Actually, I think you could post a similar list focusing on bad female writing, and it wouldn’t necessarily be sexist.
It’s not sexism per se to point out examples of sexism, which is what a lot of the jokes above are doing.
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Whenever anyone complains about any joke I make about women, I just say, “I’m just talking about white women”.
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Welp. Ciao, I guess. Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya…
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Because this list is a pitch-perfect example of the kind of shit coming out of the Hugo “Sad Puppies” camp.
Also, bye bye Pi!
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Nicely done.
Can someone explain to me how this is newsworthy?
This isn’t a newspaper.
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Fair point. Thanks.
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I was going to ask basically the same questions, but you beat me to it. I think the last question is particularly important, and I rarely see anyone address it. Leaving aside the questions of whether posts like this are accurate or funny or justified, do they actually accomplish anything? Does anyone learn anything from them? Do they advance the cause of social justice in any meaningful way? Or do they just add more poison to the already-toxic conversation? My money would be on the latter.
The thing about oppressors and bullies and hatemongers is that they almost universally see themselves as victims. Pick any group that seeks to oppress others and you’ll find a group poor, downtrodden victims that are just trying to get their own back. Misogynist internet trollies are victims whose actions are justified. Religious homophobes are victims whose actions are justified. Even those perennial Internet argument favorites, the Nazis, saw themselves as victims whose actions were justified.
Now you can say, “Who cares? They’re wrong. Fuck 'em if they can’t take a joke,” and you’d have a point. But here’s the thing: the more you play into that belief, the less likely those people are to ever change. Victimhood is a powerful drug, and every time you taunt them you’re giving them another hit and giving them less incentive to examine their own actions.
If you want to end sexism, you have to change the minds of people who are sexist. There’s not really any way around it. You’re not fighting people, you’re fighting an idea. Sooner or later, you have to turn some of your enemies into allies. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t think I have ever been persuaded of anything by someone being rude to me. Even when I was wrong, even when I deserved it. Maybe that’s a character flaw, but I think it’s one I share with most of humanity. The way to change people’s minds is to show them that your way of looking at things is better. “My way is like your way, but targeted at you instead of me,” is not a very persuasive pitch.
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Did you just … just … play the “tone card”?!?
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Actually, there is a way around it: wait for those people to die. Sadly, there’s no universal approach to changing a person’s mind (you might respond to reason but not everyone does), so that’s the only surefire method.
I hope you know what you’re getting into…
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Only for them to pass their ideology onto the next generation.
The outlive baby boomer plan ain’t gonna work.
Look around you, dude. It’s already working.
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Sure, there are some people that can’t be persuaded. But while you wait for them to die off, you have to persuade the others faster than they can, because they’re not just sitting around doing nothing; they’re raising future generations. Plus, there are plenty of young misogynists out there. Waiting around for them to go away is going to take quite a while. And social progress is not inevitable. Look at the course of women’s rights in Afghanistan over the last century. You’ve got to work for it.
Like it or not, tone matters, often more than being right does. Lots of people listen more to the tone of an argument more than they listen to its content. Does that place an unfair burden on social justice advocates? Yes. Does it reinforce structural oppression? Yes. But that’s how the human mind works. We’re not completely rational beings. Movements that ignore that don’t get far. If being right was all it took to persuade people, we’d live in a very different world.
I recognize that this is a particularly thorny issue in regard to sexism, because one of the ways that women are oppressed is not being allowed to be angry, always having to make nice. There’s a terrible circularity to it: you’re fighting for the right to express anger (among many other things), but actually exercising that right causes you to lose ground in the fight. It’s Kafkaesque. But that’s how it works. You don’t get the benefits of victory until you’ve won.
Got it. Don’t be so uppity.
Fuck that noise.
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I’m sorry, but what? That’s bullshit that I picked up on when I was fourteen and on a heavy diet of action movies. I didn’t even identify them as male-writer problems, they were just tropes, and the thing about tropes is that someone is putting them to paper, film, or other medium. They don’t pop up magically like mushrooms when no one is looking.
Reverse sexism is anti-sexism, the word for what you are trying to identify is “sexism.” More precisely, “sexism against men,” but that has the deficiency of sounding as petty and inapplicable as it actually is. Also, it’s not sexism to point out rampant sexism. Sheesh.
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…and yet polls show that each subsequent generation is more (socially) progressive than the previous one. In any case, I am referring to the United States. Afghanistan had and continues to have serious problems that extend well beyond women’s rights.
Seriously, this shit leads to nothing good. Once you start arguing about tone, the discussion’s pretty much dead. Whatever you may think of the presentation, the Tumblr post contains relevant criticism.
Oh, I don’t dispute that. I looked at most of the items on this list, nodded, and said to myself, “Yep, I’ve seen that crap a thousand times.” But I was already persuaded before I even saw it. Would someone who didn’t already agree have the same reaction? Personally, I doubt it. That’s my point. It’s not wrong or irrelevant, it’s unpersuasive.
And I’m not saying it’s some kind of heinous hate crime to post a snarky list. I just don’t see what it’s supposed to accomplish.
People seem to have taken these questions as rhetorical, but they weren’t meant that way. I’m genuinely curious what purpose this is supposed to serve.
- Comedy.
- See one.
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It’s essential … to establish … a basic tonal vocabulary:
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