Sometimes, there are no words.

_dahne_ writes a screed about how being "PC" has gone too far.

I don't even know what to say about this, other than someone needs to have their privilege checked. Badly. (Except, of course, that "Privilege, like 'troll' or 'fail' can now mean whatever we want it to mean, so my little statement there is apparently OPPRESHUN of her truth. Or something.)

I count sexism, ablism, heterocentrism, and I'm pretty sure racism in this one sentence alone:

The male side of fandom runs around calling each other niggerfaggots while the female side has earnest ten-page debates on whether calling something crazy is ablist.

(Emphasis hers)

Because the boys doing that is totes okay, y'all, and the girls should be doing the same thing. And men never, ever talk about whether what they're saying is hurtful to other people or not, 'cause that's girly stuff. (Hey, wankaboys, come and sit in the invisible corner with us bisexuals, English majors, and ampersands.)

And then there's this:

Like the idea of "tone argument." At its core, this makes sense; it's meant to address the idea that abused classes of people shouldn't have to be deferential to their abusers in order to be listened to.

In practice, what it means is, "I'm allowed to be an asshole as long as I'm really, really sure I'm right."

I just...I can't. I mean, the tools of the master will never tear down the master's house, but come on. By refusing to accept the tenets of the tone argument, we're bullying the people in power?

Whut?

And both examples are from the first seven paragraphs of her little screed. There's also kind of a priceless gem in there about Fandom_Wank being a "prime vector" for "too much" political correctness.

And I think the worst bit is (as far as I could tell before the comments were pushing me to the ragey point) she's not getting any disagreement.

I would love to be able to write a thoughtful rebuttal that might be as widespread in fandom as this one's (apparently) getting, but I'm afraid my brain keeps hanging up on What Is This I Don't Even.

ETA:

t_boy found swordygardner's response which is a breath of fresh air in amongst all that fail. ETA 2: In fact, pretty much all of page 2 of the comments (which is about the point she turned off anon commenting, I'll bet you), is pretty awesome.

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innervoice_chan
2011-01-24 02:53 am UTC (link)

The clusterfuck around this comment has gotten really, really nasty on all sides, spread across various communities, but I've posted this before and I think it deserves to be posted again:

I'm acquainted with leafing from another community. Yes, that comment looks like one giant tortured and extremely inappropriate metaphor, but to put it in context--a plant metaphor is a typical leafing thing to say. She's obsessed with plants. Plants are her life. She has clinical depression and a difficult home life, and her main coping mechanism is to escape from the world and from people by tending her beloved plants. She sends plant seeds with her Christmas cards. She says herself that she doesn't understand people. In other words, she is probably not neurotypical, and her (inappropriate to the situation) use of a plant metaphor is a manifestation of that. That comment should be viewed with this in mind.

I'm not saying that there are no problems with what she's said, I'm saying that for everyone going "what is even going on in this comment?," there is an explanation for what seems, on the surface, to be complete WTF.

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gusty
2011-01-24 05:16 pm UTC (link)

I'm a close friend of hers too, and while I can absolutely understand why people are upset over the metaphor, I think the backlash has gotten to be a bit too much. People are actually hunting her down in other unrelated communities she goes to in order to continue to harrass her about the comment. Is this really the right way to go about better educating someone on this subject?

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	chikane 2011-01-25 02:28 pm UTC (link)
	Hunting her down like that is definitely not the right way, and I suspect that people hunting her down don't actually care about the issues at hand in any way. After all, actually active -ist people don't get such a treatment, hinting that the people doing it are of quite a different crowd. (Reply to this)(Parent)

chikane
2011-01-25 02:25 pm UTC (link)

Yes. She shouldn't get hounded outside of the discussion. Harassing her outside of the discussion isn't okay, nor is mocking her self-harm.

Still, she should get called out on what she did inside the discussion. Her intent is not magical, other people cannot read her mind and know how she meant it. For many of them, all she did was dehumanizing and dismissing them like many others did, hurting them in the process. Her pain does not trump the pain she caused.

Those who called her out on her comment really didn't do a bad thing. What they did was appropriate. What other people did later - by harassing her outside of the discussion - was not.

I don't hate her or anything, but I still side with those she hurt - there was no need whatsoever for her to do this. At the same time I hope she get the help she needs, and that, if people are harassing her outside of the discussion, they stop or get banned.

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