Men who parade how "feminist" they are but who can fuck right off...

[ArcheryAnnie]

...as they don't actually want to listen to women who disagree with them in any way.

I am not including common-or-garden arseholes here, as the list would be a billion posts long and the internet would explode. I am talking about the kind of man who writes a long, handwringing article in the Guardian about how we should all listen to feminists more, but then deletes most of the comments from actual feminists that are posted on it.

The two currently at the top of my very long List are:
Ally Fogg
Owen Jones

Nominations, please.

Another one for The List: Graham Linehan, or @Glinner on twitter.

For this gem:

"Dunno why there's not more anger amongst UK feminists about abortion law in NI. I guess the fight for a female Doctor Who takes precedence."

He is so right! And for the following reasons:

1. our little ladybrains make it difficult to think of more than one thing at a time;
2. all activism is well-reported, so if Graham isn't seeing reports of women's activism, it doesn't exist;
3. if Graham isn't seeing feminist activity on twitter, it's feminists' fault, even though Graham has blocked many feminists on twitter.

What we really needed was a man to tell us what we should be working on. Thanks, Graham!

I'm really annoyed by linehan. Ffs, if he can't see it, then it's not happening?!

Please don't get me started on Graham Linehan. I had a rather long and involved twitter conversation with him about pornography last year. His general argument was 'the women get paid well so what's the problem?'

Can I nominate Noah Berlatsky who wrote an article in Playboy (no really!) all about how Meghan Murphy is rubbish at feminism for saying that posing nude is not empowering and is now being lauded by the twitter funfems and transactivists as like, the most feministy feminist ever. Mind boggling.

I was really disappointed about linehan, I didn't know he'd said such stupid things about porn too.

I assume he also tweeted a link to one or more NI campaigns he supports, Annie?

Or...not?

article on our latest male feminist [[http://feministcurrent.com/11663/noah-berlatsky-is-going-to-objectify-women-straight-to-freedom/ Feminist Current on Noah Berlatsky]]

Time to reanimate this zombie thread! For comedian and broadcaster Mark Steel, who I normally like very much, dammit.

He tweeted this earlier on today:

"'I've woken up to some posh woman on Radio 4 dribbling for 20 minutes about the current plot of The Archers. I might sue for emotional abuse."

When a bunch of women pointed out that this was a wee bit insensitive, as the discussion was about the Rob/Helen DV story, he threw his toys out of the pram and began a blocking spree.

This is his response to one woman: "not once was domestic abuse mentioned in the bit I heard. Try harder at learning to engage with people."

Because a slot on the R4 Today programme devoted to one particular groundbreaking storyline that is entirely about domestic violence has no relationship at all to domestic violence. Right, Mark. Sure.

And the "some posh woman" thing: there's nothing worse than "posh women", right? I don't blame Mark - who has hosted his fair share of Radio 4 programmes - so perhaps all women should shut up, just in case they are insufficiently downtrodden for Mark's liking, and it would be unfair to subject him to women dribbling on about things that affect them.

Mark, you may have left the Socialist Workers' Party, but the SWP has clearly not left you.

I think that's a bit much given that if he replaced the word women with "bloke" or "guy", no one would give a shit. Besides in 2016, a soap with a story about domestic violence is hardly groundbreaking. Can you think of a soap that has not covered it ?

He obviously knew the discussion was about DA. Why reference it otherwise?

Essentially, he though it would be really funny to minimise DA. And have a poke at 'posh women' who care about such things.

incredible, you can read all that into it !!

The 'some posh woman' comment is incredibly dismissive even without the rest of it. I agree with WomanWithAltitude.

"Some posh woman/bloke/kid" is such a lazy way of rubbishing anything. Inverted snobbery is just as bad as snobbery.

And he did obviously know about the DV storyline, so it's totally disingenuous for him to claim that his tweet wasn't about it. He's a social-media-connected, politicaly-minded, Radio-4-show-having broadcaster, not a hermit in a cave. He also referenced it directly in his tweet with the "joke" about emotional abuse. It doesn't need a lot of "reading into" anything.

I liked Mark Steel! I want to continue liking him! That's one of the many reasons I am so bloody disappointed when men like him pull shitty moves like this. It's not even so much the ill-timed, tasteless joke (lots of jokes are tasteless, that's in the nature of many jokes, and he's a ~edgy comedian), but it's the response (deny, sneer and block) which is depressing.

Mark Steel made jokes about Josef Fritzl when I saw him in his live show (plus a bunch of other sexist bullshit material). My admiration stopped that day. I couldn't bring myself to heckle "What is this misogynist shit" as I felt too upset, so just sat in grumpy silence until I could rant on the way home to DH. I actually decided after that gig that Russell Brand was less sexist than Mark Steel.

I agree that while "posh" is derogatory, "posh women" is worse because it has connotations of a class of women who are not engaged in any activity that is considered useful by society whereas "posh men" has connotations of men who are ruling the country or the economy or some such.

Have I read your post right, Archery , in that he seems to be claiming that there is a difference between what he acknowledges is "emotional abuse" and "domestic abuse"? That is really disheartening. So he acknowledges that as a 'right-on' kind of guy, he would never make jokes about a man actually hitting a woman, but it's OK to belittle and minimise emotional abuse which, particularly in the story-line quoted, has inflicted incredible damage to the victim's mental and physical health.

I don't know exactly what he meant to signal, Pink, but I do know I'm done with him.

It's so disappointing when you think a man gets it and then find out he's just another misogynist.

PlonitbatPlonit what did he say in his show? Did other people pick up on him being sexist?

I think the way he's handled this on twitter is awful. Simply won't recognize anything and also laughed at the joke about abuse. He won't get my money again.

The joke about Josef Fritzl was using Fritzl's dungeon as a punchline along the lines of a revenge fantasy on 'the bankers' where they dig their way out of prison only to get into Fritzl's cell below, if I recall correctly. It relies on a bit of shock/disgust value to work and a 'ha! ha! corrective rape' element. I may have forgotten the twist that saves this joke from being as dismal as it seems. However, it did come after some Savile/celeb related jokes, and before one aimed at Russell Brand about threesomes. He was (self-deprecatingly?) comparing his own imagined performance in a threesome with that of RB, which involved the international comedy action of shagging (basically thrusting at an imagined passive lump of meat) while holding a conversation with a mate about football. It's a sort of "I'm a man, me! and don't you forget it" gesture. Ironically, that a is exactly what the RB joke MS is riffing off is about. Anyway, sorry if that explanation is a bit rambling and incoherent (I blame the comedy I'm describing). I came out of the theatre ranting to my husband about how no wonder the SWP were in the state they were in if that's the comedy they were treated to - which is perhaps not the correct inference.

Thanks PP - interesting to hear about and no need for the apologies - appreciate the effort you took to flesh it out. I've got to be honest, I'm really disappointed. I used to be a real lefty in my 'youth' but realized as I've got older that misogyny knows no limits! Still it sucks when someone you held in some esteem turns out to be similar to the very person he's lambasting.

Animating zombie thread alert!

This is to add another instance of wankery to Glinner's account. He's just shamed Shappi Korsandi on twitter for supporting Let Toys Be Toys, the group which works against the unnecessary gendering-stereotyping of stuff for small children.

He quoted a Let Toys Be Toys tweet, and added a sarcastic "Hugely important issue. Nothing more important going on right now. Great use of energy." and then went on a rant about how nobody cares about abortion law.

Because all those women (including me) who have worked for decades on abortion law reform and the right to choose don't exist, right? It's only since he got involved that it's become important, naturally. And the way we as a society treat girls as frivolous has no effect at all on how we as a society treat adult women, right?

The cherry on the cake is that the woman he was shaming for not bothering about abortion - Shappi Korsandi - has been open about her own abortion, a very very difficult thing to do, and anyway is active on many political fronts, as well as being an excellent comedian.

What a wanker.

He gets some things so right and other things so completely and utterly wrong. The majority the latter

Ugh, it's just another form of whataboutery but this time, instead of directing women's attentions to problems affecting men it just pushes what you're allowed to focus on back and back.
You can't care about gender stereotyping until abortion rights are sorted but you can't care about abortion rights until women stop being beat to death by their partners. And really, why care about domestic violence in the UK when things are much worse for women in Saudi Arabia. But don't tell Saudi Arabia to treat women better because that's cultural imperialism.
Heaven forbid we could focus on more than one thing at once (pink brain is all about the multi-tasking after all)

He seems to be all for gender stereotyping if it means that men can become ladies by putting on lady clothes though.

To be honest, these days I avoid becoming a fan of a male artist in the first place, as there's so high risk of any given male actor, writer or singer turning out to be a sexist arsehole.

Like, that guy who plays Bilbo in The Hobbit? I thought "Hey, he's not that bad", and then it turns out he makes rape jokes that indicate that he has raped, or would rape if the opportunity presented itself.

And then you feel so conflicted about liking his work.

With female artists, there's no guarantee that they aren't horrible people in private, but at least they aren't so prone to proudly reveal themselves as arseholes on live television, so I have less of a risk to feel conflicted.