Thursday, February 09, 2006

Snort

From the Livejournal of a feminist who will remain nameless:
Any time someone suggests that a woman is reacting emotionally rather than intellectually, they really ought to be prepared for rage.
Yeah, OK. Noted.

2 comments:

emily1 said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
emily1 said...

---oops --- submitting again with typos removed ---

she's right. anger is a perfectly human response to the behavior she's complaining about. after a while, one just starts wishing that the kneejerk anti-feminist factory would develop and produce a new model with new talking points for once -- just for the sake of variety in what passes for debate in the wild woolly hills of the internet.

i don't understand why people who attack feminists as 'emotional' think they're saying anything at all, much less scoring a 'point'. it's easy to get angry when one is just sooooooooooo tired of snotty remarks about PMS and emotionality when one is complaining about something that SHOULD cause an emotional reaction. being treated unequally causes a negative emotional reaction in most people. likewise, it is perfectly natural to feel and react angrily to someone who is attempting to trivialize and marginalize one's positions as unworthy of even a modest attempt at a serious response. particularly when that very trivialization and marginalization is what one was attempting to rectify in the first place.

one thing i've noticed over my not overly-long life is that people who criticize the emotional state of the other party to a conflict or disagreement really don't give a crap about the other party's feelings, and that says a lot more about him or her than it does about the other person, their emotional reactions, or their unaddressed grievances.

so, could we please finally put a knife in the heart of the stupid, empty idea that a negative emotional response to unfair circumstances or passive aggressive displays of disrespect instead of a cool, dispassionate and purely intellectual response invalidates his or her position on a point of disagreement? because ginmar's right, it's getting REALLY old.