I really do feel that people go for safe targets rather than difficult ones, and I think that’s where a lot of the passionate APRFdom comes from, actually. Because it’s easier to bicker at your “sister’s” slutty ways than to actually contemplate that wow, for really real realness, there are people dying out there. People being brutalized. It’s so much easier to turn around and roll your eyes at someone nice and safe — and someone who blog comments or e-shunning might convince to change her mind — than to really do anything likely to actually secure lasting rights for real people.

Agreed, and I do not think this is in opposition to what I said or contradictory, but I feel like maybe I don’t have the words to really articulate what I mean. Octogalore has talked about it before and been excellent, so I will defer to her (not really fair bc she’s not here, but I thought of her).

Also maybe some of our differing views just have to do w/ diff. ways that we have experienced things and feminism.

I really do feel that people go for safe targets rather than difficult ones, and I think that’s where a lot of the passionate APRFdom comes from, actually. Because it’s easier to bicker at your “sister’s” slutty ways than to actually contemplate that wow, for really real realness, there are people dying out there. People being brutalized. It’s so much easier to turn around and roll your eyes at someone nice and safe — and someone who blog comments or e-shunning might convince to change her mind — than to really do anything likely to actually secure lasting rights for real people.

And I’m sick of it. I’m sick of feminism being nothing *more* than the place where people who don’t like vicious jokes hang around and insist that we *do* have senses of humor and everyone’s mean because they said we don’t. I just want to smack people for that lately, tbh.

I am also wary of the argument about things being small in scale. I agree w/ your point on one hand but again on the other hand it reminds me a lot of “Oh shut up humorless feminist, it’s not a big deal, it’s just a little thing” and the idea that unless something is the worst situation it could possibly be then it’s not worth focusing on. I know that is not *your* point but I worry about people taking it and running in that direction, I guess is what I’m saying.

Yes, and not only this but… a lot of the things women pick as examples of sexism are actually iffy. Or at least, they were for me. Before I was a feminist, things would happen and I’d wonder why they did and not know. Once I was a feminist, I found myself deciding I knew: that must have been sexism. That must have been ableism. On and on. I just knew. And if anyone told me that maybe that person didn’t like me for some other reason, or maybe someone didn’t mean it, or maybe my hair was a mess that day, or whatever… I’d shoot withering glares. When I stopped IDing as a feminist, I started to realize that in a lot of cases, I had reason to suspect sexism or “privilege-blinders” or whatever, but I didn’t have enough evidence to convince even myself I was sure that was going on.

I really think the c-r based feminisms have both been good and bad for women. Good, because they get us thinking about why people act the way they do, and make us really look at how people feel about women and how women feel about themselves. Bad, though, because they’ve encouraged us to see anything that makes us wonder or bothers us slightly as evidence of an evil and crushing conspiracy. Little sexist annoyances don’t get to just be annoyances when they prop up a worldview that says that men hate you, and getting called “sweetie” this morning by an old dude in a suit means he’s thinking explicitly of raping or otherwise demeaning you.

And yeah, weird example there, but when I got really deep into the “any mildly sexist thing is evidence someone hates women” way of thinking, I thought those sorts of things all the time: “What is this person barely keeping contained?” I felt really threatened all the time.

Now that I actually have a job doing social-justice-y things, it… well, there’s so much that just *is* obviously unfair, blatant, and stupid aimed at so many “oppressed classes” that I can’t even figure out why I ever bothered to go all wobbly over ambiguous random comments and the like.