kristinerosemary wrote:hey there, glad you brought this up.
of course this venue is hostile to women.
but after awhile you begin to realize this place is hostile to everyone and everything. many equal opportunity cynics known for cordial but distant and decidedly unfriendly attitudes. this is essentially a boyz clubhouse and anyone new or clearly female can be prepared to be ignored at best unless they know the secret passwords. no grrls allowed. unless they can think like boys who believe in nothing. and have all day to write endless posts on endless threads because they live in basements and have shirts with pocket protectors for their slide rules. ha just kidding. and they have no sense of humor. just like the women's movement. i've been in and out of here for a long time, and i just love coming in, making some snide remark, and going back out again. everyone always ignores me. it's fun. they're nice. i love them. if you want to see a site friendly to women, go to jezebel.com where all the smart, witty and cool girls hang out. this place, not so much. xoxo
I love jezebel, but it's kind of an apples/oranges to compare it to the RI board. It's a commercial site that seeks to attract a specific pro-females-are-smart-witty-cool-and-independent psychographic, and it almost always does a commendable, honest and highly enjoyable job while doing so. Can we not just love it for what it is, without using it as a club with which to beat this forum?
Because while I totally agree that this site is hostile to women, as well as male-dominated, as well as not exactly characterized by the over-all tone of joie-de-vivre with which posters approach the topics or the world, as well as covering a wide enough range of subjects that there's probably something somewhere here to offend everybody, I don't think it's at all true that it's any more hostile to everyone and everything than any other equivalently sized heterogeneous voluntary-membership special-interest oriented community discussion board. Special-interest peoples are typically bickering peoples, whether the special interest is the flora and fauna of Papua New Guinea or the paranormal and deep-political currents of contemporary western civilization.
Also, since today is my
precautionary-announcement-that-appears-to-criticize-the-poster-who-started-the-thread-when-in-fact-I-agree-with-him-or-her day:
I think it's both wrong and counterproductive implicitly to frame any discussion of widespread cultural hostility to women, or of the normative status of male-dominated public discourse (or, for that matter, any other common-to-the-point-of-nearly-universal social manifestation of sexism) as if sexism was a form of discrimination that's exclusively practiced by and subscribed to by men who are acting with the express and witting aim of injuring, weakening or silencing women. Because it really isn't. Misogyny is such a deeply rooted and longstanding part of contemporary society -- plus every one of its immediate family of predecessor societies! -- that it's practically like it exists in some form on a molecular level in every person who's a part of that culture. Although it's beyond dispute that it does much, much more damage of a much, much more serious kind to women than it does to men, and equally beyond dispute that men collectively exercise much, much more economic and political clout at executive levels than women do. So I'm not saying anything as namby-pamby-assed as: "Oh, gosh, we're all victims here." Because, for one thing, while many women are truly so victimized by sexism and its consequences that they're literally not in a position to speak, I wouldn't want to show as much disrespect to either them or myself as I'd have to in order to claim that my experience of misogyny was the same as theirs. Primarily because I was fucking lucky to be born white and to have had access to a lot more class privileges than most people of either gender all over the world do, as well as to the regular old limited, precarious and dubiously advantageous economic advantages that most white Americans whose hopeless poverty hasn't made them all-but-invisible usually do have some access to.
And owing to those things, to some extent, I can refuse to cooperate with victimhood and...you know: Choose to pay the price of a modest uptick in the amount-of-externally-originating-hostility-encountered in exchange for freedom from self-condemnation, self-loathing and/or self-denial. Sometimes. On a good day. Still. That's a much better deal than most people get wrt overcoming gender-based oppression, I'm pretty sure. Which is a horrible thought, because it sure as hell isn't any joyride. In fact, it's more what you might call an unrelentingly painful burden and a major fucking drag. Not that I'm complaining. Because, naturally, why, oh my goodness, I'm enough of a part of a misogynist culture I live in to feel the need to draw the line
somewhere. I wouldn't want anyone to think I was a cranky bitch or anything like that just because I'm all, like, wimministic and stuff.
Willow, thanks for starting this and also for what I hope will be your generosity toward letting me vent in a free-associative manner without ever really getting either on- or off-topic. Please know that I got your back, should your back turn out to be in need any gotting.
