Online Feminism: Why do we rip each to shreds?

Anyone who hangs out in the femisphere will be aware of all the implosions, most recently on SRH which has finally buckled under the weight of feminists ripping each other to shreds. There seems to be a trend emerging where we take out our frustration with patriarchal culture – on each other. Any feminist knows that being a feminist often means being an easy target; even for each other, it seems. Feminists online seem to hold other feminists to standards that are less realistic and unbelieveably higher than they would non-feminists. There also seems to be this pedantic preoccupation with “calling out” women who slip up and let some kind of privilege show while conversing, women who might have been careless in their wording of a particular point as demonstrated in the now famous Cuntalinagate scandal over at Twisty’s, or women who just have a less normative mode of expression than most (awareness of neurodiversity is not exactly a feature of online feminist discourse, amirite Aspies?). It’s as though no matter what we say or how thoughtfully we say it, how hard we try to be respectful, there will always be someone there waiting and watching, ready to hold up a GOTCHA card, like a hockey umpire with a yellow card.

Recently I’ve witnessed the feminist thought police and the feminist privilege police on several sites. These people go around revoking other people’s feminist cards, issuing enfringement notices and just generally identifying all the bad feminists among us, because the feminist police are apparently perfect feminists who never slip up, donchaknow?

This makes discussion a tiring and draining experience and it’s also stifling. Ideas and opinions cannot flow freely when your posts are being dissected to reveal signs of unexamined privilege, or audited with a fine-toothed comb. The loudest, the most obnoxious or the most educated are free to define what’s feminist and what’s not.

The flip side of this issue is that some sites go all out to control this by micro-managing threads half to death and jumping in with moderation as soon as it becomes apparent that someone disagrees with someone else OR when someone posts something that fails to chime in with the general view of the regular commentors. This kind of cliquey behaviour is common on the larger sites where an established culture exists and is often enforced by blog owners who appear oblivious to their own oppressive role in discussions.

I don’t know what the answers are here. I know I’m not alone in wondering if online feminist communities are just not productive or useful to the movement beyond sharing links. Online communities can be pretty bloody awful, generally. They remind me a lot of road rage that way. Just like otherwise decent people can turn into total pigs on the road, so can people on the internet. The veneer of anonymity and the level of social detachment is much the same. Feminists who are painfully aware, on a daily basis, of the crappy conditions that women on this planet are stuck with, might well be prone to letting off steam with a spot of online assholery directed at an easy target.

I also have some serious bones to pick over the way male commentors on fem sites are often treated like sacred cows, and the increasing trend of feeding male trolls, concern and garden variety, which I believe make fem spaces less safe-feeling, but that’s another post.

Edit: I would love to hear other online feminist’s thoughts and opinions on this subject.

Edit: This post is about the femisphere in general and my observations of it; it is not strictly about SRH and/or my personal experiences there. I have a message here asking why I haven’t included more personalised details, as if the petty squabbles were the only reason the SRH boards existed at all. The answer to that is: I’m not five years old and neither are you! You have your own site; if it’s bugging you then you can blog about it and release those thoughts into the femisphere for others to comment on. Don’t come here to this, my personal site, and try to continue the pile on, as if you have some kind of sacred right to be mean-spirited and obnoxious, as if being a first class arsehole passes for incisive and witty commentary. Sorry sister but it doesn’t.

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