An Intellectual Being
Via the comments, AnotherFred steers us to an outpouring of note by Melissa Fabello, managing editor of Everyday Feminism. In this potentially classic piece, from September last year, Ms Fabello rails against those who presume to question her feminist gospel and its charmless lamentations:
If you’re a feminist who spends any amount of time on the internet, you know exactly what I’m talking about: You post that article about the wage gap on Facebook, and all of a sudden, all of these cis, white, straight dudes come out of the woodwork to remind you that the statistics are faulty, that women take more time off of work, that women just don’t like STEM fields.
Well, yes, that will happen if you publicly assert as fact things that aren’t true and which have been repeatedly debunked. And labelling the people who correct those zombie misconceptions, the ones that refuse to die, as “cis, white, straight dudes,” even when they’re ladies, as in the links above, is an evasion, not an argument. Curiously, Ms Fabello depicts those who dare to disagree as merely “playing devil’s advocate,” which seems just a tad presumptuous.
Whenever someone responds to my critique of the culture in which we live with what they believe to be a deep conundrum or contradiction, my first thought is, “Wow. You have absolutely no respect for me as an intellectual being.”
You see, those aren’t load-bearing arguments. They’re just for show. If you poke at those buggers the whole roof could fall in. This is followed, almost instantly, by a twitch of political self-correction:
I don’t think we should value intellect… as a trait (hi, that’s ableist)
Whew. Nice save.
but I do think that we should respect one another for whichever way our smarts show up for us.
Ms Fabello’s smarts are manifest via the medium of rhetorical dance:
When you regurgitate the status quo to us
I.e., when you point out a mistake or point of contention, this is,
interrupting our thought processes
How very dare you.
in asking us to reconsider ideas that we’ve already contemplated deeply.
Yes, deeply, which apparently means perfectly, with no possibility of error. Furthermore, these beastly interruptions are,
often unsolicited.
Again, the temerity. And so,
You’re signalling to us that you don’t trust our ability to think critically.
This, remember, from the woman who praises “intersectional feminism” for the realisation that “what had gone wrong” in her life, all of it, was – and I quote – “never my fault.” Ms Fabello goes on to hurl great handfuls of straw into the air, before telling us, quite firmly, that,
Your thoughts [as a man] – no matter how well-intentioned, well-thought-out, or well-researched they are – simply pale in comparison to living in a marginalised body that experiences the trauma of oppression.
By which she means being a middle-class female in twenty-first century America. Despite all this trauma and bodily marginalisation, she somehow, heroically, finds the strength to explain just how tiresome it is for a feminist, a bearer of enlightenment, such as herself, to debate with a mere
layperson (especially one who is a straight, cis man).
Oh, the indignity. She has robes and an amulet. Do they mean nothing to you heathens?
Of course, respect for Ms Fabello “as an intellectual being” might be easier to sustain if her articles weren’t dense with question-begging and neurotically incoherent. Likewise, modern feminist “theory” might command more deference if it didn’t appear to operate according to random, somewhat bewildering standards. Such that statistics can be inflated arbitrarily, by orders of magnitude, and such that mythological figures – say, Romulus, the wolf-suckled son of Mars – are presented as real people who were involved in feminist politics.
Update:
Ms Fabello responds, bearing down with the full weight of her intellectual being.
It’s the “syllabi is” that gets me….
Yeah, I thought the same thing. But I figured it wouldn’t be sporting to point out the lack of education of a hard-core feminist. Fish in a barrel and all that.
It’s the “syllabi is” that gets me….
To be fair, that particular abomination seems to be the work of the Twitter account drawing attention to the ‘analysis’ rather than the ‘critical thinker’ herself.
Are there really now so many who question their ‘birth gender’ that society requires to identify those who don’t by the label, “cis”?
Indeed, Trevor, you is right. People in glass houses and whatnot…
Am I the only one to think that the best way to demonstrate respect for someone as an intellectual being is to subject their ideas to the same standard of scrutiny I’d expect my own to be held to…
When feminists say “respect,” they mean “toe-kissing subservience,” thus your confusion.
“the Critical
thinkerTheorist herself”The modern world really has done an enormous disservice to women like Ms. Fab.
They’re not a new phenomenon though.
Prior to the Modern era these people were what drove extreme religious sects like the Flagellants, Anabaptists, Levellers, Puritans and assorted ascetics. From a similar position of unreality they would then castigated the mass of humanity for their sins, and proposed “solutions” that were not really thought through with how people actually live.
Later versions moved to mass political parties that sought “purity” in some way or other: Fascists, Marxists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, etc.
Compared to previously, we should be grateful. While dangerous, they are at least fragmented.
So anyway, this lady tweeted Ms Fabello and directed her attention to the piece above.
Ms Fabello responded thusly:
You can imagine my distress.
Note that Ms Fabello chooses not to share the original tweet with her readers, or a link to the offending post, so that they might determine for themselves just how awful and irrelevant it is.
Ms Fabello responded thusly:
I picture our host laughing into his coffee.
I picture our host laughing into his coffee.
Well, when someone disdains the very idea of engaging with criticism from people not already sympathetic and in her personal contacts list, while inadvertently confirming, quite vividly, at least one of the points being raised, it’s hard not to smile.
I’m only human, after all.
I’m sure Ms. Fabello would accuse Paula Wright of suffering from “false consciousness”; Wright’s interests lie in evolutionary psychology, and she leans toward fact-based argumentation—qualities that would not endear her to the merry social-constructivists over on EF. She’s certainly no fan of post-modern feminism.
She has some interesting posts over on her site.
When people you’ve never heard of write “analyses” of your work and personhood . . .
Are we to then assume that we have no basis for criticizing and argument unless we know the author(s) well? If so, what
intellectual processalchemy allows Fabello and others of her ilk to skirt around their own ignorance, or are they, as enlightened beings, exempt from such things?She has some interesting posts over on her site.
Yes. This one caught my eye. Specifically,
I’ve added Ms Wright to the blogroll. Worth a visit.
“endemic female passive aggressive bullying of their female rivals”
Wasn’t it Ace who mentioned something about boys at about the age of 12 learning that assholism can have face-punching consequences while girls, on the other hand…
So she’s vain, stupid and a racist too.
https://twitter.com/fyeahmfabello/status/779687536088256512
Dave Waterman’s reply to her is brilliant. Although I do wonder if she’d like some Aloe Vera. She just got burned.
So she’s vain, stupid and a racist too.
Imagine feeling such a need to signal in-group piety – in this case, an ostentatious disdain for the entire white male population – that you’re willing to sacrifice all realism and coherence and become an absurdity, a cartoon. Not just once, but every single day.
The word neurotic barely covers it.
Imagine feeling such a need to signal . . .
Granting a feature that only registers at this general cultural moment, and will be only a sociological surreality in time, one doesn’t even need to read any of the text to see her own open and absolute signaling of her message of being an openly clueless ditz of the moment with a demand that all recognize her as lightweight and utterly irrelevant.
Go to the twit account, and the very first thing that one sees is a hipster variety outline image of a pair of glasses—and at this moment, to help underline the message of irrelevance, the pinned note at the top of the queue has an image . . .
. . . with the exact same pictographic insistence that she be ignored.
She responded to the list of philosophers with this: https://twitter.com/fyeahmfabello/status/779723370577428481
“Y’all. I can’t.”
We should all genuflect to her superior debating skills . . . when they actually manifest themselves in a tangible form.
And labelling the people who correct those zombie misconceptions, the ones that refuse to die, as “cis, white, straight dudes,” even when they’re ladies, as in the links above, is an evasion, not an argument.
‘Social justice’ means feeling good about not listening to people based on their sex and race.
‘Social justice’ means feeling good about not listening to people based on their sex and race.
Heh. Pretty much. Certainly it provides endless excuses for doing just that and generally being presumptuous. It must be quite strange to go through life mentally categorising people by pigment and whatever, and then either being fawning and credulous or smugly disdainful based on that and little else. Though it seems to me that the categorising process, the urge to label and then position people in some imagined hierarchy of default virtue, is corrosive to realism and morally blunting.
It’s a worldview that attracts self-flattering mediocrities and then makes them absurd.
Anyone else notice how “feminism” does a pretty darn good job ticking so many Cluster B boxes?
I don’t know if PD categorizations are a set of natural buckets into which fall behaviors, or if they’re pure after-the-fact abstracts for various screwballednesses, but either way they seem to fit…
‘Social justice’ means feeling good about not listening to people based on their sex and race.
Not too long ago, that would have been considered sexism and racism. Now it’s considered progressive social justice. No, I can’t get my head around it either.
Not too long ago, that would have been considered sexism and racism. Now it’s considered progressive social justice. No, I can’t get my head around it either.
I get the impression that progressivism has very little in the way of fixed content; it’s more about distinguishing oneself from hoi polloi. If the masses adopt a progressive opinion, then the progressive must find something new to believe so as not to be mistaken for a commoner.