mcity

• Cliquish structure.
• Ideas that a "true X" has to hold.
• Specialized language and terms that are completely opaque to non-initiates.
• Special terms for dismissing outsiders.
• Hostility toward outsiders unless they've "proved" themselves.
• Reluctance to consider criticism, especially external.
• Responding to criticism by attacking the critic instead of what they're saying.
• Popular Big Names who few dare contradict.
• Certain facts "everyone knows".
• Double standards for people on the "inside" vs those on the "outside".
• Tendency to put everyone in categories, and evaluate their statements based on the category they're perceived to be in.
• Reactions to things are usually based on emotion instead of logic.
• Insistence that people who disagree with one clearly cannot understand the subject.

Now, am I describing Social Justice, or a fandom?

For more, see the Geek Social Fallacies. These facts often apply to Social Justice in general, but Tumblr has a particularly intense form of it, since the mechanisms to spread information are the exact same ones one uses for fandom.

Hurlingham Club-Receptionist
The Bull Hotel-Bar Staff
The House of Agnes-Housekeeping Assistant
Thorley Taverns-Bar Staff
Topshop-Sales Assistant
University of Kent-Canteen Assistant
Waitrose-Customer Service
Wheatstone Inn-Waitress

[link] haniemohd:

“…Though no one would ever think of using the term honor violence (we reserve that descriptor for brown people who live somewhere else, motivated by religious something-or-other or tribal something-or-other), one-third of women murdered every year in the United States are killed by their intimate partners. In 2005 that amounted to 1,181 women, or three women every day. To put that in perspective, the UN estimates there are 5,000 honor killings every year in the entire world. 5,000 in a world of 6 billion versus nearly 1,200 in a single country of 300 million. In other words, a woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan. Those are scary numbers.”

- an excerpt from an extremely interesting and insightful article by one of my favourite comic artist and writer, G. Willow Wilson (which you can access by clicking the link above)

The logic is not sound.

Male on female relationship murders can be committed outside of honor killings. Wilson's questionable analysis assumes that those are the only ways women in the developing world are killed by their spouses, which is itself inherently...problematic, to put it nicely. Heck, honor killings are sometimes committed by other relatives. Ironic that Wilson snarks at imaginary people for thinking honor killings are just something done by "brown people" somewhere, and then exposes her own ignorance and faulty logic.

Statistics indicate that both men and women in the US abuse their SOs at about the same rate, and men are much less likely to report it or have it acted upon. In fact, if a man calls the police on his girlfriend or wife, he could end up arrested in some parts of the US. There's an entire TVTropes page about this. Guy kills his wife, he's a vicious killer, a woman kills her husband, he drove her to it; see Lifetime's "Snapped".

I also began to see, with frightening clarity, the malice. It would be too broad to say that men hate women, men are afraid of women, men desire power over women–though there are certainly men of whom all these things are true, there are many more men of whom none of these things are true. Yet there’s the malice. Creeping and ugly and everywhere, as though it has a life of its own.

Should I get a stake, or a silver bullet?

Of course, like any site that thrives on pseudonymity, Reddit attracts its share of the sick and the deluded. There’s a subreddit, MensRights, “for people who believe that men are currently being disadvantaged by society,” and for years the site admins tolerated subreddits devoted to pictures of underage girls.

Feminists hate when women who want an abortion are told, “You should have thought of that when you had unprotected sex”, or “You should have just kept your legs closed!” They think it’s sexist and incredibly unfair. And you know what? I agree. Everyone makes mistakes and though I think everyone needs to be using birth control unless they want a child, they deserve a fallback option.
But then men come into the picture.
A man gets his girlfriend pregnant. He doesn’t want the baby; she does. He has no recourse and is hit up for a hefty child support payment.
What do feminists say when men complain?
“You should have thought of that before you had unprotected sex! You should have kept it in your pants!”
What?!
How is that even remotely fair? You can despise an argument when used against women, but you’ll turn around and use it for men? [read more]

After a while, I took to wearing baggy jumpers in the hope of diverting wandering eyes. In student bars, cafes and even libraries, meanwhile, I was constantly being propositioned by floppy-haired boys freshly released from boarding school.

Even though I had a boyfriend back home, the fact I had big boobs seemed to send out a message to them that I must be fair game.

Ignoring my far more attractive female friends, they would slip notes into my bag or leave them in my pigeon hole asking me out for a date.

But he scuppered the relationship when he admitted I ‘reminded him of a secretary’. By that, I assume he meant the clothes I wore were a little too revealing. But like Madeline, I didn’t see why I should dress like a nun just because I happened to be a DD cup.

At work, though, as a reporter starting out on a local newspaper, the only way to be taken seriously was to dress as conservatively as possible.

I invested in a selection of androgynous black suits and I kept the jackets buttoned up at all times.

Even that didn’t deter a room full of firefighters from giving me the once over when I arrived at the local fire station to shadow a night shift.

When I was sent off to learn how to Morris dance, I ended up rapping my dancing partner over the knuckles with my bells after catching him gawping down my top.

I once even caught the local mayor taking a quick peek. I was there to cover a town council meeting, but his eyes were certainly not on my notebook.

Show a little cleavage and you are likely to be gawped at, no matter where — or who — you are.