might want to change your tagline. dick.
wil wheaton: sexist douchebag. if only i were an educated member of the Creative Class, i'd understand how making a sexist joke and then peevishly stamping my foot and saying "that's a stupid straw man I AM NOT A SEXIST" somehow magically negates actually saying something sexist. but i better shut my mouth, before wesley fucking crusher points and laughs at me. my fragile girl-ego can't take rejection, after all. and i am sure to either cry hysterically or become completely unhinged and desperate to win back his respect.
come to think of it, wil, you better be careful. i'm an unstable female, after all. clingy. mad with the need of male approval. if you do something to hurt me, i might just snap. like glenn close. and do something just terrible. us bitches is crazy that way.
posted by anne @ 8:03 PM
11 Comments:
Yeah, I saw that and winced. But it's interesting from a rhetorical standpoint: it's a multiple strawman situation!
I'm guessing that if someone actually did confront Mr Wheaton over this entry, the conversation might go something like this (apart from the pointing and laughing):
Rationally Offended Person: Wil, you're being a sexist douchebag.
WW: That's a straw man! I'm a feminist; I treat my wife with respect, I run in breast cancer marathons, and I attack sexism and racism whenever I see them, even when it's in that one TV show I was on. Remember that TV show? I was totally on it.
ROP: Yeah, Wil, I remember. It was pretty cool at times. But that's all a straw man - it doesn't matter what else you do, if you say something sexist and douchebaggy, then you're kind of a sexist douchebag, and that entry about Hillary was both sexist and douchebaggy.
WW: Straw man! I have the right to dislike Hillary Clinton despite the fact that she's a woman without that making me a sexist douchebag.
ROP: Straw man! I'm not against your right to dislike a candidate, I'm against you calling her "the psycho ex-girlfriend of the Democratic Party."
And so on. It's like the first little piggy's housing development out there. And when you have a situation like this, and the discussion doesn't go deep enough to get through the layers of (perceived) straw, you end up with all involved parties feeling thoroughly convinced that their opponent was just a jackass setting fire to straw men instead of getting to the issue itself.
Anyway, my point is, I'm agreeing with you, but I can understand why Wheaton feels that attacks on his entry are attacks on a straw man. That's the hardest thing about dealing with cases like this, where the sexism is merely a thin veneer of ugliness painted onto a solid wood credenza of reason.
but that conversation can't even be started if he's going to preemptively shut the conversation down, you know? and this isn't the first time he's said something in a sexist vein. so i'm just going to go with "jackass", and i think i'm justified in doing so.
frustratingly, there are a whole lot of jackasses out here in this world. and an awful lot of them employ the reasoning wheaton did.
...and now the blog where i first saw a link to the wheaton post is being swarmed by angry sexist fanboys defending wil's honour. it's quite the sight to see.
lamest. raid. evar. someone deployed the Weeping Picard, evidently without any sense of irony.
They're from Fark, and they feel the need to keep explaining what Fark is, because women don't know about Fark.
the best part was the Fark Emissary who came over sometime last night and left a string of threatening messages to freak everyone out:
"omg U JUST GOT FARKED!"
...
"yeah in like an hour and a a half YOU WILL GET PWNT."
...
"okay, any minute now, we will totally invade you."
...
"we are fark and we're coming to get you! seriously, just give it like ten more minutes. ARE YOU SCARED YET BECAUSE YOU SHOULD BE"
...
"i really mean it this time, you are in for SO MUCH SHIT"
He's not a dick, he just said something stupid without thinking it through, and then bruised easily when he got some personal attacks for it. Arguing with him is one thing; personal attacks are another.
That's the point of the sexism criticism too, isn't it? Let's have an argument, but let's not resort to irrelevancies?
Not that I'm on his side or anything :} Just keeping it rational.
um, no, actually, he was a dick. but thanks for coming to my blog and chastising me. i just don't know what i'd do if random strange men weren't around to 'keep it rational' for me, you know?
this 'personal attack', as you so delicately phrased it, is on my own damn blog. if wil is so delicate that his ego can be bruised by a post on a low-traffic blogger account which wasn't even tracked back to his blog, perhaps he should stick to getting fluffy bunny adulation at the cons, where it's nice and friendly and they provide free-range boobs, and stay off the big bad interwebs. or he could, you know, not be a dick.
wil shut down any possibility of discussion with his ridiculous little foot-stamp of an edit at the bottom of the post in question. perhaps you should go over there and help him keep it rational.
Yeah, I didn't really include your post among the personal attacks I was referring to. Your own blog, as you say. I meant the posts on his blog. I wasn't chastising you, or anyone really. Just reconstructing his actions.
(I just figured anne might like a break from explaining this on her blog for roughly the bajillionth time. So I'm helping out.)
There still seems to be the problem that some people view saying "Hey, that thing you just said was pretty sexist" as the equivalent of "You are a bad person".
Here on her blog, and in a lot of the civilized world now, anne and others recognize that one of the simple truths of being a human being living with privilege in this world is that we all have the potential to be sexist, and racist, and classist, and ablist, and homophobic as fitting our particular privileges. We just are. Even the best intentioned among us will sometimes say a very offensive thing. When we do so, the useful response when someone points it out is to say "Thank you for pointing out my mistake. I'm really sorry I said that. What I meant was..."
Wil Wheaton demonstrated several of the many not very useful responses, such as "It was just a joke", "That's a strawman", and of course the old stand by "I am not sexist (racist, homophobic, etc). Look at how much I like women (blacks, gays, etc)"
Saying a sexist thing doesn't make Wil a dick. It makes him a privileged white guy. Using boring tropes to defend himself instead of fessing up makes him, in his own words, a dick.
hi, liz! thank you for having words more useful than mine. i appreciate it a lot.
You were doing a great job on your own. It's just that you shouldn't have to always do these things alone.
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