Amanda Marcotte Is Not Evil (my bad), just Misguided..

Marcotte, what a feminist looks like..

I have to confess to pointing out that Marcotte was evil as all indication were there for all to see. This feminist has without remorse or even a minutiae of guilt, maligned and denigrated all Men and Boys, relentlessly. Without giving any consideration the amount of pain and suffering she has promoted and projected with her continual and unrelenting anti male rantings..

So I stand corrected, as I was not aware of the following obvious solution and explanation that Snark puts forward..

Amanda Marcotte is not evil, she's just misguided and goofy.

She's the kinda gal who grew up making awkward, silence-inducing remarks at the dinner table while the adults were trying to talk.

And she never grew out of it.

So I stand corrected as I really must of missed that interpretation of her behaviour and sheer malice that this woman indulges in..

...my bad....

Snark

Saturday, 25 June 2011

Amanda Marcotte Is Not Evil

Word has been getting around since Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Tech broke the news of Amanda Marcotte's latest gaffe yesterday. A number of bloggers have referred to her as 'evil'. PMAFT originally referred to her quote as "pure feminist evil," a phrase repeated by the American Power blog, while The Other McCain has gone a step further and referred to her as "the Beast of Babylon," quoting Revelation as if to imply she is some kind of demon, and suggesting that she may be "deliberately and consciously evil" (emphasis in the original).

Since, by chance, I had only just written up some preliminary thoughts on the subject of evil, I thought I'd weigh in here.

Amanda Marcotte is not evil, she's just misguided and goofy.

She's the kinda gal who grew up making awkward, silence-inducing remarks at the dinner table while the adults were trying to talk.

And she never grew out of it.

Evil? The devil is evil. The Holocaust was evil. Slavery is evil.

Some goof making insensitive comments on some other goof's blog is not an act of evil.

No, Amanda Marcotte is flawed, just like everyone else. Her flaws may be more cringe-inducing than most, but that doesn't make her evil.

What I offer, as an alternative theory, is our good old friend The Rationalisation Hamster.

Amanda Marcotte has spent her grown-up life as a feminist. She is very much invested in feminism. She thinks feminism is all good stuff and anything that's against feminism is all bad stuff.

So when something happens that might threaten her rose-tinted view of feminism, she rationalises it away.

E.g., feminism sometimes manifests as a moral crusade against rape. As a feminist, Amanda Marcotte is a moral crusader against rape. This is a very important aspect of who she is. Being a moral crusader against rape requires one to believe that rape is rampant; a crime of epidemic proportions.

So when the evidence starts mounting that a not insignificant number of rape accusations are entirely false, and often maliciously made, a dilemma occurs.

If a substantial number of rape accusations are false, then one's status as a moral crusader against rape may be called into question. It is even possible that other moral crusaders, who have had the opportunity to shape law and public opinion in the area of rape, have actually unwittingly assisted those false accusers in doing great harm to innocent people.

Furthermore, if the folks who are talking about the prevalence of false accusations keep on talking about the prevalence of false accusations, then even more folks might learn about how prevalent false accusations are, and then lots of people might ask questions about one's status as a moral crusader against rape.

And then would come the worst part of all, guaranteed to cause mental anguish: one may be forced to accept that one has played a role in causing harm to innocent people.

All right, hamster - do your work!

Squeak, squeak! Okay. Everything is okay. The problem has been rationalised away. It turns out that the people who are talking about the prevalence of false accusations are, in fact, rapists themselves. Therefore they are part of the problem which must be crusaded against. There isn't any evidence of this, but it must be the case.

Let's take another scenario. What if you have led a cyber-lynch mob against a group of men accused of rape? You don't have any evidence that they're guilty, of course, but you know that they are anyway. What happens when the verdict returns and the accused turn out to be not guilty? The mental anguish - not to mention the embarassment - would be too much to bear.

Go, hamster, go!

Squeak! Squeak, squeak squeak!

I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.

And all is right with the world again.

Let's take one last example. What if those wonderful, pro-woman reforms that your movement made to family courts all across the land have led to some unforeseen results? What if it is now strongly suggested that the courts are as anti-male as they are pro-female? What if somebody actually becomes so desperate at his situation that he sees no other way out than burning himself to death in protest?

It looks bad - it looks very bad. How could your mind cope under the stress of thinking that maybe your movement is responsible for such a terrible tragedy as this?

Squeak!

Yes. That will do. The guy who burned himself to death was not a desperate victim at all, but an abuser. And he was still abusing his wife right up to the point that he melted into the concrete. Therefore, it's permissible to feel absolutely no sympathy for the guy whatsoever, and to deny that there is anything wrong with the family court system.

There is no use in trying to convince somebody who is ideologically committed. Logical argument is no match for the exertions of that little hamster running around inside their brains. Indeed, Amanda Marcotte is sticking by her comment, apparently claiming now that men kill themselves in order to hurt women - rationalising away the much higher male suicide rate, perhaps?

The equivalent argument, I suppose, would be that women wear skimpy outfits deliberately so that they will be raped, just so that they can make some poor guy's life a living hell by getting him sent to prison for rape. But I'm sure that hamster can run on for a long, long time, and that even this kind of double standard can be rationalised away.

So, there you have it. While many outcomes of feminism can properly be termed evil, Amanda Marcotte isn't evil. She is not defending feminism so much as she is defending her own mental health, by flat-out refusing to acknowledge that the movement she has thrown herself into is directly responsible for enormous suffering. She is unwilling, on a deep and possibly subconscious level, to see reality for what it is. To do so would be too painful.

In a way, she is far worse off than Thomas James Ball, who, despite his desperate situation, had attained great insight into the real workings of society - the "second set of books" - before his tragic end.

- Snark