But How Do You Know It’s Sexist? The #MenCallMeThings Round-Up

Tiger Beatdown › But How Do You Know It’s Sexist? The #MenCallMeThings Round-Up.

I found this article at Tiger Beatdown.  I’ve read a few articles from that site before, and it’s one of the places I go to (including STFUSexists over on tumblr) to educate myself regarding the differences in how men and women think (it’s honestly not that hard, merely asking for starters helps).

But it seems now there’s this very dangerous attitude that’s growing and growing.  Maybe I just didn’t observe it before all that well, but it’s rather disturbing nonetheless.  It also ties in quite nicely with what I talked about yesterday about Mary Sues.  The example I used yesterday about taking the Batman origin and change it up for a woman with the only changes being gender, works in the real world as well.

There are masculine and feminine descriptors for people.  What are considered the norm are stoic, rational, adventurous, investigative and more.  On the other hand, descriptors such as sensitive, emotional, weak and others are focused on negative aspects of a person, and more often than not, related to women.  However, if you take stoic or rational and tag them to a woman, they change.  They become aggressive and threatening or mean.  Because the previous words are often identified with men, while the latter words are identified with women.

That’s something we have to change, both in fiction and the real world.  Maybe it starts in one, and moves to the other, but something needs to be done.  It’s turning into a large amount of hatred from all corners.  The author of the blog, Tiger Beatdown, goes onto say in her post that the amount of hate she’s received.  The words are disgusting.

Trigger warning for violent and abusive language.

One of the messages she received, and are similar to ones I’ve seen friends of mine have received for speaking their mind, include; I will fuck your ass to death you filthy fucking whore, you’re only worth ….

I think that first one was most likely the worst, and I really won’t go into more.  Needless to say, the messages received included threats of sexual violence, de-legitimizing intelligence, politics, and even gender, calling out as being mean, using name calling, and much more.

So, what kind of ignorance makes a person pick up their phone, send a tweet to someone they hardly know, or don’t know at all, and threatens them with rape.  Or calls them a little girl.  Or calls them stupid.  Are we devolving as a society where we consider half the population as nothing more than sexual objects.  And even less if they don’t fit into that frame?

I encourage people to check out Tiger Beatdown, there’s a lot of good stuff there.  Same with STFUSexists.  Steel thyself, however.  There can be many topics which are discussed that are rage inducing.  Not against the hosting site but against people that often make me scream “how can you think of doing that”.