25th February 2013
Notes: 123
- Erases female fandom nerds out of the equation almost entierly, presenting the idea that women don’t go to comic book stores, arcades, conventions, or other fandom based activities (you know, because being a nerd is totally male exclusive/that space is entirely for men) WOMEN CAN APPARENTLY BE SMART OR SOCIALLY INEPT BUT U’LL NEVER SEE 1 HAVE A LORD OF THE RINGS MARATHON LOL.
- Patronizes male nerds as a lot of pathetic dweebs that have absolutely no social conditioning and are terrified of women.
- Places female characters in emotionally abusive relationships with male characters (Sheldon/Amy is disgusting and terrible, Howard’s treatment of Bernedette is even more disgusting because he doesn’t even have the excuse of having aspergers). The show completely strips said male characters of any sort of responsibility over their actions and plays up their controlling, selfish behavior as something quirky and funny as all of the girls respond at the end of the day with an OH YOU!
- One character only exists to be the butt of racist jokes. One character only exists to be the butt of aspergers jokes.
- Laughs at the idea of loving nerdy/fandom stuff as opposed to laughing at the situations the characters get into or laughing with nerds (see: community). There is literally a laugh track moment after Sheldon says he found his N64.
- Treats it’s non nerdy main female character with a mixture of slut shame-y, idealized object of desire grossness and using her to make the point that being nerdy = being a freak (making you feel bad for her and angry that she’s used as Chuck Lorre’s mouthpiece about why being a nerd is so St00pid)
- Leaves no room for other “kinds” of nerds. In a day and age when nerdy interests are actually fairly chice, it’s strange that every nerd on the show is portrayed as pathetic and socially inept.
- Seriously you’d think this show was written in the 1960’s
- Im pretty sure that Chuck Lorre has this idea in his head that all nerds are white males with coke bottle glasses that got thrown into dumpsters in high school and think that girls are either 2spooky4u or unattainable sex objects meant to cater to their whims and desires.
I tried to watch one episode of BBT.
I got about 5 minutes in before changing the channel.
It was absolutely horrible.
Reblogged From thegoddamazon
At the South by Southwest Interactive festival in March, I attended a talk titled “Adding Value as a Non-Technical No Talent Ass-Clown.” It was given by Matt Van Horn, a 28-year-old executive at the social-media company Path. Path had generated a lot of buzz at the tech and media confab; it was recently valued at $250 million.
A crowd of about 100 was packed into the conference room, overflowing into the aisles. Van Horn stood stiffly in the center of the room, clipboard in hand, boyishly hip in a grey blazer, expensive-looking jeans, and eyeglasses with flashy white stems. He began with a story about chasing down a job at Digg, the once popular bookmarking site, shortly after he graduated from the University of Arizona. He said he’d won over Digg’s elusive cofounders by sending them “bikini shots” from a “nudie calendar” he’d put together with photographs of fellow students posing in their swimsuits.
Van Horn continued with some tips for hiring managers: He cautioned against “gangbang interviews”—screening prospective employees by committee—and made a crack about his fraternity’s recruiting strategy, designed to “attract the hottest girls” on campus. He seemed taken aback when nobody laughed. “C’mon, guys, we all know how it was in college,” he muttered.
Geek/nerd culture has always had a strong undercurrent of misogyny. I’m not surprised by this new trend one bit.
Virginia Valian
Although this was originally a quote about females in science, it’s a good way to answer assholes who say “Why are you making such a big deal out of such a small thing?”
And this is the right wing’s view on sex in a nutshell: We’ll deny funding for sex education, we won’t help fund contraception, but you’re irresponsible for not taking care of it yourself.
The Right Wing decided it wanted to play Monday Morning Quarterback with my lady parts this year. It seems like an odd choice for a recreational activity, especially since there’s no legislative or medical reason to suddenly introduce radically restrictive and dangerous legislation on women’s health and bodies. Maybe someone should introduce them to Pinterest instead.
Here are our Top 10 Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Attacks on Women’s Rights (just in the last 6 months!)
- The Blunt Amendment. Reasonable religious exemptions weren’t enough for Roy Blunt. This amendment would have allowed your employer – not your doctor - to decide what kind of health care you could get based on his or her own personal moral or religious convictions.
- The All-Male Birth Control Panel, or the Man Panel. Congressman Darrell Issa convened a panel to discuss the coverage of birth control – but refused to include any women.
- Susan G. Komen Foundation defunds Planned Parenthood. Komen opted to cut off funding to the largest provider of reproductive health services in the US because of their new VP’s objection to a mere 3% of their activities.
- Rush Limbaugh Calls Sandra Fluke a Prostitute and a Slut. After Sandra Fluke stood up for women everywhere, Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves and called her a prostitute and a slut for speaking out in favor of birth control coverage. He also said she should have to put videos of her having sex online to compensate the taxpayers who “are going to pay for your contraceptives.” Classy.
- Forced Trans-Vaginal Ultrasounds. Republican legislators in Virginia invited the commonwealth into the exam room when they proposed a bill that would require women seeking abortions to undergo an invasive, medically-unnecessary vaginal probe before their procedure.
- Texas defunds Planned Parenthood. Under Governor Rick Perry, the state of Texas banned funding to Planned Parenthood because it provides abortion services. In the end, though, this fight has only served to hurt low-income women looking for breast cancer screenings, birth control and pap smears.
- Women in the Military Should “Expect” to be Raped. Responding to a 64% increase in the reports of rape and violent sexual assaults in the military, Fox News pundit Liz Trotta responds, “What did they expect?” She goes on to say that there is a bureaucracy of people to support these women who are being “raped too much.”
- Foster Friess Suggests Women Put Aspirin Between Their Knees. Rick Santorum supporter, Foster Friess, reminisced about back in his day when ladies put aspirin between their knees for birth control. Back in his day, people also died of polio.
- Santorum wants to deny birth control coverage because he thinks it’s available and affordable. Despite the fact that most forms of birth control still require a prescription and 1 in 3 women have reported struggling to afford birth control. Santorum feels there is no barrier to access, so it shouldn’t be covered by insurance.
- Mitt Romney doesn’t understand a woman’s reproductive system. Romney has publicly supported “personhood amendments,” which would ban abortion by declaring life begins at conception. When asked about how this affects birth control, Romney seemed to be completely unaware that hormonal forms of birth control stop implantation, not conception and would be banned under any personhood amendment.
And it’s only the middle of March.
Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminists devoted to fighting against sexism within the visual fine art world internationally. Started in New York City in 1985 to protest gender and racial inequality in the art world, members are known for the gorilla masks they wear to keep their anonymity.
See more of their posters here. I just read about them in an article and thought they were awesome.
This is almost too poorly written to even warrant a response, but here is the actual series of events for those who are curious! Yay, storytime!
Alexander Ryking, who has a history of attempting to silence women bloggers (he told Jess of STFUConservatives and the other “feminazis” to “go kill themselves” several months ago, and has also been rude to women of color but I haven’t been on Tumblr long enough to have personally witnessed that), defended The Amazing’s Atheist’s violent rape threats on Reddit by tagging his posts with “I support TAA.”
I and many, many other Tumblr users were disgusted by this, so we decided to tag our criticisms of Ryking that night with “Ryking’s banana republic”—a reference to his co-opting of SJ concepts, NOT a homophobic dig, and the person who coined it was a queer man anyway. Someone also wrote a few jokingly romantic lines about Ryking’s blind defense of TAA and new atheism, and Ryking interpreted this as homophobic and misandric…it wasn’t, but because I reblogged it, Ryking insists that I am now a homophobe, which is hilarious given my own sexual identity but whatever.
We also responded to some of his posts with pictures of extreme close-ups of our eyes.
Seriously. That is what this guy is calling “abuse.”
We did NOT threaten him, make personal attacks against his sexuality, tell him to go kill himself, send him rude messages, or commit any other acts that could reasonably be interpreted as the “cyberbullying” Ryking claims it is. I did temporarily change my URL to rykingsbananarepublic and I make no apologies for that. Why should I? Why shouldn’t a group of feminists and their allies be allowed to respond creatively to misogyny? The only actual cyberbullying that has taken place was TAA’s initial rape threats on Reddit; I wouldn’t even go so far as to claim Ryking’s tweets to me and other Twitter users are cyberbullying, though I leave it up to the other people who were insulted by him to label their experiences as bullying or not.
Anyway, a few nights later, I tweeted something in defense of Whitney Houston’s legacy, and suddenly there was Ryking going ballistic. He found me on Twitter, called me a cunt right off the bat, and insisted that I claimed Whitney Houston’s death was “more important than the death of 5,000 Syrians” (I didn’t! Here is what I actually said!). I had never exchanged tweets with this man before, and was confused about his sudden interest in my thoughts about Whitney Houston and Syria. Naturally, I responded, told him how wrong he was, and the next day I screencapped some of the things he said and posted them here. I never expected that post to get the amount of notes it did, but I think that just goes to show how widespread the dislike for him is.
This author’s claim that I “deliberately baited” Alexander Ryking is pathetically inaccurate. There is an enormous difference between what we did,—creating a tag for our criticisms of Ryking’s sexism and general ignorance—and what he did, which was seek out women on Twitter to attack and personally degrade however he could. As I’ve explained recently, his behavior here is reprehensible because it takes place in a culture where women bloggers are targeted simply for being women. Ryking’s attacks were deliberately personal (“do you have daddy issues?”), deliberately wielded against women (“you feminazi cunts”), and deliberately violent (“go die in a fire”). There are NO similarities between the way we approached him and the way he approached us, period.
As a woman …
1. I have a much lower chance of being murdered than a man.
2. I have a much lower chance of being driven to successfully commit suicide than a man.
3. I have a lower chance of being a victim of a violent assault than a man.
4. I have probably been taught that it is acceptable to cry.
5. I will probably live longer than the average man.
6. Most people in society probably will not see my overall worthiness as a person being exclusively tied to how high up in the hierarchy I rise.
7. I have a much better chance of being considered to be a worthy mate for someone, even if I’m unemployed with little money, than a man.
8. I am given much greater latitude to form close, intimate friendships than a man is.
9. My chance of suffering a work-related injury or illness is significantly lower than a man’s.
10. My chance of being killed on the job is a tiny fraction of a man’s.
11. If I shy away from fights, it is unlikely that this will damage my standing in my peer group or call into question my worthiness as a sex partner.
12. I am not generally expected to be capable of violence. If I lack this capacity, this will generally not be seen as a damning personal deficiency.
13. If I was born in North America since WWII, I can be almost certain that my genitals were not mutilated soon after birth, without anesthesia.
14. If I attempt to hug a friend in joy, it’s much less likely that my friend will wonder about my sexuality or pull away in unease.
15. If I seek a hug in solace from a close friend, I’ll have much less concern about how my friend will interpret the gesture or whether my worthiness as a member of my gender will be called into question.
16. I generally am not compelled by the rules of my sex to wear emotional armor in interactions with most people.
17. I am frequently the emotional center of my family.
18. I am allowed to wear clothes that signify ‘vulnerability’, ‘playful openness’, and ’softness’.
19. I am allowed to BE vulnerable, playful, and soft without calling my worthiness as a human being into question.
20. If I interact with other people’s children — particularly people I don’t know very well — I do not have to worry much about the interaction being misinterpreted.
21. If I have trouble accommodating to some aspects of gender demands, I have a much greater chance than a man does of having a sympathetic audience to discuss the unreasonableness of the demand, and a much lower chance that this failure to accommodate will be seen as signifying my fundamental inadequacy as a member of my gender.
22. I am less likely to be shamed for being sexually inactive than a man.
23. From my late teens through menopause, for most levels of sexual attractiveness, it is easier for me to find a sex partner at my attractiveness level than it is for a man.
24. My role in my child’s life is generally seen as more important than the child’s father’s role.
"Now let’s see how many so-called feminists dismiss this with “LOL! What about teh MENZ!” or accuse me of being a misogynist, or engage in sexist/misandrist attacks on me rather than engage the substance of the article, or even resort to all of the above.
(via ryking)
I’m also more likely to be raped. I’m more likely to be killed by a husband or boyfriend. My number one cause of injury is from men that I am supposed to trust. I’m more likely to make less money than my male counterparts. I am less likely to be promoted in the workplace. I am more likely to be gossiped about due to my sexuality. If I am aggressive or assertive than I’m a bitch. If I reject femininity I’m a dyke. As a child I am not encouraged to pursue maths and sciences. If I do not have conventional beauty, I am worthless and it will be a topic of conversation among those around me. My reproductive rights are up for debate in the 21st century, mostly by men. Violence against me, especially sexual violence, is an overly used subject in movies and television. Men get aroused by seeing my breasts as I am being choked or stabbed. Oh but I am not allowed to show said breasts when I need to feed my child. I have to hide for that one. 1 in 4 of us will be sexually assaulted by the age of 18.
See, I can make lists too. Followers, please add.
(via the-womanifesto)
I like how several of these rely upon embracing patriarchy as a system. I also like how only a privileged male could think this means that misandry is a legitimate social problem we all need to work on.
(Source: diadoumenos)
Ron Paul on abortion
WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST READ? AN HONEST RAPE? Fuck you, Ron Paul. Fuck you straight to hell.
