He fails to mention the Pennywise cosplay convention he had just attended.
If you actually read my posts instead of filtering them through your prejudices, you would see that I explicitly state that my issue was with the people insisting that men who do not cross the road to accommodate women’s feelings “have something wrong with them.” I also never said that those who do it “hurt” me in any way. I also never said that women are irrational for being concerned about their safety in all situations, just that I thought the “broad daylight, wide open very public place” ones were a pair of fucking nitwits.
But by all means, don’t let facts get in the way of your agenda.
I must be a hopeless romantic because I assumed the girls thought he was cute and then ran away when they got caught looking. Silly college girls. There’s really no way of knowing what they were thinking.
I just don’t understand why Darren’s comments on this subject have been so distorted. His view seems rather moderate to me.
I’m examining this from more of a philosophical/conceptional point of view, not an emotional one. As I mentioned before, I find it interesting the way some modern liberals attempt to hold two sets of inherently contradictory ideals at the same time. On the one hand, condemning those who judge all people of one group based on perceived group characteristics (a black man might be a mugger, an olive-skinned man might be a suicide bomber), but on the other hand also condoning those who judge all people of one group based on perceived group characteristics (a man might be a rapist.) On the one hand, having to modify your behavior to accommodate the possibly unreasonable feelings of others (such as when it would apply to a black man or an olive-skinned man having to go out of their way to signal their harmlessness, or a woman having to dress modestly to avoid giving horny men the wrong idea) is condemned, but on the other hand, modifying your behavior to accommodate the possibly unreasonable feelings of others (crossing a road to avoid having to walk near a woman) is commended. Then to defend it, they pull out words like “power dynamic” and “privilege”, thinking that they have just hit a home run answer when they are really just using buzz-words and special pleading.
I visualize characteristics of cultures as a sliding scale, like a little slider that you would move while setting up the traits of a character in a video game (call it 1 to 100, or 0 to 11, or “none” to “all.) Every culture finds their comfort level on that scale for each characteristic. One of those characteristic is how much people in a culture should have to inconveniently modify their behavior to accommodate the possibly unreasonable limitations of others—one end of the scale is no accommodation at all, the other end of the scale is accommodating everything. The question is where along that sliding scale it is best that our culture settles (and that is very far from an easy question.)
Let’s take as an example an incident at another site I read regularly, an “advice column” that I read not because of the advice itself but because of the wacky situations that sometimes come up.In this situation, there were two cow-orkers standing outside their business. One of them had an (undisclosed, I think) phobia about birds. A pigeon walked towards him, he freaks out, and shoves his female cow-orker out of his way so that he could flee. Shoved her into traffic. Where she was hit by a car, had broken bones, and was hospitalized. The woman who was injured insisted that she would not return to work until bird-boy was fired. The letter writer wanted to know how to handle that female employee for being unreasonable expecting to not have to work with the guy who pushed her into traffic. The fucking idiot who shoved her into traffic needed to be “accommodated for” because he had a phobia. Now, not only do I not think that he should have been protected by the ADA because of his actions and should have had his ass fired, if I was the injured woman I would have made every possible effort to see the guy sitting in prison for assault and damn his “phobia.”
So they question is, is walking across a road to accommodate “man phobia” (and playing nicey-nicey with someone who pushed you into traffic to accommodate “bird-phobia”) something that fits within reasonable expectation for culture side of the slider, or is it too far on the cuckoo bananas side?
You won’t find intellectual consistency on the left. They employ the Humpty Dumpty method of reason. Where words and by extension, concepts, mean only what they want them to.
This is a bullshit generalization that reeks of intellectual laziness, but I suspect you know that.
That’s interesting story about the bird phobia, but are equating a woman who was physically injured as a result of someone else’s phobia, and someone crossing the street to feel more comfortable in what may be seen as a potentially risky situation?
I don’t know that he’s equating them, so much as using an extreme example to illustrate his point. Namely, that we have to consider to what extent we should allow other people’s issues to impact our social norms.
Ok. I think if no one is assaulted then we can make allowances. If someone is hit by a car, that has definitely crossed a line and allowances should end.
If someone who says “the clothes that women/girls wear can really screw with men/boys minds, especially tight, revealing clothes” gets offended that someone crossed the street, or broke out running, then i can’t get too upset about it.
Broad brushing like this is both wrong and pathetically lazy. You should know better.
We could actually have an intelligent and nuanced discussion about concepts like power dynamics, privilege, etc., if you want. These things really might exist and really might be worth discussing.
Or you could just assume that it’s all bullshit and those who disagree with you are stupid hypocrites.
And to be clear, i am aware that the comment was part of a larger point that women have the right to wear whatever they like * even though it messes with men’s heads,* and that men have the right to walk where they want, even if that likewise messes with women’s heads.
I was equating her being expected to “forgive and forget” her attacker because of his phobia and being expected to cross the street to avoid the appearance of intimidation. I was speaking of how far society should have to go to coddle other people’s mental problems. Where is the level where you are allowed to say “I’m sorry you have this problem, but it is your problem, not mine”?
I’m going to stick with double-standard special pleading hypocracy. You can stick with “all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others.”
Were it possible, I think most of us would support you being allowed to see from the inside what it is like to be a woman, or black, or trans, or whatever your bugaboo is. Some of us would happily make that a mandatory sentence for hate crimes. Not permanent, mind you, but if you had to spend 6 months black, or 6 months as a woman, I think you might have a different perspective.
If nothing else, it would be hilarious to watch you twist yourself in a logical knot over it.
You can stick with straw man arguments like this if you like. If you are interested in the possibility of a nuanced discussion, I’m open to it.
So you are saying that if I became a woman or minority, I would start demanding special treatment while calling it equal rights? Because that is the only logical knot here.
No, you aren’t. You are open to my seeing your Obvious Truth. It is an opportunity for you to teach me the Correctness of special treatment based on minority status being Justice and the “true” equality.
When it causes you actual harm.Your example is someone who was hit by a car. And what you are equating it to is someone who feels put out about a woman’s unease in certain situations.
Eta and is it " expected" for a man to cross to the street? I thought this started because one man said that’s something he does, not that anyone expects all men to do so.
No, look back over my posts–it was started over his saying that every man knows that you are supposed to do this and if you don’t do it then there is something wrong with you.