Democracy Fanboy wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:I think that if you insult women who are fat while demanding acceptance for men who are fat, or vice versa, that is hypocritical.
True, but this applies both ways. And I'm sure both sides would claim their double standard is satirizing the other's hypocrisy.
Ahem. You remember what "vice versa" means, right?
Emphasizing "both sides are bad" is almost invariably a bad choice when discussing political or social issues. For one, it opens you up to getting caught in the crossfire between both camps. For another, it means everyone you talk to will feel vaguely insulted- because you're throwing stuff in both directions.
Either pick on one target at a time, or pick on nobody. That's my opinion. I may not always follow that rule myself, but it's nearly always a good rule to follow.
Obsessing about how everyone else is a hypocrites is NOT a healthy way to use your time. You get the perverse satisfaction of feeling more sophisticated than other people... But you don't get the more permanent satisfaction of having actual beliefs, values, and opinions. You'll be too busy denigrating other people's beliefs and ideas to have meaningful participation in their conversations.
I also think your joke was crass, because in the process of joking about one group you delivered a broad-spectrum insult to another group. It is as though you were making a joke about Poles, and said "maybe the dumb Poles [do X] to distinguish themselves from all the dumb Swedes." Obviously this would offend both Poles and Swedes. And it's a particularly gratuitous way of offending the Swedes.
[I'm using 'dumb Pole' and 'dumb Swede' because those were real stereotypes that really existed and had real consequences, but are now basically defunct.]
Because both of those stereotypes attacked
nationalities (or ethnic groups, or populations; take your pick). The fallacy behind them is almost like racial stereotypes, because they're treating whole nationalities or cultures as homogeneous in personality and mindset even though those categories are not inherently premised on shared personality or mindset to begin with.
By contrast,
political movements like MRAs and fat-acceptance
are defined by shared values and mindsets that make them much more mentally homogeneous than countries or races. So your effort to equate jokes against two teams of hypocritical ideologues with jokes against nationalities or ethnicities (which many consider to be categories one is born into, almost like race) is transparently disingenuous.
No, no, stop that, you're missing the point.
Stop trying to think of reasons why I'm wrong, and start trying to think about what I'm trying to explain to you. At the very least, make sure you
understood what is being explained, before you reject it.
The reason I chose an example was to illustrate something ELSE to you.
"because in the process of joking about one group you delivered a broad-spectrum insult to another group."
Let's emphasize that again. The point I was actually making is that in the process of joking about one group, you
insulted another group.
Nitpicking about how Stereotype A is a different kind of stereotype than Stereotype B is NOT a valid response to that. It doesn't matter whether you think men's rights activists or fat acceptance activists or Poles or Swedes or left-handed redheads or professional unicycle riders are examples of one kind of stereotype versus another. It's not about whether the stereotypes are nationalities or political factions or fans backing different sports teams.
The point is that when you insult one group in the process of jokingly insulting another group, you can reasonably expect to have shit flung at you. From two directions at once, even.
This is not some kind of obscure reasoning about subtle differences between different stereotypes.
This is not an exercise in inventing justifications for doing what you want.
This is obvious, practical facts about human behavior and interaction.
It was also a bad idea to name Tess Munster particularly, because that makes it about her personal habits, which (if the poster who talks about them isn't outright lying) would reasonably leave people saying to you "she's fine, why are you using her name in a nasty context, go fuck yourself!"
I invoked her name because she was the first publicly visible fat-acceptance ideologue that came to my mind. But yes, I was addressing the larger movement she represents rather than her as an individual.
Then
why did you pick on one individual? Did it not even occur to you that this might be a mistake? Did it not occur to you that maybe you don't
KNOW enough about this individual to be sure she is worthy of condemnation? Did it not occur to you that maybe knowing that someone is a "publicly visible fat acceptance" person, and believing that they are an "ideologue," whatever the hell that means inside your mind... is not grounds for saying that they
personally are flawed or bad?
If I insult a particular person, I make damn sure I have a list of specific actions they've taken that I can justify condemning them for.
On the one hand, even if you are correct then this is obviously not a receptive community to your views.
And that's why I feel the Pharyngula community has let me down. Just as Thunderf00t on Youtube degenerated from this totally awesome champion of evolutionary biology and science to an obsessive anti-feminist constantly bitching about Anita Sarkeesian, so too have they apparently eschewed reason and science in favor of politics. They and Thunderf00t are almost mirror images of one another right now.
In this case, I don't think they're abandoning objectivity. They just disagree with you. There's a difference.
The reason they disagree with you is because they don't think there is equivalency between women trying to get acceptance for overweight women and men trying to do the various things the Men's Rights Activist movement is doing.
So they see your joke as a crass and offensive attempt to set up a false equivalency, and thus smear the good name of a movement that is doing something essentially noble.
But then, I've figured out a long time ago that even the people who wax the most poetic about rationalism and objectivity are just as full of shit as the stereotypical woo-believer. Their shit just smells more like sexism, racism, or political extremism than the supernatural.
Do remember that sometimes people who think you're wrong are
correct. Everyone is a dumbass once in a while. And since you know from your own history that you have committed major acts of social gracelessness or silliness... you REALLY ought to be willing to consider the possibility that you have simply made a mistake.
On the other hand, your delivery of these views is NOT good. A joke that insults one group in the process of condemning them to another disliked group is a really bad way to voice criticism of that group. It is also a bad idea to make ill-considered assumptions like "women's body acceptance activists are just angry that men aren't drooling over them"
On the contrary, pointing out to assholes that they're psychologically identical to those they consider their rivals (as competing teams of assholes typically are) is a great tactic for drawing out their hypocrisy for the world to see.
What the rest of the world ends up disagreeing with your argument on its merits, and concludes that you're
wrong about claiming that Group A is psychologically identical to Group B?
Then your brilliant stratagem backfires, and
you look like the asshole. Because you're willfully insulting Group A for no damn reason.
And I'm not attacking "body acceptance" in general, but fat acceptance (which, let's face it, is mostly insecure fat women and men demanding society sweep the obesity pandemic under the rug and rewrite its beauty standards so they can pick up not-so-fat partners for themselves, rather than work on the health issues they've picked up over time).
I actually think you are
totally wrong about this, and would like to explain why. Please take what I'm saying seriously, and don't dismiss it. I'm getting this from women I'm very close to who find it personally stressful in their own life, and who are NOT worried about "picking up partners."
Women are judged on their appearance a lot more extensively than men. No, seriously. That's true. That is really true. It's just a fact of life in modern society. The first checkpoint you must pass is recognizing this fact. Don't bother reading further if you don't accept it; if you don't accept it, please inform me and we can talk about that.
It will be
a complete waste of both our time for you to continue reading this argument, if you have not yet realized that women are judged on their appearance a lot more extensively than men.
Now, assuming you have realized and understood this- one of the substantial ideas of the feminist movement is that
this is sexism. Women should not be required to look pretty in order to be taken seriously, any more than men are. Women should not have to spend half an hour a day to pretty themselves up enough to be seen in public, when men only have to spend ten minutes a day on it.
...
Now, we apply this to weight, and the problem becomes clear- women who happen to be fat are being judged on their appearance very strongly and getting a double dose of prejudice.
A woman who is thirty or forty pounds overweight is not just having trouble "picking up partners." She's going to have trouble getting people to take her seriously at work. She's going to have trouble getting people to listen to her when she has a complaint. She's going to have people constantly dismissing her as a sort of inferior, less-valuable woman because she is heavily overweight.
So no, it's not just about her sex life. It's about every part of her life. Including areas where her being overweight really shouldn't matter: fat people can do desk jobs just as well as thin people. And that's where the idea of this being injustice comes up.
...
This is further amplified by the fact that women,
more so than men, are pressured by media imagery to think of themselves as inferior women if they are not slim and light and trim. This is a reality of women's world, that almost every woman finds a source of stress. They're so accustomed to being told by society that they must be 'pretty,' and the standard of 'pretty' is defined largely in terms of thin-ness, that it can actually cause them to experience totally unnecessary anxieties and fears and neuroses.
At which point it's not them pretending obesity doesn't have health consequences. It's them pointing out that being heavy (perhaps obese, perhaps not)
shouldn't have
extra consequences imposed solely because society likes making people feel fat.
And quite bluntly, trying to oversimplify this into "fat women want us to stop pretending obesity is a problem so they can get thinner sex partners" is incredibly stupid and offensive. And frankly you deserve to get yelled at if that's what you're doing.