When I heard about the recent “Donglegate” story, in which Adria Richards, a feminist working for a Tech company, got two honest men fired from their jobs for making a silly joke in her presence, my first reaction was to impute malevolence to her actions. When I read her account of matters, that she felt compelled to go public with her complaint over their “dongle” joke, which was not directed at her by the way, I revised my interpretation. Adria Richards’ reprehensible actions were not motivated by malice, but, even worse, by a desire to be an advocate of justice.
Aurini astutely observed in his recent video, The Nature of Evil [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZghvQAdPRY], that evil rarely takes the obvious form of bloodthirstiness, overt cruelty, or malice. Rather, people who commit evil acts often, perhaps more often than not, believe that they are doing it for the greater good. Sometimes they even believe that they commit their state-sanctioned crimes for the victims’ own good.
Take for example Wafa Sultan’s account of such perversion in Muslim countries, where kidnapping and rape of a woman in some circumstances is fair marriage, beheading of non-believers is an act of tolerance, and a grown man rubbing his penis between a small girl’s thighs is kindness:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ough-e6ThWE&list=PLEDB2BA5928DEF0AA&index=6
An extreme example of this perverted morality is the recent case in Saudi Arabia, which enraged even the Saudi public, of a man who after being found guilty of committing unspeakable acts of violence and rape on his five-year-old daughter, was given a moderate fineunder Sharia law, and only as compensation to the girl’s mother. [http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/14869]
To return to another totalitarian supremacist ideology, I think we may broadly divide feminists into two major groups for the purposes of this topic:
* Hateful feminists
* Loving feminists
I suspect that although hateful feminists, like Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanas, are prominent, they are probably in the minority. Only the most demented radicals would proudly admit that they are motivated by hate -- justified hate, and for the greater good, they would argue of course, but still hate.
Accordingly, most feminists, from Rebecca the-eternal-martyr Watson, to Hilary widows-are-greater-victims-than-dead-soldiers Clinton, and Anita fighting-against-patriarchal-lego-men Sarkeesian, believe that they are motivated by love, by the righteous duty to strike a blow on behalf of the little girl, the single mother, the working woman. (Although not the conservative woman or happy housewife, they can go to hell)
When reading Adria Richards’ account of the incident, I tried to see things through her eyes, to understand her perspective:
http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont-belong-at-tech-conferences/
Of course, her actions are reprehensible, and clearly her hypersensitivity to silly jokes bespeaks all manner of psychological and moral shortcomings (in addition to a lamentable sense of humour -- they are rather funny jokes after all), but we can see that her conscious motives were pure. Underneath the surface was probably a seething hatred of men, but foremost in her mind was that sweet, innocent, little girl who might at any moment fall prey to a bloodthirsty pack of rapacious Python geeks telling dongle jokes.
Yes, I know it’s ridiculous, and for anyone balanced it’ll be hard to say this with a straight face, but remember, Richards was deadly serious about this.
Now to look at Richards and watch her videos on YouTube, she is the pretty, kind, caring face of feminism, but as GirlWritesWhat puts it in her NAFALT video, even the loveliest, most personable feminists implicitly lend their support to their genocidal comrades’ supremacist objectives.
Following from this, when I composing my reply to Vesta Vayne (The Cowardly Feminist), I felt obliged to soften my response, to be conciliatory. On reflection, I realised that this is because she is pretty young woman with a personable manner and a talent for writing well.
And therein lies the danger. It’s easy to confront an ugly, fat, repulsive harridan with gusto or a simpering mangina; it is, for reasons probably rooted in our biology, much harder to verbally hit back at a pretty young women with aggression. But when the pretty young woman propagates an old, ugly ideology, that is when it is most incumbent upon you to demolish her arguments mercilessly and repudiate her reprehensible conduct.
Accordingly, I shook off this hesitation and responded unabashedly.
The lesson that I encourage you all to take from the “Donglegate” saga is not to give an inch. Had someone stood up to Adria Richards’, the poor fellow who lost his job would still be happily employed and the news we’d have from PyCon would be the kind of news that genuine Python geeks, men and women alike, deserve to hear.
Aurini astutely observed in his recent video, The Nature of Evil [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZghvQAdPRY], that evil rarely takes the obvious form of bloodthirstiness, overt cruelty, or malice. Rather, people who commit evil acts often, perhaps more often than not, believe that they are doing it for the greater good. Sometimes they even believe that they commit their state-sanctioned crimes for the victims’ own good.
Take for example Wafa Sultan’s account of such perversion in Muslim countries, where kidnapping and rape of a woman in some circumstances is fair marriage, beheading of non-believers is an act of tolerance, and a grown man rubbing his penis between a small girl’s thighs is kindness:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ough-e6ThWE&list=PLEDB2BA5928DEF0AA&index=6
An extreme example of this perverted morality is the recent case in Saudi Arabia, which enraged even the Saudi public, of a man who after being found guilty of committing unspeakable acts of violence and rape on his five-year-old daughter, was given a moderate fineunder Sharia law, and only as compensation to the girl’s mother. [http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/14869]
To return to another totalitarian supremacist ideology, I think we may broadly divide feminists into two major groups for the purposes of this topic:
* Hateful feminists
* Loving feminists
I suspect that although hateful feminists, like Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanas, are prominent, they are probably in the minority. Only the most demented radicals would proudly admit that they are motivated by hate -- justified hate, and for the greater good, they would argue of course, but still hate.
Accordingly, most feminists, from Rebecca the-eternal-martyr Watson, to Hilary widows-are-greater-victims-than-dead-soldiers Clinton, and Anita fighting-against-patriarchal-lego-men Sarkeesian, believe that they are motivated by love, by the righteous duty to strike a blow on behalf of the little girl, the single mother, the working woman. (Although not the conservative woman or happy housewife, they can go to hell)
When reading Adria Richards’ account of the incident, I tried to see things through her eyes, to understand her perspective:
http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont-belong-at-tech-conferences/
Of course, her actions are reprehensible, and clearly her hypersensitivity to silly jokes bespeaks all manner of psychological and moral shortcomings (in addition to a lamentable sense of humour -- they are rather funny jokes after all), but we can see that her conscious motives were pure. Underneath the surface was probably a seething hatred of men, but foremost in her mind was that sweet, innocent, little girl who might at any moment fall prey to a bloodthirsty pack of rapacious Python geeks telling dongle jokes.
Yes, I know it’s ridiculous, and for anyone balanced it’ll be hard to say this with a straight face, but remember, Richards was deadly serious about this.
Now to look at Richards and watch her videos on YouTube, she is the pretty, kind, caring face of feminism, but as GirlWritesWhat puts it in her NAFALT video, even the loveliest, most personable feminists implicitly lend their support to their genocidal comrades’ supremacist objectives.
Following from this, when I composing my reply to Vesta Vayne (The Cowardly Feminist), I felt obliged to soften my response, to be conciliatory. On reflection, I realised that this is because she is pretty young woman with a personable manner and a talent for writing well.
And therein lies the danger. It’s easy to confront an ugly, fat, repulsive harridan with gusto or a simpering mangina; it is, for reasons probably rooted in our biology, much harder to verbally hit back at a pretty young women with aggression. But when the pretty young woman propagates an old, ugly ideology, that is when it is most incumbent upon you to demolish her arguments mercilessly and repudiate her reprehensible conduct.
Accordingly, I shook off this hesitation and responded unabashedly.
The lesson that I encourage you all to take from the “Donglegate” saga is not to give an inch. Had someone stood up to Adria Richards’, the poor fellow who lost his job would still be happily employed and the news we’d have from PyCon would be the kind of news that genuine Python geeks, men and women alike, deserve to hear.
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