Salon.com > Misogyny

Twitter’s latest unfunny trend: #killallmen

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:32:00 +0000

This is why we can't have nice things: Every day, plenty of nice, reasonably normal women are already tired from defending the word "feminism" from the angry, annoying trolls who think that acknowledging sexism means misandry. And then we wake up and see that #killallmen is trending on Twitter, and we just want to turn this car around until everybody can behave themselves.

I swear to God, no ice cream for anybody today, Twitter.

Nobody really thinks a hashtag is a serious call to genocide. One doesn't go looking for great pearls of wisdom in a form whose crowning achievement is the motivational #risenandgrind, either. And Twitter is already a reliably rich trove of trending topics that are openly hostile to females, usually employing some version of the word "slut." I fully believe that if we could convert all the misogyny on Twitter into a fuel source, we could reverse climate change in one hour. But there's nothing quite like gleeful shoe-on-the-other-foot bullying disguised as satire to give the most tiresome elements of the men's right's lobby – and they are legion -- fuel for their own self-righteous sense of victimhood.

“American women novelists” segregated by Wikipedia

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:01:00 +0000

Wikipedia editors have started quietly moving female authors out of the "American novelists" category and into a newly-created sub-category for "American women novelists," with the intention, it seems, of creating an"American novelists" page comprised entirely of men. There is currently no corollary sub-category for "American men novelists."

As American (woman) novelist Amanda Filipacchi explained in the New York Times on Wednesday, the process has so far affected women writers whose last names begin with A or B, but others have been moved as well:

Self-publishing star faces backlash for misogynist rant

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:09:00 +0000

Self-publishing wunderkind Hugh Howey may have relied on the kindness of strangers to boost his viral hit Wool into a word-of-mouth Amazon sensation, a major publishing deal with Simon & Schuster, and a lucrative movie deal. But after he took to his blog and Goodreads to bash one woman he met at last year's WorldCon, the publishing blogosphere may not have much goodwill left.

According to Howey, his wife told him that a story titled "The Bitch From WorldCon" (here's a cached version; here's a screengrab) wasn't the smartest thing he could post, but he ignored her and published it anyway.

Australian radio host asks victim if sexual abuse might have been her fault

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:27:00 +0000

This week, Australian radio host John Laws conducted an on-air interview with a woman who was the victim of years of sexual abuse at the hands of her five male relatives.

In response to the woman's disclosure, Laws asked her if she may have somehow provoked the abuse or if it was "in any way" her fault.

The exchange, as reported by Anette Sharp at The Daily Telegraph:

"My God they were having a good time with you," said the broadcasting legend, missing the sensitivity of the subject matter.

"Was it in any way your fault?" he then asked.

"No, I don't think so," the woman, a nurse, said.

"You weren't provocative?" Laws pressed.

"I was a little girl. I don't think so John. No, I was just a little girl."

After nine years of abuse the woman finally found the courage to consult a social worker at age 15 - the year before her father kicked her out of home.

As she broke down on air, Laws asked: "Are you unattractive?"

"I don't think so. I think I'm all right," she said.

"You sound all right," Laws encouraged.

Bro-gressives’ love affair with Rand Paul

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:15:00 +0000

There’s a certain breed of progressive dude who, when told that the object of his latest man-crush is, say, a bit racist (or misogynistic, or is stoking the fears of right-wing preppers), gets really mad. Unable to refute the fact of his worship of the racist, misogynist, prepper-stoker, he resorts to falsifying the intention of the person who pointed out the inconvenient facts. In his latest Salon column, David Sirota proves himself to be just such a dude.

How to do outrage

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:43:00 +0000

This has been a banner week in near-universal opprobrium. I say near-universal, because in the department of backlash to the backlash, there are already claims that the Internet has merely emboldened the "humor police," whether it's criticizing Seth MacFarlane's Oscar hosting or the Onion's supposedly brave joke about a 9-year-old girl. So let me offer a conditional defense of outrage politics.

Take the misogyny and bigotry on display at the Oscars Sunday, and everything that followed. Salon's Andrew Leonard may be right when he says that "in our pre-Twitter past, we might have simply turned off the TV or switched channels once MacFarlane started singing his dumb song about boobs. But now we stay watching to share our hate!" (Wait, how can we know what people did before Twitter? Maybe I can put a call out on Twitter.) Sharing that "hate" en masse happens to be a communal experience, something that has its own virtues in this atomized, time-shifted age. But it also exorcises demons that without something specific on which to fix righteous rage, are suppressed or implicitly accepted by society. Everyday slights and institutional discrimination are hard to point out on your own. Watching them on a screen or finding them in a tweet helps make them visible.

The Onion’s hipster misogyny

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:51:00 +0000

I turned off the Oscars a short while after M.C. Seth MacFarlane’s “We Saw Your Boobs” routine. The skit was framed by a stern-looking William Shatner playing "Star Trek’s" Captain Kirk, returned from the future. He was chastising MacFarlane for the trashy routine that Kirk predicted he would soon be doing. There was very little funny about it, and a quick pan of the audience revealed a bunch of famous women not laughing — including Charlize Theron — who nevertheless “classed up” the trashy routine by following up with a ballroom-style dance with Channing Tatum. I’m not sure how Theron felt about it, given her subsequent participation, but I’m assuming my response was somewhat shared by many of the straight-faced actors in the audience.

A rape a minute, a thousand corpses a year

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:18:00 +0000

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren’t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern.

Card tells 13-year-old to hope for a rich boyfriend

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:47:00 +0000

UPDATED, 3.42 p.m.: According to the Guardian, the sexist 13th birthday card was made by Creative Publishing before Hallmark bought it in 1998. Following online outcry, Hallmark has vowed to track down remaining copies of the card, which has not be reprinted in 15 years.

Greeting cards have rarely been a site of progressive politics, but some show a more tragic story about the state of the world than others. For example, a U.K.-based Twitter user, @cheesyhel, snapped a photograph of a particularly sexist birthday card, aimed for a 13-year-old girl, at her local store.

The text reads: "You're 13 today! If you had a rich boyfriend, he'd give you diamonds and rubies. Well, maybe next year when you have bigger boobies."

Bret Easton Ellis zeroes in on Kathryn Bigelow

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:19:00 +0000

Imagine what a blissfully unaware state Bret Easton Ellis must live in all the time. Imagine being a pot that black, swanning around calling any other human on the planet "overrated" and a maker of "just OK junk." Yet that's exactly what Ellis, who, when not loathing the memory of David Foster Wallace, browbeating Lindsay Lohan or cryptically tweeting apparent requests for cocaine, is a sometime writer, did on Twitter Thursday. And because he's Bret Easton Ellis, he threw in some old-fashioned sexism for good measure. At least the man who once opined of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case that "just reinforces my theory that men are no picnic but women are fucking CRAZY" is consistent in his misogyny.

Local news can’t handle the ugly truth

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 20:49:00 +0000

There is plenty that's horrible about a racist, sexist act of vandalism at the University of California, Los Angeles. But along with the crime itself, there's yet another depressing aspect to the story: the way it's been reported.

On Wednesday, students discovered a handwritten sign on a bathroom stall door in the school's Powell Library that read, "Asian Women are White-Boy Worshipping Sluts." It was the second such incident in as many days. On Tuesday, a sign saying "asian women R Honkie white-boy worshipping Whores" was tacked to a Vietnamese Student Union sign on the campus's Kerckhoff Hall.

It's not the first time UCLA has battled racism, either. Last year, shortly after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, then-student Alexandra Wallace gained YouTube infamy after posting a three-minute diatribe about the "hordes" of Asians in the school library, "going through their whole families just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing," adding, "I'll be typing away furiously, blah blah blah, and then all of the sudden, when I'm about to, like, reach an epiphany, over here from somewhere, 'OHH Ching chong ling long ting tong? OHH.'" (Wallace left the school soon after the clip went viral, saying she'd received death threats.) And last winter, a nearby apartment complex that houses students was defaced with graffiti against "you rude ignorant spic cunts" and "dirty Meximelt bitches."

Chris Brown will never learn

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 19:45:00 +0000

Who's more stomach-turning: Chris Brown or his army of Twitter trolls? You know what? Don't answer that. Let's just call this one a draw.

It's been almost four years since Brown's notorious violent altercation with his then-girlfriend Rihanna and subsequent assault conviction. That's a long time, especially when you consider that Rihanna herself has made it more than clear she's back on friendly terms with him. But to those fans and supporters who say it's time to move on and put his abusive past behind him, allow us to illuminate why Brown keeps making that a tall order. There was the "Good Morning America" tantrum. There was the nightclub brawl with Drake. And then there's what happened Sunday night on Twitter.

Fox host: We hire from Victoria’s Secret catalog

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 21:10:00 +0000

"Fox and Friends" co-host Brian Kilmeade said on air Friday that Fox hires female hosts by looking at "the Victoria's Secret catalog" and asking, "Can any of these people talk?" Media Matters points out that his comment is just the latest in a string of sexist utterances on Kilmeade's and other Fox shows.

"Fox and Friends" co-host Gretchen Carlson walked off the set in June when Kilmeade remarked that "women are everywhere. We're letting them play golf and tennis now."

Media Matters noted that Kilmeade's Victoria's Secret comment came in response to a caller who complimented his guest, "Fox and Friends Weekend" co-host Alisyn Camerota, and the person who hired "all the women of Fox." Camerota, less enraged the Carlson, responded only, "You're crazy," to Kilmeade's most recent misogynist outburst.

Listen below:

Australian PM takes on misogyny

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:19:00 +0000

If only the U.S. could borrow Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard to take on Congress's misogynist caucus. New footage from Australia's parliament shows Gillard is more than capable.

During a parliamentary session Tuesday, Gillard skewered opposition leader Tony Abbott for a career's worth of patriarchal comments. She tells the chamber that she "will not be lectured on sexism by this man" (pointing at Abbott). She goes on to list a number of Abbott's misogynist remarks, including his suggestion that men might be more adept at wielding authority than women.

Gillard's speech came in response to Abbott's call to have Australia's speaker of the house, Peter Slipper, removed after a scandal involving lurid text messages. As Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams noted on Monday, Gillard has faced misogyny from a far wider base than just her parliamentary colleagues. Taking to Facebook to discuss education policies with the public, the PM was bombarded by trolls calling her a "slut."

We wonder if Gillard takes requests: Todd Akin, R.-Mo., and Allen West, R.- Fla., to name just a couple, could certainly use a similar treatment.

Watch Gillard's speech below: