The second response: "lol feminists lol". Friends of this guy will immediately start posting anti-woman, anti-feminist pictures that discredit any woman who speaks up against sexism as irrational and hypocritical. This gives them an excuse to dismiss my comment. Without knowing me from a bar of soap, they will immediately launch into an attack on my character, all the while guffawing and congratulating each other on how witty they're being.
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These guys aren't bad people. Guaranteed a glance over their profiles suggest they're perfectly normal, generally amiable guys. But it doesn't even for a moment occur to them that there's something wrong with attacking and slandering a woman they don't know just because she publicly stated an objection to sexism.
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Plenty of guys think it's totally OK to make statements that attack women publicly in front of women. Women who respond with male gaze and laugh along with the guys about how stupid girls are heralded by these men as "honorary bros". ( and are allowed to hang out in mens groups , lol) They have lost the shame that is their femaleness. Women who object to the statements being made about all women including them are silenced, shamed, given stern lectures about what they are and are not allowed to talk about, and their tones.
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Problem is, when a society wants to marginalize a group, they start with humour. They create caricatures made up of a collection of flaws and, soon enough, they start to believe in them. Examples: The scary black man. The effeminate gay. The miserly Jew. The emotional woman. The angry feminist.
And I genuinely am struggling to understand how our culture got this fucked up.
excellent Op. thanks. here are some i really liked.
this would be the point of someone saying, regardless what woody did... or, whether woody did anything or not, type comments and i sit with mouth open as it is defended, excused, and finger pointed at those that called it out.
I sat and listened while a Stellenbosch student friend of my ex boasted to him about how he had just "fucked a slut that was too drunk to know what was going on". When I got upset, I was told to lighten up.