“Oh, the civility!” is of course the catchcry of pearlclutchers everywhere, especially on that subset of socially-conservative blogs where a bit of cussing is viewed as inherently and self-evidently an order of magnitude more offensive than calling someone a pervert or a traitor.
Here’s a couple of comments from another blog which point out just how much this “civility” standard is rank hypocrisy, which cuts right to the heart of our Civility Guidelines here at Hoyden About Town.
Rheinhard:
Consider 2 pieces of writing:
1. A lengthy screed written by lawyers and statisticians explaining, with numerous polysyllabic phrases and data extrapolations galore, the benefits that would accrue to the national discourse, the economy, and morality in general should the polity choose to put all of the citizenry who happen to be of Jewish extraction into cleansing facilities (which, it is explained in a technical footnote, will contain only the most humane and sanitary of gas chambers and crematoria)
or
2. A short flyer posted on lamposts telling the Nazi Punks to F**K Off.
Which set of writers would you prefer to dine with?
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Filed under: blogging, conservatism, culture wars, ethics, moral panics, peeves
And most remiss in not thanking the delicious Guest Hoyden’s for helping Lauredhel keep the blog ticking over in my absence until after I’d made two posts today.
Thank you, thank you bluemilk, Helen on the Cast Iron Balcony, sajbrfem and Kate for such wonderful posts.
I had a great holiday in soft, deep snow that didn’t stress the joints the way that icy Australian snowfields usually do (’tis the vibrrrration, Cap’n, she’s shaking aparrrrt!). The kids enjoyed themselves, especially the ritual school holiday interlodge snowfight, and mr tog had a quiet lodge to himself with his laptop bein used recreationally only for most of the days (except the serious blizzard when we all stayed in).
On the way back home I sampled various coffees and cake on various occasions with the delectable Ampersand Duck, Zoe Crazybrave (with little Jethro) and Bernice Balconey with her lad (unfortunately missed Cristy Nopod and her Third Pea through an unfortunate series of minor events).
Glad to be back and able to spend more Hoyden time again though.
Filed under: blogging, blogmeet, travel
Feminist read ‘ems!
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“A Disincentive to the Female Voice Online”
Jenn talks about men who cyberharass bloggers who are women of colour. Her experiences are harrowing and revolting, but she vows to survive:
When I participated in a popular APIA forum, I was disheartened to watch as feminist voices were shot down by male participants who threw around words like “whore” and “slut” within their counterarguments. In another forum, men angry that I am unabashedly partnered in a stable, eight-year-long interracial relationship have accused me of “loving to suck White dick”, “daddy issues”, and worse. They re-posted photos of my loved ones (that I used to host on this site to share with real-life friends) and made racially and sexually derogatory remarks about the people in them, including mean-spirited mockery of my boyfriend’s mother. . I no longer host personal photos for this reason. Still others have emailed me hateful judgements and presuppositions of my personal life while assuming materialistic, superficial motivations for all Asian American women. In all these behaviours — commonly received by many women in cyberspace – it is the woman and her experience that becomes decentralized; even in assaulting us, male aggressors shift the focus from a female blogger’s feminism to a denial of her self-worth based exclusively upon the men in her life.
~~
From Diary of a Goldfish, “Paris Hilton and the Iconic Blonde”. The Goldfish takes a generational look, drawing parallels between the misogynistic media treatment of iconic blondes Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, and Paris Hilton:
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Filed under: Politics, Read 'ems, blogging, celebritism, cyberbullying, racism
Well, I try and kick arse, but I don’t really think I kick an Angela Davis level of arse. (Updated to Add: see, although Crikey! has just described Hoyden About Town as “dispens[ing] its femmobolsho views loudly, proudly and with plenty of bite”, in contrast The Stranger’s blog Slog last week called us a “charming feminist blog”. The perceived arsekicking capacity remains ambiguous.)
So, I wonder how much arse our Guest Hoydens for the next week or so can kick? (seekrit identities revealed after the cut). And what about our commentors?
Which Western feminist icon are you?
You are Angela Davis! You were the THIRD WOMYN IN HISTORY to appear on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. You are a communinist, black power-lovin’ lady who shook up the United States when you refused to lie down quietly to oppression. You WENT TO JAIL! Wow. You kick so much more ass than Foxxy Brown.
Take this quiz!
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Join
| Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code
Ignore the links in the code above – they take you to the Quiz site’s main page and it’s hard to find the quiz from there (because the author, belladonnalin, didn’t use any tags to direct searches). Click here for the quiz.
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Filed under: blogging, fun, travel
I’ve just tweaked the subscription service a little.
I was finding it wearing dealing with the few folks who decided that they’d rather reply to the comment notification emails than comment on the blog, so I’ve created a new address just to deal with the subscriptions and set up an auto-responder to nag people to comment on the blog instead of expecting an email reply (the tiny joys of blogging – aren’t they fabulous!).
So, if you have aggressive spam filters and don’t want to miss out on your “new comment” notifications, you might like to update them to reflect that subscribers will now receive notification emails from an account named “Hoyden About Town (do not reply)” and the email address sending them will be “hoyden.donotreply” at that gmail (d o t c o m) place.
Filed under: Meta, blogging
A discussion in another blog reminded me that I hadn’t yet got around to HTMLifying my exploration of feminist ethics in digital communities. I’ve put it up here.
I’m particularly interested to hear responses to these questions:
In a blog comment community, who has the right to participate in the production and enforcement of norms, and how are those rights allocated? Should the blogger, who has the power to pull the plug, have the ultimate right over their “own” space, including a comment community? Under a traditional ethical system, she would retain this absolute right, and that right would prevail, in a conflict, over commenters’ rights to be heard and to participate in community norms. From a feminist ethics viewpoint, the situation is less clear-cut. Rather than focussing on bloggers’ rights, the feminist ethicist looks at the responsibilities of bloggers and commenters. To what extent do (or should) bloggers feel a responsibility to care for their comment community as a shared social space, to encourage connections, to facilitate a more democratic production of social norms? What value does a blog hold without its readers, commenters and linkers?
And going back a step, do you feel a sense of community in digital spaces? Which ones and why? How would you evaluate whether participants feel a sense of community?
Filed under: blogging, ethics
There were some long involved threads on ozblogs last week about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Kim at LP, and those of us who agreed with her, got piled upon (twice) for disagreeing with some of Hirsi Ali’s suggestions about how to best end the oppression of women in Islamic cultures. The offended were a whole bunch of WOT-hawks who seem to think that Hirsi Ali’s many undeniable strengths and talents mean that somehow her opinions, agenda and tactics are above criticism. Their argument seemed to be that because Hirsi Ali has suffered sexist oppression justified by reference to Islam and she speaks of how such oppression needs to end through curtailing the power of Islam, that therefore her calls to eradicate Islam are the only plans for ending sexist oppression that should be listened to.
I’m not going to flinch away from mentioning female genital mutilation (FGM) here, because that seemed to be a core of the outrage: how could we criticise a women who wanted to end the genital cutting and mutilation of little girls? Of course, we never criticised Hirsi Ali wanting to end FGM: who doesn’t want to see the end of harmful physical mutilations?
We merely argued that her particular emphases and tactics seemed counterproductive rather than genuinely helpful to the goal of eradicating such harmful practices as infibulation (and never even got a chance to mention that by far the bulk of genital cutting is simple ritual labial marking which leaves minimal scarring on a par with piercing an ear, or that excision of the top part of the clitoral hood actually enhances sexual pleasure rather than diminishing it).
So, not waving away FGM, but now it’s back to the larger picture of women’s oppression by traditionalist male hierarchies. We can all agree that sexist oppression justified by religious teachings needs to end. Where many people have a problem with Hirsi Ali’s speeches on this is that she singles Islam out as somehow uniquely prone to being distorted by male hierarchies seeking to rationalise and justify the systemic oppression of women.
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Filed under: authoritarianism, blogging, interblog, islamophobia, middle east, religion, war
I’m going to have to start writing proper posts more often. Along with the Blogocracy Round Robin initiative (see previous post), which was a welcome workout, I’m also going to be guest-blogging at Feministe for a week at the end of July June!
Jill has put together a roster of guest bloggers to fill the posting gap that’s due to Jill interning at a law firm this Northern summer and thus having less time for writing on the intertubes (law firms are sticky about browsing at work), and the roster includes ex-Feministe blogger and founder Lauren, as well as regular Feministe commentors Mikey, Little Light, Flea, Belledame, Trailer Park Feminist, Evil Fizz, kactus, SassyWho and Bean. Those who are regular readers of Feministe should appreciate just how varied that roster is in terms of various feminisms.
So, as Jill’s idea is to showcase a variety of voices rather than just cookie cutter feminism, I’m casting around for a few topics to cover that week that have a regional slant on feminist and progressive politics issues that are still of interest to the American majority readers of Feministe. Any suggestions (in comments please)?
Also, my own posting might be a little less frequent as I aim for more depth and analysis again in my posts. So I’m actively soliciting more guest posts here from people who have been commenting here for a while. Shoot me an email if you’ve got a post you’d like to see published at Hoyden. I’d like to see one or two guest posts a week, say.
Filed under: blogging, interblog
So I went image hunting and photoshopping.
For those who don’t frequent Shakesville, Melissa McEwan (aka Shakespeare’s Sister) occasionally presents certain commenters with an image of a fainting-couch, or uses it to illustrate a post involving a moral panic amongst the pearlclutching set.
I could have just copied her image (I’m sure she would give permission if asked by a fellow progblogger) but I decided to do my own.
On my image hunt, I also found this, appropriately only as a tiny thumbnail. I hereby present the smallest fainting-couch in the world, just waiting for the most delicatest of sensibilities:
Both images are up on my Flickr account, just link to them as needed using Flickr’s guidelines (click on them to go to Flickr). Go forth and mock, mates.
Filed under: Meta, blogging, fun, moral panics
