Urgg Facebook debate

[Hazchem]

I'm having a debate from my uni facebook group. It started out as a bit about trans pronouns which is great. But has some how go into feminism and it just feels like every point I say the man is being dismissive of me. It's hard not to say. see this thread this is you dismissing feminism because you are a man and I am a women.

I used the "feminism is a radical idea that women are people too" but he just said oh that is first year then quoted bits of Webber's iron cage which was in the same unit the feminism quote.

Urgg Urgg urgg.

I mean, do people really talk like that?

He is messing about with women's lived experiences and minimizing/dismissing them. Really, just dismiss him.

Well it sort of turned out ok in the end.
He ended up making himself look rather foolish.

He suggested when I spoke about female I was using it in a social context rather then a biological context.

I pointed out I was using female as biological and therefore he had misunderstood my whole argument.

he tried to mansplain the difference in sex and gender. I pointed out I knew them.
He then asked why I hadn't used feminine.
I explained because that's not the word I wanted to use and that femininity and masculinity were constructed by society
Then he asked "Is there some core to 'women' that society presses femininity onto?"

At that point I sort of lost it and asked how he could discuss trans pronouns when he didn't understand that gender stereotypes were constructed by society.

He had a hissy fit and said he got good marks in youth culture and why do they say female on toilet doors.

Not that I want people to look foolish but really gender and sex are different and so is female and feminine particularly if you want to have post structural debate about gender neutral pronouns.

I don't feel not clever anymore although I haven't made much headway on my essay.

"He had a hissy fit and said he got good marks in youth culture"

PMSL!

Yeah it was sort of great.

I was hoping Buffy would show up

Just big pompous posturing for the sake of it.

This will sound a whiney or what ever but I've always thought I wasn't academic because I failed to get into the G&T at the start of high school and I can't spell. So it turns out I did get into the G&T program but my parents didn't think it was a good idea and I have mild dyslexia.
So I've never tried to do the academic thinking thing before because I understood I wasn't good at it. However it turns out I'm good at the thinking part of it just not so great with the spelling and long sentences.
So when someone is all big words and "facts" about theory I get a bit like oh I must have missed that because I haven't done academic study before and maybe I'm not very good at this.

I'm pleased a super hero has come to my rescue

Buffy, or should that be Epistemology Woman - don't do it! The cape thing. I know the Incredibles is a pretty poor movie from a feminist perspective, but the fashion designer is spot on in her critique of capes - you will get sucked into a jet engine cape first or some such.

Hazchem - well done for getting the guy to look like the plonker he is (high five). And as an ex academic I have known a lot of incredibly bright people with dyslexia - please don't let your early experiences of education make you think you aren't bright, you clearly are. (And I've known so many parents make that sort of well meaning cock up about telling their children what they see as white lies but actually really screw with the child's self-esteem - my gran told my dad he'd failed the entrance exam for the grammar school in their town, when actually he passed, but she couldn't afford the uniform and the school trips! It was years before he found out the truth.)

Thanks LurcioAgain when I have time and space for essay etc I do quite well so I "know" I'm Ok but then you get a bit of a knock.

That sucks for you Dad both that he didn't know and that his Gran could afford it the uniform.

Just strikes me that's an example of personalising the problem rather than pinning the blame on societal structures

there's a lot of that about

. Brilliant for carving through the post-structural bullshit he was clearly trying to use to obfuscate the argument.

I have no idea about post-structuralism or even understand what epistemology is! I do know that if someone jumps in with that to discuss something that can be broken down into much simpler terms i.e. differences between sex and gender, then they are talking out of their arse.

I can see how a discussion can develop into an analysis using post-structuralism or about post-structuralism (even though I would be out of my depth at that point!). But statements such as: "In Foucauldian terms, historical analysis is undertaken to search for knowledge-power relationships." are just designed to make you STFU.

Really well done for not doing that!

I find that arguing with men about feminism is invariably a waste of time and emotional energy.

Anti-feminist men aren't approaching the issue in good faith, and are there simply to poke holes in your argument, deflect, derail and frustrate any conversation that may be developing among women. Such men also often pose as feminist allies (or potential ones), if you'll only convince them of your argument...

Cue hours later, and they usually haven't given a single straight answer, and have managed to introduce any number of bizarre derails (you must demonstrate that you understand post-structural epistemology before I can take your 'women are human' proposition seriously!) that lead further and further away from the pertinent issues. What's the point? They fundamentally don't believe that women have anything to teach them or can even be taken seriously when talking about their own experiences, so arguing with them is just pissing into the wind. Better to save your time and energy for conversations with women about feminism, I say, and just piss off men who try to disrupt that conversation with a curt dismissal.

The exception to this (which sounds like it applies in your case) is if you are arguing in a public forum and a man's arguments need debunking for the benefit of any women reading. Then, I try to keep in mind that I'm talking to them, rather than trying to convince him (which is an impossibility anyway). Sounds like you did a good job of that if he had to huff off with his tail between his legs

I should add that such men want to waste women's emotional energy. It's not merely that they disagree with feminism and want to say so - they actively enjoy making you run around in circles trying to justify yourself and drag the argument back on track, and often come into feminist forums and debates with the express purpose of forcing women to do so.

Buffy

And no it hasn't made my confusion worse at all. Cleared it up in fact! So epistemology and ontology is key, I suppose, when you are considering things like moving the Overton Window? Changing people's view of reality.

I feel a thread coming on...

And yy to DonkeySkin and men wanting to waste women's emotional energy. The rape culture thread being the perfect example of that.

Thanks Buffy that is helpful to me. I have one more sociology unit coming up the future and I think will be really helpful.

Yes DonkeySkin that is pretty much how it went. Looking back at how the argument unfolded you can sort of pick out the straw mans and all that sort of thing. when I continued to talk about feminism it was only because he continued to ask me about it. I didn't even bring feminism into the debate, he did, then got upset that I knew about it. It's fascinating. It would make quiet a good study.

"t. I didn't even bring feminism into the debate, he did, then got upset that I knew about it. "

I'm sorry, but what a complete knobsquirrel.