barbiehighheels replied to your post: yeah i mean i am man-hating, narcissistic, and…
don’t need no acolytes, need allies
here is a thing about their rhetoric - they being the men who harass us, not street harassment or like “hey little girl” shit, but the men that come to our spaces for our feminisms and tell us we’re wrong
they think it’s a game of follow the leader.
i think it’s hilarious, because it’s not, and it never has been, and it never will be. a lot of my hate mail (which i got more of in the past, strangely; i am far more offensive to man sensibilities now than then) and hate mail i’ve seen other ladybloggers get revolves around some idea that they are trying to act as a leader, which i can’t speak for everyone but i never have wanted to be a leader and never intend to. speaking of speaking for everyone, they also all think we’re trying to do that. i see this rhetoric repeated in different ways in completely unrelated circumstances in many different internet spaces—even emily’s okc dude referred to us, our little corner of the internet, as “her followers - not in the blog sense” - implying that she is some sort of ringleader of a miscreant misandry gang. which she isn’t. not to say that i don’t respect or even worship emily, but i consider us equals as far as equality can extend to a body (it can’t; equality is a myth, and besides that girls like emily and emily and rgr and anna and ET CETERA -there’s so many of you- will always make me feel inferior because they are more educated than me but being real, a BA ain’t for me and it ain’t ever gonna be for me and that doesn’t mean i can’t participate in whatever this is we do and i know that and they know that so i really just need to get over it). digression but what i’m saying is regardless of how different we are in terms of education/experience/practical application/RESUMES/PRICE TAGS/I DON’T KNOW we’re all sharing on the same level. and when we’re not writing about Important Feminist Whatevers we’re texting about crushes and drinking fancy drinks and how i feel about my dad moving back to town. there is no head alpha feminist. if there was i certainly wouldn’t be texting her all of my vulnerable feelings at 3 in the morning, and that’s what’s truly valuable about us is that i can do that. because i need that. we need that.
but they constantly frame women like us as attempting to garner “acolytes.” always our personal blogs, too, no one’s talking about mencrying indoctrinating people. the personal really is what’s political here.
i think it scares them. i think it scares them not to be able to identify leaders, and they’re grasping at straws because they don’t understand the way we utilize space. where we use the collective space allowed by dashboard view to share with each other, archive important material, write our traumas/catharsis, publicly shame, and just generally do some next-level hivemind thinktank shit. i understand why it’s terrifying because there’s nothing they can do to stop it. it’s outside of a physical reality wherein their dominance is established and reinforceable.
i don’t know. it’s laughable, really laughable, how much they don’t understand. And this is not to say that the history of thought is not important, but that the history of thought and the production of thought is not a process that necessarily begets a clear set of leaders and followers. But they don’t get that, do they? What does that to their brains? Capitalism? Fapitalism? Who knows.
Well, I’m pretty much over acknowledging the existence of dude trolls for now. But, if anything, I like what we’ve got going here with this cyber-space we make. Especially this miscreant misandry gang we’ve got.
