Hello from your friendly neighborhood debunker! It’s been a few (fact-check: 18) days since I last ranted, which is only because the absolute nitpicking nonsense that’s getting put out there as fact-checking has become so ludicrous that it’s gone beyond warp speed stupidity and well into full plaid.
I mean, just look at this shit! How am I supposed to do anything about this? Every time I sit down to write a spicy debunking of some abortion of a “fact-check” that someone without any idea what they’re doing farted out, I see something else that’s even worse, then something that’s even worse than that, and by the time I’ve processed it all the news cycle has moved on to the next phase of whatever lunacy we’re going to have to contend with for the rest of this election cycle.
So instead, I’m going to write about another disinformation campaign, one that no amount of fact-checks will ever be able to touch: structural misogyny. Without it, we wouldn’t have most of the nonsense floating around that we have today.
Don’t worry. I can explain. And I’m gonna!
As a professional who has debunked herself out of countless jobs, I have carefully observed what’s been going down over the last decade or so, from GamerGate all the way to now, where actual elected officials cut their racist shitposting teeth on 4chan and it shows, and I have thought it all the way through to one irrefutable conclusion:
Misogyny makes you stupid.
Honestly. We’ve all seen perfectly normal-seeming people get forever changed for the far worse by some bullshit internet rabbit hole by now, right? And then you wonder to yourself, holy shit, could I have ever seen this coming? What was it in them that led them from normal inhabitants of reality to a pair of blank eyes with a little worm peeping out from behind them?
There are many paths to becoming a full-blown fash-humping piece of shit, but each of them starts with becoming convinced that a big chunk of the world’s population is inferior and untrustworthy. This is depressingly easy for a lot of people!
Misogynists don’t like women simply because they are women. Structural misogyny — aka The Patriarchy — encourages that mindset because there’s a whole lot of money and power in fucking women over, and there’s nothing women can do to make ourselves more palatable to people who already hate us. They hate us for just being, like, womanly at them, and no amount of yelling, or logicking, or special pleading will make them think otherwise.
The dirty little secret is that it’s also quite easy to be misogynistic in the US of A, just as it’s easy to be racist (which coexists with misogyny more often than not). Much of American culture has been set up to reward hating women for my whole-ass lifetime! For example, if you complain about having your titties groped at work, you’re No-Fun Susie the complainer who ruins the vibe. If you go along with it, you get to feel special. You’re not like the others. You’re a fun girl. You’re one of the good ones! To fight that is to swim upstream, your entire life.
After a while, you even start to believe it, sort of, maybe, I guess.
This sort of thinking, no matter where you are on the gender spectrum, takes a lot of work, especially when you’re surrounded on all sides by living refutations of that mindset. You have to keep reminding yourself that women are inferior and cooking up reasons for it. You also have to believe weirder and weirder things and surround yourself with people just like you in order to keep believing it, what with all sorts of evidence to the contrary that women are human beings worthy of the same exact respect as anyone else.
And that’s how you end up saying extremely weird shit like this. Or this. Or (God help us all) this. Jesus fucking H. Christ on a carousel.
Misogyny is how you end up with absolute freakshows like Donald Trump, who is basically Misogynist Prime, referring to women as breeding stock or whatever kick he’s on this week, and how seemingly normal people coagulate and curdle into conspiracy theorists — if you keep chasing misogyny, eventually you’re going to end up believing some really out-there shit.
Your friendly neighborhood debunker was just a wee radio network anchor once upon a time, approximately one billion years ago when dinosaurs and lizard people still roamed the earth. I worked in a professional culture in which, believe it or not, some colleagues didn’t like me. They said I was crass! They complained I was confrontational! Can you believe that shit?
And when management finally hauled me in to explain myself, they wouldn’t even take “I work with a bunch of fucking ding-dongs who couldn’t report their collective way out of a paper bag” as an excuse for my bad behavior, even though it was one hundred percent true!
So off went your friendly neighborhood debunker to Get Along With Your Dipshit Coworkers class, where she discovered something truly hilarious and enraging: Her instructor was the only man in the whole class. That’s right! The only people whose behavior was getting bitched about in the entire company were the women! We all had a good laugh about that one, so we wouldn’t cry and then get called overemotional hysterics by the lone dude in the room. And we didn’t, and at the end we all got little certificates saying that we had passed our Get Along With Your Dipshit Coworkers class, and everybody was happy, except for the women, who are never happy, am I right guys, am I right?
But why, I hear you asking, is this little story relevant? I’m so glad you asked.
That anecdote is just one example of what structural misogyny looks like in practice. It’s that constant, low-key drip of criticisms and complaints that have nothing to do with your perceived gender, oh no no no, it’s how you comport yourself, or how you looked at a coworker this one time, or how the way you are isn’t quite good enough but no one can tell you how, exactly, and you and your work are just so unlikeable. But it’s your fault, you stupid bitch, and if you don’t fix it you’re a failure! Why can’t you be more like Whiteboy McFailson over there? Everybody likes him!
That incident exposed a cultural issue at a major broadcast network. Now export that internal culture to all the reporters there who are getting promoted instead of sent to Mean Yelly Lady Class, because they aren’t a bunch of shrill unlikeable bitches, and what sorts of approaches a journalist doing quite well in that sort of culture might take to covering a woman of color who is the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States.
And let me just say this: It’s absolutely fair game to criticize anyone in politics. In fact, all public figures, elected officials or not, should be held up to scrutiny. Otherwise, how would you know whether they are acting in the public interest? We might have all sorts of monsters just running around, trying to influence public opinion in all sorts of underhanded ways!
Haha! That’s as much of a funny as I’m capable of making in an election year.
But this kind of bullshit isn’t scrutiny. Anyone who has ever lived as a fairly competent professional woman, particularly a woman who isn’t white, sees exactly what it really is: fucking endless nitpicking and negging to go along with the theft of professional credit and the inevitable titty-groping that has over the years turned me, and many others just like me, straight into The Joker.
Now imagine that shit going on all over the place, in just about every news organization, because boy howdy, it sure is! Now what do you think that does to the stories that reporters swimming in those waters are writing? A cultural problem doesn’t need to be active censorship in order to be harmful.
And that’s why I say with total confidence that misogyny — along with racism and antisemitism — is the greatest security issue that the American people face today, because the people entrusted with maintaining our information ecosystem are presenting skewed versions of the world to the rest of us, because they are not examining their own biases and the cultures that produce them. Their failures affect how we see everything in the world, especially since we don’t really have a way to track down actual vetted information any more.
To put it another way, misogyny doesn’t just make you stupid. Structural misogyny makes us all stupid by tainting the way we look at the world. Failing to question the structural and what effects it might have on your own life leads to living in a full-blown “bitches, amirite?” echo chamber. Before you know it, you’re living in a strongman authoritarian society and wondering exactly when your rights got taken away, because trust me, pal — it never ends with just one group of people.
You don’t want to be stupid, right? Question that shit.
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