An Illuminating Sociological Experiment

by Clue Bat | 8:13 am, January 25, 2013 | Comments Off

That’s what this has to be: The 9 Ugliest Feminists In America

The content of the article consists of unflattering images of assorted feminists paired with rather tame jabs at their appearance. Hardly nice, but nothing compared to the venom directed at Republican women one can find on Democrat-leaning websites. But it’s not the content of the article that makes it interesting, it’s the angry responses to it.

Go now, reader, and observe in these comments the thought patterns of Progressives on full display. Set aside any emotional or visceral reactions which the comments may provoke, and look closely at the nature of the arguments presented.

To my eye, the arguments mostly fall into the following classes:

1. Assertions that the article’s criticisms are hurtful to the women pictured: Attempts to make the author feel guilty and perhaps retract his article over the possibility that his comments may have caused the women pictured emotional or psychological pain, and condemnations of the author for being cruel and insensitive to the feelings of other human beings.
2. Assertions that the women pictured wouldn’t care about the article’s criticisms: Dismissals of the article in toto for being based on the mistaken premise that the women pictured would even care about his criticisms, and for being unworthy of their notice for its shallowness and triviality.
3. Shaming language about the author’s own appearance, habits, and inclinations: Assertions that the author’s judgments of the women pictured are motivated by his own ugliness, physical shortcomings, sexual perversions, impotence or moral failings, and condemnations of him as a worthless human being because of these flaws, making him unfit to criticize others for any reason.
4. Psychologizing the author: Using pseudo-Freudian concepts and pop-psychology cliches to diminish the author’s judgments as the product of “mommy issues”, repressed homosexuality, feeling threatened by “strong women” and a host of other neuroses, distracting attention away from those judgments and onto the author’s purported mental problems.
5. Imputing opinions to the author: Allegations that the author’s criticism of these individual feminists’ appearances equates to his complete rejection of and categorical opposition to anything the women or the movement they represent claim to stand for, whether or not those things are even mentioned in his article or are unique to these particular women or the movement they belong to.
6. Grandiose disapproval: Displays of dismay and disgust verging into outrage over the fact that the author dared to state such politically-incorrect opinions, and that he should even be allowed to do so.
7. Incoherent rage: Unfortunate sharts of logorrhea which are short on clarity and structure but rich in passion and unnecessary capital letters.

#1 and #2 are clearly contradictory: the women pictured cannot simultaneously be hurt or offended by the author’s comments and be airily above noticing them or taking them seriously, but none of the commenters making one class of argument seem to notice the contradiction with those using the other class. Both are appeals to emotion in order to shut the author up: the first by scolding him for the negative emotional impact of his words, the second by publicly humiliating him through asserting the irrelevance and impotence of his words. #3 is about as hypocritical as it gets, given that the same commenters attempting to earnestly and non-ironically shame the author over the judgments he chose to express and the values those judgments revealed would doubtless be aghast and offended were he to use shaming language against, say, women who choose to wear revealing clothing and engage in promiscuous sexual activity and the values their actions reveal.  #4 and #5 are dishonest and juvenile conversational weapons employed frequently by Progressives, who unsurprisingly tend to be dishonest and juvenile. #6 is boring emotional grandstanding and self-congratulatory moral preening, when it doesn’t verge into thinly-veiled advocacy for infringements on free speech. #7 is simply funny, because even more plainly than the other six it reveals exactly how easy it is to provoke to a childlike tantrum from people who demand to be respected for the mature judgment, sober reasoning skills and superior intellect they’re quite certain they possess but can never seem to demonstrate when the situation calls for it.

Recognizing these kinds of reactions is key to learning how to respond to (or not respond to) them, but when encountering them one at a time one is likely to be too offended or frustrated or perhaps intimidated to take a step back to see what is really going on. The value of this sociological experiment lies in its exposure of a variety of these responses in a concentrated and readily-visible form. It certainly doesn’t cover all the bases (nobody accused Roosh of being  a racist, for instance), but it’s a useful eye-opener to the corruption of thought among Progressives.

 

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