These awful, clueless, evil avatars of supreme privilege
Jesse Singal this morning:
1/ One other observation about this whole Hypatia blowup. In @tweetertation's excellent book, which I'm working on a piece about, she IDs
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017
2/ this strange and exceedingly unfortunate characteristic of the present progressive privilege-discourse in https://t.co/ENuTmO3TKF
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017
3/ which women get ganged up on online as these awful, clueless, evil avatars of supreme privilege. It really does seem to hit women way
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017
4/ more than men, which should give us pause. The thinking seems to be that their whiteness means they have a huge amount of power, and
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017
5/therefore they are fair game. That totally happened here. A young woman philosophy professor does not have all that much power, even if
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017
6/ she is white, and some of the responses I'm seeing from the sliver of people supporting the pile-on are acting like she's some sort of
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017
7/ empress. Which is insane! Privilege politics often turns discussions of power into really weird fairytales.
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 3, 2017
Exactly so. That’s certainly Zoé Samudzi’s approach, and she’s far from alone. Isn’t it interesting how it’s so nearly always women who are the targets of this kind of shit? Isn’t it even more interesting how it’s feminism and feminists hanging from the gibbet?
Bear in mind that Tuvel appears to be Jewish, as does (I’d bet) one of her most vicious detractors Berenstain.
I suspect the latter is trying to inoculate her self from attacked by people even crazier than she is .
There is a lot about this situation that’s depressing. Feminism is so very very important to me and it just kills me to see people making a mockery of it.
Ugh. I just saw a passing mention on Leiter’s blog, of the fact that among the signers of the “open letter” attacking Rebecca Tuvel are:
Lori Gruen (Wesleyan)
Lisa Guenther (Vanderbilt)
… both of whom were on Tuvel’s PhD committee. WTF is wrong with Gruen and Guenther? I cannot fathom doing that to a former student of mine. What a terrible, shameful way to treat one’s former student. They should be mentoring her, not publicly maligning her. Sheesh.
The other four committee members (Wood, Scott, Medina, and I forget the other one) don’t appear to have signed it, at least not as of when the archived copy was made (link at Gender Trender).
Oh gawd that’s awful. It just keeps getting more disgusting.
And all this desperate moral concern didn’t seem to make anybody notice Tuvel’s ‘sins’ until the witch-sniffers showed up.
There’s a scene in Life of Brian, just before the crucifiction, in which Brian is harassed by another prisoner about how favored and coddled he is by the lenient treatment HE’S getting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EI7p2p1QJI
The concept of ‘privilege’ has been degraded to meaninglessness. I don’t know the history that took it to take a legitimate description of the socially and morally insulated children of wealth (Bush, any number of Etonians etc.) into a generic insult to be unleashed on just about anybody.
For example, rape and slavery are crimes against the individual. To be ‘unraped’ or ‘unenslaved’ is NOT a privilege. Rape and slavery are to be combated with all the rigor possible. Attacking non-victims as ‘privileged’ is just wankery.
I watched Life of Brian again recently because it reminds me so much of recent social justice discourse. The way the People’s Front of Judea reserve their worst vitriol for the Judean People’s Front (and the Popular Front – SPLITTER!) and their one attempt to attack the Romans becomes a brawl with a rival group is just like what’s happening in feminism and other social justice movements.
The PFJ are based on 1970s trade unions. Sadly, I think this has always been a flaw of social justice groups.
It has. That’s why “politically correct” started out as a self-mocking joke on the left.
Of course she has power, not because she’s white, but because she’s a biological woman and is going to be WRONG and made to apologize for hurting the fee fees of every male in a frock, by that alone. They are so filled with hate toward biological women. The “feminist” Hypatia editors? A bunch of handmaidens sucking up to men. Yeh, Hypatia eds know MtT trans are men, that’s why they genuflect. Pass the popcorn.