It's
funny how things work out. As I was writing yesterday's post, which along with
the post before that was inspired by Stephen A Smith continuing to be awful,
after I had already written about that, I was getting to the part about constant
comments to women in general to shut up. I wondered if I should elaborate on
that, and was thinking of different examples, but decided not to. Suddenly, one
of my examples went live again.
Just
to be clear, I don't expect that anyone is going to quit being awful because of
my writing. I don't have a big enough audience for that, and people with much
larger audiences don't really get anywhere either. I just mention it because
sometimes I worry that I repeat myself, but I see now that everyone else is too.
Let's
talk about general admonitions to shut up. Yes, I knew about Justin Lookadoo
spouting off that "dateable" girls know when to shut up, and I found
that easy to ignore because he is so ridiculous, and the kids he was speaking
to knew it. And Steven L Anderson, best known for praying for the president's
death, but also known for feeling that women even saying "Amen" in
church is too much expressing their opinions, how can you take him seriously?
It
started to get to me as I was thinking about a specific young girl's problem,
and how everything she says is discounted by the people she needs help from,
and I was thinking about it on a day when I had read about another conservative
leader saying something about women needing to be quiet.
I
can't find that article and who it was. It was not about the GOP's newest
attempts at strategy, where they need to connect with women on an emotional
level instead of an intellectual level. I keep thinking of Phyllis Schlafly,
but I think that was because she had said a different offensive thing that same
day.
I
shook the article off when I saw it, because it just wasn't that surprising,
but then thinking about my friend, it doesn't matter that it's not surprising.
It matters that it is so prevalent that people get silenced.
It
happens to different groups, but it seems to happen to women most of all.
Women
who point out structural problems get abuse rained down on them. I've been
seeing a lot of that:
It
comes from other women sometimes:
It
comes to people from both genders who try and speak out about issues that
disproportionately affect females:
And
an example of it showed up in my timeline again, just as I had decided that I
was not going to write about it. Therefore today I wrote this, and it is good
that it is my day off, because it was getting really long. The example will
wait until Monday.
Edited to add, the article I could find was not about the Prime Minister of Turkey, but whoever it was, they could be friends: http://www.shakesville.com/2014/07/theyre-not-laughing-with-you.html
Edited to add, the article I could find was not about the Prime Minister of Turkey, but whoever it was, they could be friends: http://www.shakesville.com/2014/07/theyre-not-laughing-with-you.html
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