Women

Once Is An Accident, Twice Is Coincidence, Three Times Is Enemy Action

Oops. Looks like T Rex of Firedoglake has put his massively clawed prehistoric foot in it again following an ill-advised post from fellow contributor Pachacutec.

Normally I wouldn’t bother with FDL or contributor TRex, not after the last time. I haven’t read FDL since the his gratuitous insult of blogger Lisa at Culture Kitchen. I’m a big fan of energetic vituperation but that was just unpleasant.

I’d already been cooling towards the blog although they did fantastic work on Plamegate, but for some time it’s been becoming a magnet for drooling fanboys and girls. The comments are becoming a stew of self-referential high-school types who tend to pile on at any sign of criticism of their idols. Who needs it?

Feh. Don’t like it, don’t go there and I don’t. Simple.

But Tom Watson has been reading FDL and he’s not happy with the tenor of some of FDL’s more recent prose, particularly this from Pachacutec, seeing it as part of the wider issue of misogynystic language and attitudes on the left:

Anti-Feminism on the Left III

Do Jane Hamsher and Christy Hardin Smith have conservative operatives in their midst? Has FireDogLake – arguably a top five liberal group blog – been infiltrated by dirty tricks squads of the right? More directly, does FDL blogger Pachacutec work for Karl Rove?

I ask because of the reckless, misogynist post that appeared this morning in my regular blogroll (I’m a big FDL fan, most of the time) about Democratic Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher of California. Tauscher is a so-called Blue Dog Democrat, a centrist type who has often voted with the Republicans on military issues. She may well be due a primary from the left in her district in San Francisco’s progressive suburbs. But she is certainly not due a vicious attack on her gender, dressed up as “snark” by a leading liberal blog. Here’s the slime, headlined ” FDL Late Nite: Whore, n., 1. A prostitute. . .”

You know, sometimes I’m an old fashioned sort. I can appreciate tradition. I certainly believe in hard work, and positively adore the craft of genuine professionalism.

In that spirit, I bring you an underappreciated practitioner of the world’s oldest profession, a woman in congress Congress, Ellen Tauscher. She can slurp the gnarly nub of power with the very best, gamely grinning to the gushing finish: a working girl’s working girl. Howie calls her, “a bribe-taking corporate whore and shit eater who has guaranteed herself a nasty primary in 2008.”

I hope Peter Daou is reading this, because his boss may well have to face this kind of sexist attack beginning next year. It’s so bad, so poorly executed, that it really does appear to be a clumsy Republican efforts to pollute a top Democratic blog. These posts are permanent, folks. They give aid and comfort to the other side. They make our side look surly, sexist, hypocritical.

To put is [sic] another way: are you stupid? Or just insane?

[…]

But in a world where a hero like Mukhtar Mai of Pakistan overcomes court-ordered gang rape and a corrupt regime to help educate the children of her attackers, we kid ourselves that we’re advanced enough, cool enough, hip enough, or evolved enough to throw around this low-brow gender-based garbage and think it won’t stick – to us, to the left, to the Democrats, to our candidates, to our movement.

Tom’s post is one of a series of three (one and two) examining the innate sexism that is apparent on so many left-wing blogs, not all of them run by men, attitudes which are even more apparent amongst supposedly sophisticated, allegedly liberal media types, many of them women.

Obligatory mea culpa: I’m as guilty as the next person of intemperate language but I will never apologise for that unless its shown to be factually unjustified. I wouldn’t expect any other self-respecting blogger to do otherwise. As a political woman who self-identifies as feminist I try to be sensitive (and, as I’ve been told by a number of mysogynistic pricks, even hypersensitive) to the underlying implications and subtexts of language, particularly in the way language reinforces the continuing negative position of women in the world.

But and this is a big but, there are times when only certain insults will do – I certainly understand that. Even so, there is a line between entertaining invective and the outright sexist garbage Pachacutec produced. What are possibly entirely justified criticisms of Tauscher on the issues got lost in the spew of language. He might’ve got away with it too, if he’d actually been funny. There’re are lot of sexists on the left who get away with it only because of that.

That said, I’ve noticed there is a terribly self-congratulatory and particularly male strain on the broad left that assumes that if they publicly profess to be a Progressive (‘liberal’ is so passe now) the act of having done so washes all their antifeminist sins away now and forever after. Just like the Born-Agains they affect to despise, by virtue of this public self-anointment as ‘progressive’ they feel forever exempt from any further self-examination. Hey presto, you’re a Progressive! All you have to do is say so, loudly and often.

No need, now, to question your own attitudes, no need for any more of that boring stuff. It’s hard work. Just say you’re progressive and anything you do or say is fine.

But progressive is as progressive does and reacting like this when challenged, politely, on some assumptions about one’s own sexist attitudes is not what I’d call progressive, not at all. Scabrous wit is one thing, you can get away with a lot if you say it cleverly enough. But crude sexist insult is another thing and speaks more of the writer’s own insecurities:

“UPDATE II: The grown-ups at FDL have been busy. The C-word has been edited out of the post.”

That was my decision, Tom. I decided I would rather refer to Miss Ingraham as a Bitch Troll from Hell.

You, on the other hand, are a miserable little cunt.

Posted by: TRex Nov 27, 2006 7:25:23 PM

Someone doesn’t like being challenged.

You can say anything you like, but if you don’t do it it means nothing. All these smug, supposedly progressive men resting on their laurels while displaying antifeminist attitudes worthy of any freeping wingnut; it’s the same essential hollowness that’s at the heart of American evangelical Christianity. It’s all shows of piety, public professions of faith and no works.

US and UK politics both show this tendency written large. Everyone wants a party to represent their particular views, but too many want it like any tv-advertised commodity, instantly and with no visible sign of the boring machinery that got it there. They don’t actually want to have to do anything. They vote for the left (well, some do), don’t they? Isn’t that enough?

Nope, it’s not. Political activism, like patriarchy, starts at home and it means we have to consider everything we do or say, at home at work, wherever, in the light of our principles. What’s the point otherwise? You can talk a good fight all you want but if you don’t do it, or at least try to – even in your domestic life, on your blog, with your kids – it means nothing. That old saying, think globally, act locally has become such a cliche but it’s never been more pertinent.

[BTW, I recommend the comments thread on Tom’s post for the full flavour of FDL fandom in full flow]

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