In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: April 2014

Spillover #16

Another month has ended, so here’s another #spillover thread. Some reminders:

1. #spillover is part of our comment moderation system for keeping other threads on-topic by providing a separate constructive space for side-discussions.
2. Commentors are encouraged to respect the topic of each post and cheerfully volunteer to take off-topic side-discussions into #spillover.

Scalzi on why “but not all [p] are [q]ists” defensiveness is a derail

We tend to get it here mostly on threads which criticise racist aspects of mainstream feminism, but it’s all over the social justice map – people derailing criticism of ongoing perpetutations of oppressions with their defensive insistence that while yes of course that incident was very wrong however critics need to acknowledge that They/We are not all like That/Them.

John Scalzi lays out the 101 on why that argument functions as just another silencing tactic whether one means it that way or not, and notes how falling back on it blocks one’s ethical self-examination of how one benefits from the status quo:

David Choe totally hates rapists, is only guilty of bad storytelling

[Strong, strong trigger warning for rape]

In the March 10 episode of his podcast, David Choe recounted in lurid and self-satisfied detail his activities of the night before, in which he raped his masseuse at a massage parlor. On Friday, shortly after the story came out on Gawker and xojane, he insisted on his blog that he was totally joking, that he hates rapists, that his art is controversial, and that all he’s guilty of is bad storytelling. Call me a humorless feminist, but I’m not laughing.

VLOGGING – Can Virgins Have Oral Sex?

From outside, it probably seems we quit the Feministe vlog after just 4 months of vlogging. In actuality, despite scepticism from professors, we’ve been labouring for 4 months behind the scenes to reboot the vlog, brainstorming ways to deliver content with appeal beyond the feminist blogosphere. Frankly your mates and ours might need this more than you, if they never got sex education in school. So come, judge what we came up with. For one thing, it involves Call of Duty…