Going, almost gone.

I think that it’s incredibly infantile that on this blogging site, you can’t defend someone from bad behaviour perpetrated against them without people assuming you’re calling them a perfect unproblematic angel who is a victim of someone unrepentantly evil and vile.  Given my post about men mocking right wing politicians took off in a radical feminist direction, I’ll use that as an example. You see it reflected in the way everyone just accepts MRA dudebros taking time out from discussing false rape accusations and the wage gap, to talk about how terfs deserve to be raped and/or die paintully. Nobody wants to say anything about these men expressing these horrible views on women, in case people think that they’re terfs, too (which really goes to show how little that word has come to mean given its indiscriminate usage). Or maybe they think the sentiments are justified, I don’t really know. I do know that anybody who speaks out about it is accused of treating the women in question as correct on all fronts. Creating an environment where people are too afraid to address misogyny head on, where they have to foreground their posts about female celebs with “Ok, I hate her, but you have to admit what happened to her was fucked up” is so toxic. Why is addressing wrongs done to women painted as equivalent to holding those women up as paradigms of non-problematic feminism? You don’t have to agree with a woman, to stand up against misogyny perpetrated against her. If you agree that misogyny is a form of oppression which affects all women in varying ways, then you should not need to make caveats about how something is still misogyny, despite how shitty x woman is, it should be obvious. It is obvious. Why can’t people distinguish between addressing oppression, and painting someone as incapable of all wrong? Why is there this tendency to claim to care about all axes of oppression, by people who then turn around and treat oppression as a zero sum game? Get a grip, like I don’t mean to be cliche but if that’s how you’re viewing the world, you’re really going to struggle in the long term and I honestly hope things get better for you. I understand that the discourse on this site is fragmented because of microblogging, I understand that vulnerable young people are drawn in by reactionary rhetoric that tells them that they’re disgusting trash if they don’t immediately accept and repeat everything they hear. What I don’t understand is creating an environment where abuse and harassment is treated as mega progressive praxis, and where people can’t address wrongs done to anyone problematic. 

Like, I know that I’m sourly preaching here, but we need to take a look at the environment tumblr activism is fostering, when it’s acceptable to say random hateful shit to strangers based on a hunch or because someone said they’re bad.