PandaGate and anti-male bigotry
Cathy Young | February 15, 2007, 6:40am
I'm coming a little late to the farewell party for Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte as blog coordinator for the Edwards campaign. Now, Marcotte's sister-in-arms, Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister, has stepped down as well.
Some, such as my Reason colleague David Weigel, are concerned that the Marcotte/McEwan brouhaha may backfire against all bloggers who don't write like political hacks. I think outspoken bloggers have nothing to fear unless they aspire to actually become paid political hacks. (Andrew Sullivan has a good comment on this.) What I find more troubling is that the criticism of Marcotte has focused so much on her swipes at religion, and so little on her brand of feminism -- a cult of female victimhood rife with militant anti-male bigotry.
A number of publications have quoted her sarcastic comment on the Duke alleged sexual assault case: "Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair." But it's hard to appreciate the full flavor of that comment without its full context. This is the post that Marcotte scrubbed from her blog after it attracted unwanted attention in the wake of her new job with the Edwards campaign. It seems she also deleted some of her comments in the thread, preserved here. Even with Marcotte's posts gone, the thread remains quite revealing: Marcotte's like-minded regulars (particularly ginmar) verbally assault, insult, and mock any dissenter. Responding to a feminist blogger who says she is a survivor of sexual assault herself but is concerned about fair treatment for the accused players, ginmar offers this gem:
Natalia, I don't think anybody cares if you're a rape victim and you toe the party line when it comes to "But what about the menz!"
(Yes, I know ginmar is not Amanda Marcotte, but ideologically they're pretty much peas in a pod.)
A sampling of Marcotte's other posts on the Duke case can be found
on this page. Anyone who questions the guilt of the accused players, in her book, is a "rape apologist." In
this post, she fumes:
Kathleen Parker has been ... building a long case that unless the victim is 9 years old and a virgin and white and blonde and her attacker kills her and he mutiliates her body, then rape isn't so much a crime as a feminist plot to put all men in jail so that we can, I don't know, wear sweatpants more or something.
Here are three Kathleen Parker columns, discussing the "rush to judgment" in the Duke case. In the last of these columns, Parker actually expresses concern that the alleged victim may be seen as less deserving because she's a stripper, and writes, "A woman raped is a woman raped, no matter what her ill-chosen profession."
Marcotte's crude "satire" is far worse than a caricature of Parker's views. A caricature is an exaggeration of truth. Marcotte's summary of Parker's position is an outright, slanderous lie.
I should add here that I have been on the receiving end of the Marcotte method of polemics myself. On July 25, 2005, Marcotte made a post at Pandagon titled, Cathy Young to battered wives-"Stop hitting yourself!" This in reference to my Boston Globe column on the Violence Against Women Act. Somehow, my discussion of the false assumption that mutual violence always involves male aggression/female self-defense becomes a call for throwing battered women in jail if they fight back or so much as accidentally hit the abuser while flailing around trying to escape. See also Marcotte's post here at Feministing, and more of my discussion here.
And finally, best for last: an October 19, 2006 post in which Marcotte explains that there's no such thing as man-hating feminists. She's particularly unhappy with the "made-up word 'misandry.'" (Actually, the word "misandry," or "hatred of males," appears in the Webster's Encyclopaedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language [1996] and its origins are traced to 1945-50. That patriarchal conspiracy sure is insidious!) Sayeth Marcotte:
This is a word that was made up by men on a victim trip because they don't get to abuse and oppress women as much as they'd really like to, and it's an attempt to pretend there's a tradition of man-hating so severe it deserves a word of its own. ... Attempts to create a false equivalence are about the worst sort of victim tripping imaginable. It wasn't the girls that were sent out of the room so boys could be raped and killed in recent school shootings.
Marcotte, I assume, is referring to
these two cases. The horrific actions of two severely disturbed men become her paradigm for male attitudes toward women in our society. (Was serial killer
John Wayne Gacy a self-hating misandrist male because he killed only boys?)
Marcotte's conclusion:
The phrase "man-hater" is more an insult to men than to feminists. Anyone who uses it generally means that the person thus accused is a rapist-hater, abuser-hater, sexist-hater. And when you call someone a "man-hater" who is actually hating on sexists, abusers, and rapists, you imply all men are these things. And they are not. So who are really the man-haters when that phrase is being wielded? It's not the feminists; it's the men implying that hating rape or hating abuse is the same thing as hating men.
Or maybe the person using the phrase "man-hater" means that the person thus accused is ready to presume any man to be a rapist or abuser at the drop of an accusation, no matter how non-existent the evidence. For a stark demonstration of such bigotry, look no further than the Marcotte/ginmar lynch-mob mentality in the Duke case.
Extended version cross-posted at The Y Files.
joe | February 15, 2007, 1:02pm | #
Cripes, you're gullible, John. Tell the truth, you read the hit piece in the Weekly Standard, and you swallowed their characterization hook, line, and sinker.
"This case serves as yet another depressing reminder of all that is wrong with this country: Our sons are spoiled misogynistic bigots,"
That quotes ends with a fucking COMMA, John! A COMMA! What the hell?
Here's the entire sentence: "This case serves as yet another depressing reminder of all that is wrong with this country: Our sons are spoiled misogynistic bigots, and our colleges are hotbeds of polarizing identity politics."
Nice spin, John.
Here's the passage where Lithwick dares to say that the DNA evidence might not be conclusive:
"Supporters of the Duke students say the lack of a DNA match exonerates them. Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project says, "There's an old saying that the absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence." Nurses say the injuries are consistent with rape. The boys say someone else raped her. Time-stamped photos suggest the alleged victim was already injured before she arrived at the party. Other time-stamped photos suggest new injuries occurred while she was there. Lost fake fingernails in the bathroom suggest a fight. The lack of any DNA material under those nails suggest she never fought back. Photos say she was intoxicated upon arrival. The second stripper implies she was drugged at the party.
Pick your fact, any fact. Each of them can, it seems, be spun both ways. This scandal has become yet another exercise in fiction-writing as opposed to truth-seeking; we can use the same evidence to confirm what we already know in our bones to be true."
This column was about uncertainty and spin, and because you wanted to spin with certainty, you accuse Lithwick of doing it, too. You know in your bones what you want to be true, and aren't going to admit that this wasn't an open and shut case.
"If you're not with us, you're against us." Right, John?
Jeff G | February 15, 2007, 1:42pm | #
I
posted quite
a bit on this during the whole
dustup -- though my concern was never really with Marcotte's "potty mouth"
per se (just with how uncreative she is in using it), nor was it with her anti-Catholic bigotry or her heterodoxical views (against all evidence to the contrary) on the guilt of the Duke 3 -- though naturally, all of those things played a part.
But for anyone familiar with Marcotte's online writing, none of this was particularly surprising. Which made her hiring by the Edwards campaign almost surreal.
On the day of her announcement, I posted a few questions to the Edward's blog -- namely, I wondered how Marcottes's views on Iran jibed with what Edwards had just got done saying that very morning, and if her recent indictment of such views, when she was ascribing them to Bushco, would color her impressions of the campaign for which she had chosen to work (I juxtaposed her characterization of Rethuglican deathmerchants with Edwards' own muscular statements, which he later tried to walk back). I also wondered if she thought it wise to insist on the guilt of the Duke 3 while working for a North Carolina candidate, or if she regretted noting that the people of North Carolina treat women and minorities as subhuman. After all, she was now to be part of the community, and had spent the morning writing about how she is staunch defender of social justice.
So it seemed naturally to seize on what might be a problem with selection bias.
I didn't find these questions beyond the pale -- after all, she was hired to be the web presence of John Edwards, and she came to that task with a well-known set of biases -- and I was curious to know how she was going to reconcile her beliefs with the official message of the campaign, or if she thought the question of reconciliation between her personal beliefs and those of the campaign even a legitimate one to ask.
For my troubles, I was accused of
"stalking" Marcotte, and her boyfriend even showed up on my site to accuse me of wanting to bed her down. Which is about as far from reality as you can get without licking a mess of Colorado River toads.
Later, Amanda herself showed up to scold me. The temerity! Asking questions when I should have been celebrating the ascension of a woman to a position of power and influence (which, we heard when the going started getting tough, was not a position of power or influence at all, and so we shouldn't be picking on such a low level staffer).
Not only that, but Marcotte, or one of her underlings (if she had any) deleted my post from the public Edwards blog -- just as she routinely deletes dissenting views on Pandagon, leaving behind only vicious rejoinders while preventing the people she is attacking from answering back.
Hers is a hermetically sealed world of hyperbolic victim politics and perverse views on social justice (which typically involve constraining the "institutionalized" power of men), and I found it rather astounding that she was being mainstreamed by a man who came within OHIO VOTER FRAUD from being the VP of the United States.
So when Edwards accepted their apologies once the anti-Catholic writings were widely quoted, I found it insulting that he concluded his statement by talking about how this country needs a debate on the issues -- even as his webmistress was busy scrubbing away dissenting views.
And this was the
real outrage of the Marcotte hire, as far as I'm concerned. After all, the blogosphere is filled with ideologues who occasionally engage in salty language (I do it myself from time to time); but what we were witnessing was a presidential candidate who hired -- then defended -- two women who are not only openly hostile to Catholicism and the idea of equality before the law, but who likewise were willing to openly shape the terms of the debate by weeding out any inconvenient rejoinders to their cliched feminist / progressive boilerplate.
And lest we forget, Marcotte was also willing to dismiss as practically subhuman large portions of the electorate with whom she disagreed.
For instance,
here is one of her more pointed posts:
I’m not an idiot. I’m a twat. Get it straight.
I’m a hot, moist, inviting twat. Warm, wet, inviting. But not to you or your friends. Even if I were single, these nubile thighs do not wrap around the hips of Republicans. You can fuck yourselves or the dry twats of the self-hating misogynists who will allow you tiny penis to penetrate them. Have fun! Um, the wounds you get from rubbing you un-lubricated dick repeatedly into your heartless, soulless woman–iodine is your best friend, my be-scarred friend.
And now she complains of hate mail -- and tries to get us to believe it is all coming from wannabe theocrats.
But the truth is, Marcotte has made a career out of trashing everyone with whom she disagrees, and she uses dishonesty and a tightly controlled comment section to do so.
That these women, who are both illiberal and averse to genuine public debate, are now being defended, celebrated, and proffered as "Free Speech" martyrs by many progressives (though I don't believe they actually
believe this to be the case, just that they believe it a useful rhetorical counter meant to rally the troops and to deflect attention away from the fact that critics cited Marcotte and McEwan's
own words, in an effort to turn that unmasking into a grand conspiracy by rightwing smear merchants), shows either a depth of cynical opportunism or denial that is staggering in its presumtuousness; or else a worldview that has become so twisted by ideological hatreds that it is a wonder it hasn't yet imploded under the weight of its own incoherent baggage.
Mona | February 15, 2007, 7:02pm | #
1. I can't believe that I agree with Jeff G,
Ditto. I ended up in some reasonably intense flamewars with Dems/liberals who were all bent out of shape about right-wing attacks on the Edwards bloggers. Yes, I understand they are sick and tired of the right-wing driving the narrative and getting away with its denunciations of critics as traitors, anti-American, not supporting the troops, being unhinged, or Jonah Goldberg's latest that liberals are fascists in a book with a cute little Hitler smiley face on it.
And yes, I also understand that Wm Donohue is a professional grievance monger and asshat, and that Michelle Malkin is no paragon of decency merely because she mostly lacks a potty mouth.
But at the end of the day, two things pissed me off: 1. My own moral compass isn't directed by fear and loathing of those whom I normally revile to the extent I will give a pass to behavior they rightly condemn, and 2. a significant number of those defending Marcotte see no problem with her gratuitously trashing a doctrine held to be sacred by many of the electorate. Hers was not a dispassionate examination of the empirical failings of the Virgin Birth doctrine; it was obscene ridicule of a major religion for no good reason.
Nor is the situation akin to the Mohammed Cartoons. Catholics did not riot and send Marcotte into hiding with armed guards, even if she did receive some vile email. By contrast, the Danish paper running those Cartoons did so because it had come to the editors attention that professional illustrators feared drawing Mohammmed least they be killed. Thus, running the Mohammed Cartoons was in the vein of flag-burning; it an act, one repudiating thuggery more than saying anything about Islam itself.
Which is to say, it was a revolt against things like a fatwa on Salman Rushdie. For all I know I wouldn't approve of Rushdie's fiction about Mohammed, but the response to it is intolerable in a free society. By contrast, in a civil society we do not run around gratuitously slamming in the most vulgar possible terms the beleifs of our fellow citizens, and a politician who hires people who do do that, lacks all good judgment.
Then there is the matter of Marcotte's awful belief that men simply cannot be falsely charged when the "victim" is a female. Please.
Mona | February 16, 2007, 7:57am | #
Sure we do. Indeed, blogging is a perfect example of how civil societies actually work.
Speak for yourself. I'm a blogger and I do not gratuitously ridicule the religious beliefs of others, nor their political beliefs unless they are manifestly lying and operating in the service of vile agendas (e.g., war-mongering). If they are obviously nuts, and off into conspiracy theories and such, yeah, I'll poke fun at them. But not religious belief
per se.
Why? Because in a civil society where we all agree to live peacefully together, demonizing people for their Ultimate Beliefs is not a good idea. Scientology is a system it is hard for me to fathom any intelligent person accepting, but I would not criticize them if they didn't bilk people out of lots of $$ and employ litigation and lies to destroy critics. But their beliefs per se, I'd leave alone if they didn't try to harm people, and I criticize only the harmful beliefs (such as their "fair game" doctrine).
Further, as a libertarian I'm with Hayek -- the ultimate rationalist -- in holding that long-surviving religions embedded into our culture serve some group survival advantages. Religion is a double-edged sword, but not all that it brings is bad.
Moreover, I'm an atheist, and on occasion I will strongly object to uncivil attacks on those of my kind -- attacks which are legion. Widespread misunderstanding of atheism and contempt for it causes people to think of us as monsters, and that really bothers me. It is wrong, and I have been known to object when bigoted hate against non-theists rears its ugly head.
In any event, it is monumentally stupid for a candidate aspiring to the presidency to hire a blogger who writes the rancid bile Marcotte does about Catholic and Xian belief. She isn't
The Skeptical Enquirer, she is a contempt-monger. Atheist Carl Sagan warned his pal James Randi not to step too far into the latter behavior, because it is attacking something quintessentially human, and I agree.
rob | February 16, 2007, 10:51am | #
"There are a large number of regulars (like Guy and rob) who characterize anything I write as 'trolling,' merely because they disagree with it, and think I'm inferior for holding opinions they dislike." - joe
You seem to have some serious self-delusion going on there, joe. I count 4 times in this recent thread that you call me a troll. (http://www.reason.com/blog/show/118684.html#comments)
"A 59-41 election is what is generally called a rout, troll." - joe, February 14, 2007, 4:04pm
"And just to remind you, troll boy, the question you asked was, 'Hey, joe, about those Dem presidential candidates - which ones didn't vote for authorization of force? You can't even name them, can you?' That's whay you asked, that's what I answered. If you meant, '...who voted against the resolution,' you should have written that." - joe, February 14, 2007, 5:06pm
"You don't say. No, genius, it doesn't give you an 8 point split. It gives you a 16 point split, 58-42. Smarter trolls, please." - joe, February 14, 2007, 7:35pm
"Neener neener nee-ner. pwned, troll." - joe, February 15, 2007, 10:30am
My only sentence with "troll" in it? This one:
"I love it when you call ME a troll. I’m not the guy who comes to a libertarian web-site armed with the latest DNC Talking Points and itching for a fight, then insulting and cursing at people who (predictably) disagree with you." - rob, February 14, 2007, 10:38pm
"If I thought they spoke for the majority of regulars, I wouldn't bother coming here." - joe
Stop trying to blame your masochistic desire to be a libertarian pinata on "the majority of regulars."
