Adria Richards Might Not Be A Feminist, But Vesta Vayne Certainly Is

Adria Richards is not a feminist, apparently.

In a comment to my recent blog post, Feminism Is A Satanic Force, Vesta Vayne, aka The Cowardly Feminist, says, "It is my understanding Adria Richards specifically said she did not consider herself to be a feminist.," and then proceeded to distance herself from Adria Richards' actions by criticising Adria Richards in such reasonable and polite terms that you could almost believe that Vesta Vayne is not a feminist herself.  That is with the exception of one, small, but revealing detail:

"I feel Richards should have given them the opportunity to correct their own behavior."

For the record, here is the comment in full:

So there are two questions that arise from The Cowardly Feminist's comment:

1. Is Adria Richards a feminist?
2. Were the two developers doing anything wrong by telling dick jokes?

I've tried to find where Adria Richards specifically said she is not a feminist, but all I found was one mention of a claim on the Men Factor blog to that effect.  I can't search Richards' blog at the moment because it is offline, but let's say that AR has gone on record distancing herself from the label "feminist".

Does this mean she is not a feminist?  Can a woman (or mangina) be a feminist in practice but not in name?  And if she is a feminist in practice but eschews the label "feminist" is she actually a feminist despite her protestations to the contrary?

In order to test this, we need to establish what a feminist is in practice, which is notoriously difficult to ascertain, if disagreement within feminist circles, and the all-too-common equivocation practised by online feminists, is anything to go by.  Nevertheless, to be a feminist must mean something if it is to mean anything at all; there must be some axiomatic claims in the feminist argument, some understanding of what feminism is and isn't, some central tenets that all feminists can agree on.

To illustrate what I mean, let's look at the example of environmentalism.
Let's say that I declare, "I'm not an environmentalist," but I recycle religiously, drive a Prius, attend demonstrations against lumber mills, support a Carbon Tax, eat "organic", use only "natural" cleaning products, vote for the Greens, etc.  Is there a point at which it ceases to matter whether I call myself an environmentalist, or is the declaration of adherence to the ideology a necessary condition?  I'll assume that declaring yourself an "environmentalist" but doing nothing that other environmentalists do is insufficient to be considered an environmentalist, so calling yourself one is probably not a sufficient condition.  But the key question here is whether you have to not only follow the precepts of an ideology, but also declare yourself an adherent thereof in order to be considered a member of that group.

Assuming that Adria Richards has actually gone on record distancing herself from the label "feminist", I can't say with absolute authority that she nevertheless is a feminist, but I can say a few other things:

First, pretty much the whole world thinks she is a feminist, including big-name feminist blogs like Jezebel, who defend her actions to the hilt.

Second, the PyCon code of conduct was written at the behest of feminists:

Third, the astonishing delusions of martyrdom and grandeur evident in her own account of the events are undeniably the product of generations of feminist activism.

Still, let's accept The Cowardly Feminist's claim and say that Adria Richards is not a feminist.  Can we blame feminism for the Donglegate debacle?  Absolutely.

Next, and this is where The Cowardly Feminist, for all her politeness, reveals the extreme hypocrisy and nastiness of her ideology:

The men at the conference were doing absolutely nothing wrong.  Many feminists have a fetish for the term, "safe space", but if there were EVER a "safe space" for computer geeks, it should be a developers' conference.  If there were ever a place where two computer geeks should feel safe to tell stupid dick jokes, which were in all probability a typically geeky way of poking fun AT THEMSELVES, it should be a developers' conference.   If there were ever an opportunity for computer geeks, to use Adria Richards' shamelessly hypocritical words, "to go to a conference and be a geek," it should have been at PyCon.

But Vesta Vayne evidently doesn't think computer geeks deserve a "safe space", from the feminazi thought police.  So Adria Richards might not be a "real" feminist, but rest assured that Vesta Vayne, The Cowardly Feminist, absolutely is.