I have a lot of hate inside me and I've stopped caring who I hurt as long as I destroy those who fucked me over. I'm a crusader and would gladly see the Spanish Inquisition brought back to punish these bitches.


Blimey. I suspect that if you found a less aggressive means of communicating your message that the resurgence of feminism is causing you or your gender a disservice for which you can argue properly and in the appropriate register (or have somebody do it on your behalf), you might have more success in making your opinion listened to. The video is a great example of how high levels of aggression and strong language turn you into a pastiche and undermine your point; it presents women talking aggressively in order to mock them. You are now using the same hyperbolic language as your opponents and if you ever get a higher-profile platform from which to speak, you will be ridiculed for it, too.

As usual, there are two conflicting interests; people who think women have a raw deal from society; and people who think they have it just fine as it is, if not too well. There probably is no right answer, and one twelve-minute video that frames the creator's own personal expectation of a prospective study as evidence, having earlier criticised opposing commentators for doing the same is not the way to do it. It's clear that nuance is completely absent from both populist sides of the debate; the famous catcalling in New York video presented something deeply shocking, with a woman clearly on the receiving end of accepted, invasive, and highly-gendered behaviour; and when the stunt was repeated in a different city in a different culture, it presented a completely different story, with a woman clearly on the receiving end of respectful and non-invasive behaviour*.

The issues are clearly deeper and more complex than either one of these projects can explain or even diagnose on their own, and a higher and more specific level of analysis is required. That said, the video actually criticises somebody for seeking funding to carry out precisely that higher level and more specific study, while it later criticises the movement it has decided she represents for failing to provide sufficient evidence. The video simultaneously presents the feminist movement as one which is highly biased and therefore argues to discount the evidence that camp puts forward. Meanwhile, the video is highly biased, as evidenced by the immediate pursuit of the victim-card in the 'let's see how long' section at the start. Should we also dismiss the evidence this video puts forward?

The first step to higher and more specific analysis, and this goes for more or less everybody, is that the word 'feminist' isn't good enough on its own in anything purporting to be proper debate and needs qualifying. Feminism is a huge spectrum of categories spanning everything from complete genderblindness to the idea that women have always been oppressed by men and society needs restructuring from the ground up. The kicker is that it's a self-defined term. We see it particularly in the Page Three debate in the UK**, where the models themselves defended Page Three with feminism (self-expression should not be censored because of female nudity taboos) while critics argued with feminism that those other feminists were contributing to women being treated as sexual objects. It's simply not good enough to make a feminist point (or a point about feminism) without being more specific than just the F-word, and this goes for the feminists in the video as much as it does the guy trying to make a point about all of feminism using just those examples.

I think we all need to remove the sticks from our collective arses, and this goes for both sides of the debate. Somebody on this thread has claimed to have suffered gendered abuse, and they had this abuse openly doubted. This is not something I see applied to women in UK media; currently there is outrage that there may be legal cases where women who have been raped must prove that they have been raped***. I would hope and expect that any decent person, when faced with somebody, regardless of gender claiming to have been abused in any serious fashion, would react with compassion, rather than implicit or open queries as has happened here. Apart from anything else, the moment a man is laughed at for claiming to have been abused, he is made a martyr to the idea that men are oppressed, and is alone compelling evidence to back up that claim within that field****.

I'm a victim of abuse from mothers.


Get help. Not in a passive-aggressive, you're-behaving-stupidly-so-lol-you-need-help way, just for clarity. You are both externalising and internalising whatever it is that you have gone through by making it your mission to destroy an outside party that does not seem relevant and by building all that rage up inside you, none of which is indicative of good mental health. If it pops, you could hurt somebody else or yourself. Please get help.



* Annoyingly, I can't actually find the video. I think it was a less built-up area, maybe New Zealand. Arghrgrgh.
** Tl;dr - an infamous page of a popular but poorly-respected UK tabloid which features a mostly or completely nude model
*** This is the heavily-abridged version. The more detailed version is that welfare applying to children from lower-income backgrounds is soon going to be restricted to the first two children, hence the discussion of a situation where a woman did not mean to have a potential third child who might need that welfare.
**** It would be unfair not to acknowledge the feminists I personally know, among whom there are full-on SJW's but also women arguing that feminism is a good thing for men too, on precisely this sort of issue.



Now, everybody have a nice relaxing cup of camomile tea and chill right out.