alleged rape," Erik Wemple said: "For the sake of Rolling Stone's reputation, Sabrina Rubin Erdely had better be the country's greatest judge of character. ...Rolling Stone bears a great deal of responsibility for placing the credibility of the accuser in the spotlight, thanks to shortcomings in its own reporting. Consider that: Erdely didn't talk to the alleged perpetrators of the attack."

Katherine Reed has written a thoughtful response [H/T to Jessica Luther] to this particular criticism, from the perspective of someone who covers sexual assault cases, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Unsurprisingly, Reed's "thoughtful" remarks include this graf:

I also understand the fairness argument when names are involved. But in this particular case, the names of the accused are not included in the Rolling Stone story.

In other words, Reed takes the position that, so long as no particular individuals are named as perpetrators, anything goes, i.e. the same position taken by Rolling Stone editor Will Dana. That Melissa McEwan confuses this with something like responsible journalism comes as no surprise; she continued in this vein for literally months, condemning in harsh terms anyone daring to do the actual investigation that Rolling Stone had not, or who shared Wemple's skepticism. From December 5, 2014 (emboldening mine):

Robby Soave, writing under the headline "Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?" for Reason, does not find it credible that Jackie's friends could have discouraged her from going to the hospital or reporting out of self-interest.

If the frat brothers were absolute sociopaths to do this to Jackie, her friends were almost cartoonishly evil—casually dismissing her battered and bloodied state and urging her not to go to the hospital.

Failure to support a rape victim is something that could only seem "cartoonishly evil" to someone who has never survived an assault only to be met with indifference from friends, law enforcement, and/or even one's own family.

If "Jackie's" story were even remotely like true, in the real world, her friends should have immediately driven her to the closest emergency room. But of course, in McEwan's tortured cosmology, it's much more likely that they're monsters; she cannot imagine a good rape tale being false, ever. It's the same reason she justified Erdely's failure to contact the assailants on the grounds that "there was nothing meaningful they were going to add" to the story, never mind that their very existence would be a good starting point.

She does this sort of toe dance repeatedly, here, and here, and finally here, pretending that the Charlottesville police investigation and reporting from the Washington Post and Washington Times (which latter she does not mention) indicated that "Jackie" was anything other than a serial fabulist. (Mean old facts.) So at last, what does she take away from this? Why, of course, that Rolling Stone "threw Jackie under the bus" when they credulously and unquestioningly believed the supposed victim, just as McEwan demanded, and this now amounts to "victim-blaming". "Always believe" got Erdely to publish the story, just as it got her in trouble when "Jackie" turned out to be a liar. And I use that term without reservation, because who gives out multiple burner accounts to "friends" when trying to establish the identity of a supposed date? Why could no one confirm literally a single detail of "Jackie's" story?

---

The same approach, i.e. it's really Rolling Stone's fault for doing what I told them, pollutes Jessica Valenti's reaction at The Guardian, initially established by her December 9 piece in which she announces that

I choose to believe Jackie. I lose nothing by doing so, even if I’m later proven wrong – but at least I will still be able to sleep at night for having stood by a young woman who may have been through an awful trauma.

It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" argument that should invite derision and contempt from anyone interested in justice or actual facts. Surprisingly, Amanda Marcotte's followup is remarkably subdued in comparison; she's the only one of the three — to her credit — who calls "Jackie's" prevarications "lie[s]". Even so, she partially lets Erdely off the hook for want of "guidance and support". That said guidance should have been obvious — get on the phone with the friends, and track down and interview the alleged perps — is almost beside the point. It's nearly a monumental victory to cross the low bar of calling a lie a lie.

Everything Is Sexist

Violating my general rule that squeakers don't deserve rebuttal, I come to a Buzzfeed piece entitled "31 Times Celebrities Gave The Best Damn Responses To Sexist Questions". That it appears on Buzzfeed — a widely-read website — sort of gets me off the hook for that, but it isn't the same as taking down an Amanda Marcotte or Jessica Valenti. So I reckon that I should preface this piece with the observation that, yes, there are sexist men in the world, but if you publish a lot of weak examples in with your supposed strong arguments, maybe you're just yelling into the echo chamber. I mean —

• #1, Or, Celebrity Interviews 101 : Anne Hathaway brushes aside questions about her diet. Um, hello, duh, it's a celebrity interview! Of course they're going to ask about your diet!
• #2, Or, Paging Judith Martin: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler use an their awards show introduction to George Clooney to instead talk about... his wife? Why is this sexist? Because we always have to be talking about women? And, the hell, guys? This is borderline rudeness in the Kanye West vein.
• #3: Math Is Always Sexist: Clueless TNT dork asks Mayim Baylik of Big Bang Theory "how many people think you can solve a calculus [sic] at the top of a hat?" Which she deftly replies to with, "I was trained in calculus for several years. I'm a neuroscientist." I mean, yay? The guy clearly hadn't prepared for the interview, but it's not like he said, "Hey, as a girl, how hard is it for you to math?"
• #5/6: How Dare You Ask About Her Dress/Makeup! Seriously softball questions, and intrinsically sexist, because, why?
• #11, Or, The Reward Of The Male Feminist: Interviewer to Megan Fox: "The fact that there aren't many superhero films with superheroines, with female leads. What's your take on that? Do you feel it's time, like it's a matter of time before we see more of those?" That this is labeled sexist is the most astonishing example from these, because it shows how the author (and let's be honest, a good deal of modern feminism) isn't especially interested in developing allies; they want permanent contrition. If you own a penis, you're just guilty of being a terrible person, a priori, and no argument is possible. It's terrible to suggest that we should see more women in leading roles? Quelle horreur. (The fact that Fox gets all cranky at the interviewer does not lead me to think she is an especially decent human, either; after all, he's there presumably to promote her brand.)

Not all of them are terrible, and some are funny: the mani-cam (#17) was a silly idea, and good for Elizabeth Moss for giving it the finger it deserved. Zooey Deschanel's remarks about feminism's straitjacket (#8) are, within the context of this piece, both true and positively subversive. But this list is larded with worst-case assumptions about the interviewer, male or female, and inflates stupidity into malice at nearly every turn.

Conor Friedersdorf's Disappointing Analysis Of The Scott Aaronson Fracas

Prior to the Michelson-Morley experiment, belief in the luminiferous aether was something like universal among physicists, who posited that, as with waves on water or sound waves in the air, a wave needed a medium to transmit it. Albert A. Michaelson and Edward W. Morley put an end to such talk, by measuring the speed of light perpendicular to and in the direction of the Earth's rotation. Finding it the same in both directions, they rightly concluded no such aether existed. Yet the hobgoblins of feminism, being all specters, can never be disproved to their believers; they exist with all the firmness (and justification) of the holy Trinity to a Christian. That was why it was so very saddening to see The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf's disappointing essay analyzing Scott Aaronson's now infamous "comment 171" and subsequent responses from Laurie Penny, Scott Alexander, and (briefly) Amanda Marcotte (treated at my blog here, here, and here). After going through the three essays above, Friedersdorf actually endorses the intellectually vacant concept of "privilege":

In my view, the "privilege" framework, as described by Peggy McIntosh in her seminal essay, is one of many useful frameworks for understanding the world. It's important for people—whites and men, college graduates, women, U.S. citizens—to be cognizant of unearned advantages, and to identify and remedy unfairnesses that result. But if an omniscient being told us the precise degree of absolute and relative privilege possessed by nerds of both genders, feminists, and women in STEM—giving group averages as well as individual privilege scores for all—and if accurate trauma scores were available for groups and individuals too, what good would that do? Would that resolve any useful real world debate? Would it suggest any certain answer to the problems that confront us?

It would not.

Privilege tells us nothing other than the desire of the speaker to lump certain people into one group and ascribe to them a theft or thefts. McIntosh's essay is surely tiresome; she lists forty two grievances against white males, things which she feels she should be able to do like men do, but can't, because, privilege. Such a concept, especially as an explanatory force, merits discussion only to the extent it is dismissed with great force, as Scott Aaronson did.

I reproduce here, with mild editing, my remarks in the comments.

"Privilege" is a group slur, and is no more valuable for discussions of sociology than any other sort of slander. In its more vacuous and extreme forms, it becomes an excuse for all manner of failures. "Male privilege", "rape culture", "patriarchy" -- all ghost stories ("rape culture", especially in the West), yet fundamental parts of the feminist canon. Penny's casual dismissal of Aaronson's very specific claims -- particularly, how feminist anti-sexual harassment haranguing made him feel like his normal male sexual desires were entirely wrong and awful -- along with her unfounded and wholly spectral response to the origin of his problems -- shows her as a dogmatic and unoriginal thinker. Contrast this with Aaronson's genius-level retort to her claims about "patriarchy", which dismiss such stuff as the kind of religious first principle nonsense they are.
What I find deeply disturbing about Friedersdorf's piece here is the apparent inattention to detail it takes to write this:

In his experience, he writes, "feminists throwing weaponized shame at nerds is an obvious and inescapable part of daily life," citing an awful collection of images that are hard to distinguish from anti-Semitic cartoons mixed in to underscore his point. (All together now: #not-all-feminists do this–nor most, I'd add.)

Contrasted with this footnote:

*This being the Internet, there were also responses that were strikingly uncharitable. For example, Amanda Marcotte paraphrased Scott Aaronson's blog post as follows: "Having to explain my suffering to women when they should already be there, mopping my brow and offering me beers and blow jobs, is so tiresome."

Marcotte is no small voice in the femosphere, and a quick descent into the comments will readily show that she has many supporters. Moreover, it betrays a disturbing inattention to Penny's history as a misandrist to miss the deep irony in this comment of hers:

Weaponised shame - male, female or other - has no place in any feminism I subscribe to.

Ho, ho, ho, Ms. Penny, what do you know: she came out for a sort of original sin among men, one which can never be questioned or redeemed. If that isn't weaponized shame, I'll eat my male privilege.

I probably overstate my objection to Friedersdorf's piece, but the slander of "privilege" needs the strongest possible rebuttal wherever it appears. If you've been following along here at all, he doesn't add much new to the debate, and he does (rightly) condemn Marcotte as "strikingly uncharitable". Still worth reading in its entirety.

Dirty Jobs

Some links contravailing the narrative about women and dirty jobs:

• "Agency 'a man's world': Women sewer workers sue DEP over unfair treatment"
• "City tunnel worker sues over sex bias" 
• "The pay's OK but the hours stink: Pair become Britain's first female SEWAGE apprentices"
• "Daughters of the Mountain: Women Coal Miners in Central Appalachia"
• Women coal miners in early industrial Britain 

I came across these in another discussion elsewhere. Not that these aren't real, but they're far from routine, and still lack evidence that women are either currently knocking at the door of such opportunities, or have in the past in large numbers in the absence of better prospects. (The link on coal mining particularly is interesting, inasmuch as it was used as propaganda against women in such jobs.) Men still form the vast majority of the labor force in difficult, dirty jobs; and in the case of the first two, it's a matter of an arguable jackpot situation, depending on the damages sought. Certainly, the commentariat is remarkably absent in these matters. One does not see, for example, a Jessica Valenti demanding there be more female coal miners, or an Amanda Marcotte stumping for more men in the veterinary medicine field. Always, it is STEM fields, because

1. Science is important
2. Women must do important things
3. Women must be scientists

even if "you go first" applies.

The First Time Amanda Marcotte Shows You What She Is, Believe Her

I realize I've mangled the Maya Angelou quote ("When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time"), but I've never liked the way that scans. Still, it's wholly appropriate for an exchange and subsequent observation I had in the comments of her dreadful Scott Aaronson attack piece of last week. The whole thing started with this interaction:

I don't particularly have any interest in stirring up the sand flies infesting the comments section over there, but I found myself scanning the other comments, and "tough guy" kept showing up. His interaction with me there notwithstanding, he was pretty reasonable elsewhere, so this bit really shocked me:

To which the commentariat ungenerously replied (as he predicted!):

But here's the kicker: Marcotte herself steps in:

Well, boy, howdy.

Well, of course. Not enough that I tell him that Marcotte engages in character assassination; apparently one must live through it. No matter who the subject, from an otherwise obscure MIT professor to an unknown commenter on her blog, men are always liars. Marcotte just knows this, just like she knows Aaronson supports rapists. Amazing.

Saturday Links

Some links for a slow Saturday:

• First, an amazing long rant about the Amanda Marcotte/Laurie Penny pile-on to MIT professor Scott Aaronson because he had the temerity to reject feminism (and its perpetual abhorrence of male sexual frustration). It's a super-long rant, and I confess I skipped a bunch of it, but there's some gems scattered among the failure to edit:

  When Penny bares her suffering to the world for all to hear about, she gets sympathy, she gets praised as compassionate, she gets published in important magazines whose readers feel sorry for her and acknowledge that her experience sucks.
  
  When Aaronson talks about his suffering on his own blog, he gets Amanda Marcotte. He gets half the internet telling him he is now the worst person in the world.

  And then, this:

  Patriarchy is yet another motte and bailey trick.
  
  The motte is that patriarchy is the existence of different gender roles in our society and the ways in which they are treated differently.
  
  The bailey is that patriarchy is men having power over women.

  The post from a lesbian friend of Aaronson's and author of Unit of Caring is worth reading, too, making the point that even female desire for other women is the sort of thing that anti-sex feminism is all too eager to police, even to the point of suppressing lesbians. The whole post is a goulash of interesting insights and somewhat tedious at the end (rants get that way), but worth picking up.
• One of the things I find objectionable about much modern feminism is how it claims to favor grrl-power, up until women have to be protected like little girls. A good example of this is how sexual assault figures get calculated, mainly by stripping the purported victims of agency and volition, i.e. determining for them whether they've been raped. Tough women who have actually had to make their own lives and get out from real oppression, both legal and social, are harder to come by when many of those battles have been won, which is why I was tickled to learn of Hortense Mancini, Dutchess Mazarin from the wonderfully talented artist Jason Porath, who runs the delightfully offbeat Rejected Princesses blog. Atypically for a portrait designed to appear as a setting for the goddess Diana, “she is surrounded not by nymphs, but hunting dogs and four dark-skinned boys dressed as pages.” Married to an insane, controlling man who sent her to a convent, she conspired to race greyhounds after dark, and terrorized the sisters in other ways before escaping. What a character!
• (Mostly) how not to shut down Internet arguments, from io9, whose stuff I mostly like. Of the list, only #1, #3, and #10 are really unobjectionable.
• #2 is a repurposing of the tired and false arguments used by Anita Sarkeesian, and actively implies that if you're not with the objector, you must be with the oppressors. Yes, it's a cartoon, but it's also a dishonest cartoon that steps just this side of endorsing collective guilt.
• #4 confuses chat rooms, online comment sections, etc. in which people belonging to different groups — say, ones that contain both men and women — with closed spaces containing only people belonging to those groups. The "sealioning" trope this apparently has started in some areas is completely disingenuous in that regard. This particularly awful Robot Hugs cartoon is a fine example of the delusion involved in this trope, and seems to precede "sealioning" by quite a bit. As well, it illustrates how a large segment of modern feminists just wish men would either go away or shut up altogether.
• #7: Why am I not surprised to see another Robot Hugs cartoon in this list? The way to determine whether some kind of abuse is widespread is to ask a lot of people at random, i.e. polling. As usual, the (apparently lesbian separatist?) author of Robot Hugs would rather get into pissing contests about the value of one party's experiences vs. another's (typically male). The point, of course, is principally about justifying slander ("Street harassment is part of a larger system in which men feel entitled to comment upon women's bodies") rather than making any empirical observations. Also, Robot Hugs is never funny. Ever.
• #8: the victimhood pissing contest. See also, Scott Aaronson.
• #9: male sexuality is more visually oriented than female, film at eleven. Men are a market, women are a market.
There's only three — #1, #3, and #10 — of any real value, with the rest serving principally to shut down heterodox political opinion.