Feminist Stupidity Daily: Ideological Aggression and the Kafkatrapping Game

Posted on | February 25, 2015 | 71 Comments

“Once a woman is singled out by a men’s rights group such as A Voice for Men, the misogynist Reddit forum The Red Pill or even just a right-wing Twitter account like Twitchy, she is deluged with hatred.”
— Michelle Goldberg, Washington Post

Because I’ve been busy offline the past few days, the stupidity has been piling up, and I need to clear away some backlog. Let’s start by checking in at the repository of amateurish nonsense, Everyday Feminism:

7 Ways to Lovingly Support Your
Gender Non-Binary Partner

(Why is your partner “gender non-binary”? Is there a drastic shortage of normal human beings on the planet? Are you so desperate you’ll date any doomed weirdo that shows up?)

Thinking Critically About Who Pays for the Date
The primary dating script, as advertised by American pop culture (most notably, romantic comedies), supposedly serves as a map to help us navigate romantic love’s rough, rough terrain.
However, in a society that privileges different types of people over others, that map is filled with hazardous roadblocks for some and traffic-free highways for others.
One of the most significant factors in determining who gets assigned which roles from the dating script is money. . . . When we spend it, how we spend it, and who is spending it all come under scrutiny in this classist society.
Consequently, who pays for the date (and the contract that payment supposedly creates) is usually rooted in assumptions about gender and sexuality that deserve a lot more scrutiny. . . .

(Yeah, thinking critically about gender assumptions in classist society. Good luck getting a first date. A second date? No way.)

5 Ways to Deal with Misguided
(But Well-Intentioned) Allies
We’ve all been there. Whether it’s a self-proclaimed “male feminist” making sex-shaming comments on a Facebook post or the “LGBTQIA-friendly” straight ally unwittingly making transphobic slurs at a party – the misguided ally is nearly impossible to avoid.
It’s not that the misguided ally is a bad person. We know they don’t want to hurt us. But they do.
And then, often times, they hurt us even more by choosing to blame to us for whatever awkward experience ensues as opposed to taking accountability.
Though these instances are irritating, their irritation is nuanced. They often facilitate in safer spaces becoming unsafe, which, in turn, expedites the increased formation of identity-exclusive spaces.
And while having spaces just for marginalized people themselves (spaces specifically for people of color, or trans folks, or for women-identified people) isn’t inherently wrong, they often end up being centered around healing from the harmful microaggressions of “allies.” . . .

Do you understand what’s wrong here? These feminist zombies are so desperate they’re scraping around for “gender non-binary” partners, but then it’s time for a lecture about who should pay for the date “in this classist society.” And, although I can’t imagine who would want to be an “ally” to these obnoxious losers, if you do want to be their “ally,” that means you’ve got to watch every word you say, because you can’t make any “sex-shaming” comments or “transphobic slurs.”

Where do they get the idea that the rest of us have nothing better to do with our lives than to scrupulously avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of Special Snowflakes? Hypersensitive political correctness is just a game for moral narcissists — More Progressive Than Thou! — who sit around congratulating themselves on how “inclusive” they are.

Do I seem irritated? You’d be irritated, too, if you’d been reading Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, a collection of articles edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti. This is a very bad book written by very bad women, among them the execrable Stacey May Fowles, whose essay begins thus:

Because I’m a feminist who enjoys domination, bondage, and pain in the bedroom, it should be pretty obvious why I often remain mute and, well, pretty closeted about my sexuality.

Yeah, but you had to write a 3,000-word essay about it, didn’t you? Other contributors to Yes Means Yes include Kimberly Springer, a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies whose essay is entitled, “Queering Black Female Heterosexuality,” and Kate Harding, a “fat-acceptance” blogger who provides an essay called, “How Do You F–k a Fat Woman?” My favorite (and by “favorite,” I mean most wretched) of the whole collection, however, is “Reclaiming Touch: Rape Culture, Explicit Verbal Consent, and Body Sovereignty,” which asks the question: “Can we really draw a sharp line between sexual assault and unwanted nonsexual touch?” Most people would have no problem answering “yes” to that question, but here we encounter a feminist claiming that a hug between friends is an act that should require Explicit Verbal Consent.

My first instinct when I read craziness like this is to investigate the source. It is my common-sense suspicion that crazy ideas are usually the product of crazy minds, and in this case we’ve hit the Big Jackpot of Crazy. The author of the “Reclaiming Touch” essay is Hazel/Cedar Troost, who uses the “gender-neutral pronouns” ze and hir. What kind of crazy is this? Let’s read the “about” page at Hazel/Cedar’s blog:

This is a blog by a Chicago transsexual queer/woman who’s tired of making herself as small as possible to fit the demands of trans misogynistic feminism and trans activism.
It’s also a blog about gender theory & activism (simultaneously feminist and trans), misogyny (trans & NOS), transphobia, anti-racism, intersectionality, sustainability, privilege, language & terminology, power, body sovereignty, gender/sex self-determination, radical politics, “radical” politics, bad allies, accountability, BDSM, violence (domestic, intimate, sexual, emotional, physical, stranger, hate, racialized, institutional, systemic, and more), disabled, fat, & survivor politics, healthcare, and whatever else ze feels inspired to write on.

To translate: “Stay away from me, normal people!”

Aggressive weirdness — an insistence that the ordinary behaviors of normal people are oppressive — has become increasingly characteristic of the feminist fringe. If you greet a friend with a common gesture of affection, your hug might be “unwanted touch” that violates their “body sovereignty,” while your expectation that people are either male or female could infringe their right to “gender/sex self-determination.” And if you point out how strange these attitudes and behaviors are? You’re obviously some kind of hater.

What feminists and their allies are doing here is creating a landscape covered with opportunities for Kafkatrapping:

One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping” . . .
The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others.

Activists manufacture opportunities to accuse others of moral failing, and if you cooperate with them — if you attempt to be an “ally” of these progressives who continually produce demands that you acknowledge your guilt — then you must “become complicit” by routinely accusing others of these political sins. This is why feminists have manufactured a “rape epidemic” hysteria on college campuses. Using phony statistics and false accusations to mau-mau politicians into enacting bad legislation, feminists provoke criticism, and then demonize critics — e.g., George Will and K.C. Johnson — whom they brand “rape apologists,” so that critics are accused of being pro-rape merely because they point out errors in feminist arguments or flaws in policies that feminists advocate.

“With enough fear, you can manufacture a crisis, and a crisis gives you ‘an opportunity to do things . . . you could not do before,’ as President Obama’s former chief of staff noted in his famous remarks about not letting a crisis ‘go to waste.’”
— Hans Bader, Minding the Campus

“SHUT UP, BECAUSE RAPE!”

It’s all about silencing and discrediting opposition, see? Feminism is a totalitarian movement directly derived from the Marxist/Leninist model of the Bolshevik Revolution. “All power to the Soviets!” has become “All power to the feminists!”

We are all now constantly monitored by Feminist Commissars, the enforcers of a Police State regime. You must be careful, comrade, because your “harmful microaggressions” and your failure to obtain “Explicit Verbal Consent” before hugging someone are political crimes for which you might be subjected to a reenactment of the Moscow Show Trials before you are sent to the Feminist Gulag.

Americans understand that feminism’s ambitions are ultimately incompatible with human liberty. Yet if you dare speak out against it, your’re terrorists, and the monstrous ideologues who aspire to be your totalitarian overlords claim to be victims!

By the way, am I the only one who has noticed that while feminists have taken to repeating stories about how terrorized they are by the Internet — death threats, rape threats and the like — we haven’t seen anyone arrested, prosecuted or even served with a restraining order by any of these helpless feminist victims? Having been targeted for harassment by deranged sociopaths (who have proven they are willing to target people in real life), I know how to successfully fight back: Identify the cowards who are perpetrating such behavior, and call them out by name.

What are the names of the people who are perpetrating harassment against feminists? Identify them. Call them out.

Give me a list of names of these anti-feminist “terrorists,” with proof of their wrongdoing, and I will denounce them.

Expect to be waiting a long time before we ever see such a list, because the vagueness of these claims of feminist victimhood serves the purposes of political propaganda:

A. Opponents criticize feminist arguments;
B. Feminists are victims of harassment;
and therefore
C. Critics are responsible for the harassment of feminists.

This faulty syllogism is about falsely creating collective guilt, so that George Will is implicitly accused of inciting people to “dox” Brianna Wu and K.C. Johnson is smeared with responsibility for rape threats against Anita Sarkeesian. If all critics of feminist (collectively) are to blame for every harm experienced by feminists (collectively), you see, then anyone who writes in opposition to feminism can be Kafkatrapped.

Feminists can demand that, e.g., Professor Glenn Reynolds denounce the harassment of, inter alia, Jessica Valenti, even though the harassment is committed by some dimwit Reddit troll who has nothing to do with Professor Reynolds. It’s the same thing with “rape culture.”

Everybody is against rape, right? Yet if you criticize feminist rhetoric on this issue — if you suggest, for example, that there would be fewer sexual assaults on campus if university officials cracked down on underage drinking — then you are engaged in “victim blaming” or “slut shaming,” so that you then can be branded a “rape apologist” no matter how strongly you condemn rape. The purpose of feminism’s “rape culture” discourse is to create this generalized accusation of collective guilt, so that anyone who disagrees with feminists can be portrayed as responsible for crimes they have never committed.

Rape Culture: 1 in 5 congresswomen have been groped by the Vice President. pic.twitter.com/FH5IAw6ZDF

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 21, 2015

"Queer" teachers "share their dreams for feminist education in schools." http://t.co/55uyn5CmUD @bcrwtweets pic.twitter.com/Xd83QgmldX

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 23, 2015

Despite the success of feminists in promoting perversion, insanity and misery, it is not yet illegal to be normal, sane and happy.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 23, 2015

Finally, a campus 'rape culture' case that's legit, and the suspect's name is … Mohammad Hossain. http://t.co/SMZphHMxZF @instapundit

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 24, 2015

How dare editors of the @BostonGlobe fail to instantly reply to an email from @JessicaValenti? HARUMPH! #tcot pic.twitter.com/0B2SyRAVHQ

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 25, 2015

Hey, has @JessicaValenti mentioned the accused rapist Mohammad Hossain? http://t.co/SMZphHMxZF Did I miss something? #tcot

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 25, 2015

Welcome to the 21st century, comrade. The commissars have taken over our culture and it’s Kafkatrapping all the way down.

 

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