Way back when, in the Age of Blogging (1995-2015), there was a ruckus about Anne Coulter in the progressive blogosphere. She had said something appalling (as usual), and there was a flurry of condemnation from liberal and left bloggers. Some of the mockery focused on her Adam’s apple and her supposedly being a transgender woman.
Feminist Melissa McEwen of the blog Shakespeare’s Sister pointed out (correctly) that this was wrong. Though Anne richly deserved the contempt being heaped on her, using transgenderism as an insult could only be interpreted as saying that being a transgender man or woman was itself worthy of contempt … an appalling thing for progressives to say.
Unfortunately, many leading feminists seemed not to have gotten the memo. It was not at all uncommon for them to target men they deemed misogynists with insults all based on the contempt society directs towards men who do not embody patriarchal stereotypes: i.e., having a small penis, living in their “mother’s basement,” not having sex with women.
Sadly, I’m not sure the needle has moved all that much in today’s discourse:
Jill appears to be referring to José Cardoso Sobrinho and a notorious case from 2009 in Brazil. Her contempt for then-Archbishop Sobrinho is understandable; what he did was horrendous.
However, the vehicle she uses to smear Sobrinho is itself ageist and sexist, calling him “elderly” 1At the time of the excommunication, Sobrinho was a couple of years younger than Biden is today. and (of course, the ultimate “insult”) “virgin.”
So in addition to being a misogynist, Sobrinho was old and not sexually active … what a contemptible scumbag! /s
Sadly, this kind of patriarchal feminism is nothing new for Jill, nor is she a unique purveyor of it. Let’s hope there’s more recognition of the hypocrisy of this kind of discourse in the next decade than there’s been in the last one.
• • •
*panting*
Whew! A whole blog post! With inserts and everything! Guess I’ve contributed my share of blogging for the next five years.
On a more serious note, please note that comment approval will likely be sporadic here for a while at FC should we actually reactivate to something more than a flash-in-the-pan re-emergence.
| ⇡1 | At the time of the excommunication, Sobrinho was a couple of years younger than Biden is today. |
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https://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/03/31/fecke-plays-the-small-dick-card-noh/
Ah yes, the other “JF.” Haven’t thought about him in a while. Wonder what he’s doing these days?
*checks*
Aside from working a FT job, he confines his online punditry to tweets.
Yes that is one thing that has not changed. For all the talk of gendered insults being wrong that talk will go out the window fast when there is a chanced to attack someone.