When I got a new computer with McAfee and let it monitor my email program it started blocking all my emails from substack and conservative websites. They wouldn’t even show up in junk mail. When I realized what was happening it took weeks to unblock the emails and re-request them so they’d come through again. I never got the conservative emails to work again. I had to send those to a different email and some still don’t work.
Six years in and no one's ever told me what "white women" are supposed to do to be "held accountable" for the purported fact that the majority of white women voted for Trump. A lot of men with misogynistic streaks have, however, managed to get away with saying some very vile stuff about women just by appending "white" to the front.
The SJW left is the current version of the 90s Christian evangelical right. My beliefs will be imposed upon you you unclean immoral heathen and you shall bow down and acknowledge my righteousness.
I would add that the whole "controversy as advertising" scheme really took off with Trump during his first presidential campaign. When Nike signed Colin Kaepernick to an advertising deal I wrote that the company was taking a page out of Trump's play book: why waste money on paying for ads when CNN/Fox/etc. will do your publicity for you?
The downside of course is that it's a race to the bottom. If there's no such thing as bad publicity and what counts is generating controversy then each new public announcement has to push the envelope, has to be ever more outrageous than the last. The effect on the public discourse is obviously going to be corrosive.
What made Gillette especially egregious is that they were getting their asses handed to them by Dollar Shave Club and other low cost competitors. That was the background for that ad.
Anybody who went with Gillette over a lower priced competitor based purely on that ad was a moron. But did anyone like that actually exist? I doubt it, (at least in large numbers), but Gillette clearly had such a low opinion of the public that it felt that virtue signaling was sufficient to fool people into paying more money for the same product.
Would love to know if there was any actual data to show if there was an impact in any direction ? Same with the Nike series. So many exogenous things going on , it seems pretty hard to reliably tease out the effectiveness of a single ad campaign. I am sure there are many metrics they can point to, but I always wonder how good the content validity is to some of those measurements.
I would say the issue for progressive white women is they spent way too much time pushing unpopular ideas and not enough time protecting what they had. It’s like the idea that things could go backward never entered their minds.
This is what happens when you brainwash kids with bullshit like "You will change the world". Never mind that a) every generation's been told that b) not everybody in every generation agrees with one another, much less with everyone else who's younger or older and c) that's not actually how history works.
The thing I found even more appalling than Forster’s suggestion that white women are only suited to secretarial work were some of the responses, for example:
“YES MA'AM. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 We're late, we're unprepared, and we don't get to walk in like that and lead the meeting. But we can bring everyone a coffee and take allll the notes, and do it happily and humbly.”
Decades of work to get society to see women as capable of more than taking notes and getting coffee, years of saying “I don’t have to smile just because you ask me to” have shifted with absolute whiplash pace to the most progressive white women willing to eat it up and say thank you.
Absolutely nothing wrong with secretarial work, nor telling new recruits to activism that they have to start with the grunt work, but the explicitly gendered language and attitude here is straight out of the 1950s.
The far Left (definitely including the Socialists) has been gaslighting women for many years now, completely ignoring the urgent need to protect the most important women's rights (bodily autonomy) when not actively working against them (backing men who claim the right to invade women's spaces), and deciding to walk away when an actual woman (HRC) was in sight of actual power (POTUS), because said woman was just not cool enough for them.
Lol of course. Hate on that guy who ran to bring us inclusive healthcare for all (with, again, no Hyde Amendment). Makes total sense to not be able to stand him.
It seems very clear that the only reason Biden won was due to the left flooding in to vote for him.
It may be worth asking what Biden has done with control of two of the three branches of government. Or what the DNC did in the two months between when this ruling was leaked and when it went into effect. Or what their long term concrete plans are with regard to abortion.
Because it seems like they don't have a plan and haven't had a plan the last two months. But the fundraising emails sure did go out fast!
Democrats have majority. If a supermajority is needed for any legislation, how was Trump able to do so much with only a slim margin in the senate and a deficit in the house?
Also, the fact that Biden and the DNC have no interest in doing anything about the filibuster has caused his major legislation to collapse.
If HRC would have reached out to the middle of the country instead of calling everybody "deplorables" and hanging out on the coasts, she would have one. And the cabal of white feminist hags screeching that America OWED her the presidency is another reason she went down.
Bright side for decent liberals is that Roe being struck down is going to slow the red wave considerably. And by 2024, should the Dems somehow conjure up a young, charasmatic candidate who isn't property of the woke mob, I think they get it; many idiot Republican politicians are going to try to make birth control illegal and it's going to lead to moderates holding their nose and voting for Democrats.
I take Freddie as my default socialist, who also voted for HRC, oh so reluctantly; and more importantly declined to use his superpower of persuavive writing to help out at all, instead writing some pretty nasty shit about Hillary.
And HRC, as POTUS, would not have needed to codify Roe; all she needed to do was not appoint three ultra-right-wing justices, which I believe was fully within her limited capacities.
And I care because things could have been different, and I lament that world that could have been, but is not, because the Left (me included, for not persuading enough of you) fucked up royally.
I am not claiming any moral high ground. I'm just mad.
And now, the Left has now gone so far off the rails (I am 100% Team TERF and 100% Team Anti-Racism = Racism) that I have reluctantly concluded that the Republican Right is today, amazingly, the lesser evil.
You're confusing the primary and the general. I had no problem with people supporting Sanders ih the primary, until it became clear that he had no chance to win the nomination, at which point he should have dropped out and urged his supporters to back HRC. (He did that finally, but only after fighting uselessly to the bitter end, denigrating her in speech after speech, day after day after day.)
There was a strong progressive case to be made for HRC over Trump, because of SCOTUS. But our most skilled and most powerful voices chose not to make that case.
And so here we are. Roe is gone. Executive action on climate change is gone. Much more will be going soon.
We, the Left, could have done something. But we didn't. We sat on our asses and sucked our thumbs and dreamed our foolish dreams.
And then we went insane, backing racism and the worst kind of partriarchy, the kind that says that women aren't good enough as they are and so teen girls should go lop off their breasts because maybe they're really boys (which is such a much better thing to be dontcha know).
So all in all I'm pretty pissed about the way things have turned out.
I'm not going to detail all of the ways that HRC was an unacceptable candidate---for those on the left or not. Just remember that she was roundly rejected in the 2008 primary and was nearly defeated in 2016 primary by a self-avowed Socialist from Vermont. This is evidence that she was a toxic candidate who only won by capturing a large portion of the party apparatus...and if the party isn't even enthusiastic then why do you think the rest of the country would be?
Be mad that you could support a candidate so transparently awful, and known to be, that they could lose to Trump.
Yeah, that was sort of the thing. Bernie was more "out there" so you get more street cred saying Bernie or die because you get to pretend you are more extreme (than these capitalistic neoliberals and centrists - ewwwww).
I dunno. I think there was an alternate history where, in the face of demonstrated movement energy behind Medicare for all (which got rid of the Hyde Amendment btw), the major institutions of “womens issues” supported that effort instead of trying to wall the abortion fight off in the service of Democratic leadership. These divides within the wider Left are not simply or even primarily the result of individual moral failings. Lots of powerful actors and institutions have failed to build or even encourage solidarity at the base.
All true, but here in our timeline (or branch of the universal wave function), once it was down to HRC or Trump, it was time for the base (that is, you and me) to put aside differences and go all-out for HRC. And if we didn't do that (which we didn't), we would get the result we have today: Roe gone, executive-branch action on the environment gone, voting rights eviscerated, etc etc etc.
Before the 2016 election, Andrew Sullivan wrote that a Trump victory would be "an extinction-level event for American democracy". He was right. That extinction is taking place over a longer period of time than we envisioned, but it is in full motion.
And all of us on the Left who knew better in 2016, but refused to act affirmatively, share the blame.
You are so brilliant that you missed where I said it was silly tactically (because I made the opposite choice obviously), but I notice that you didn’t defend your earlier implication that leftist feminists who didn’t vote for HRC are somehow involved in “gaslighting” women.
I was a socialist who voted for hrc in 2016, but in retrospect I wish I hadn't. Not because she isn't "cool" but because she actively opposes many of my values.
It is almost as if Roe alarmism was used by liberal institutions to hate on Bernie instead of do much of anything to push back for the last decade, considering how flat footed these institutions that supposedly didn’t have “time” for primaries or movements or swells of support for expanded and universal healthcare for all. That and a half decade of RBG fandom. Maybe we actually did have time for a big universal healthcare movement and it was…squandered.
The fear was more than warranted, and yet it was also used cynically by people who could have actually done something about it other than fundraise and help crush the left.
Seems a bit more concrete than a poem and call for donations...
We've longed recognized that the Democratic approach is insufficient. Rather than rejecting the Hyde amendment or passing legislation codifying Roe, the Democratic response has been `vote for us to prevent the Supreme Court from taking away your rights'. A bit convenient for them...
Yeah it is weird. One way they beat back the Left was to say “these folks are too focused on stuff that isn’t defending Roe,” but like, then how were they caught off-guard this week? Their faction won and they just…didn’t have much more than fundraising emails?!?
Apparently, being a ww (note the lowercase) is some kind of disability that one must overcome in order to become an "activist"?
I understand the criticism that much of the SJW movement is just Militant Karenism, privileged and overeducated white women confusing their banal insights with universal truths and expecting the rest of the world to treat their personal gripes as cosmic injustices and to lend a hand in getting the manager in here to fix this, already!
That said, it is equally absurd to start from the assumption that ww have nothing and can for the time being have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, all because of the simple fact that they are ww.
"Alright, alright, fine: besides the 19th Amendment, the Catholic Worker's Movement, criminalizing marital rape, establishing workplace protections against sexual harassment, Title IX, the first birth control clinics, the Equal Pay Act, and the Violence Against Women Act, and establishing the basic framework of American women's rights activism, WHAT HAVE THE WHITE WOMEN EVER DONE FOR US?!"
I always expect the dumbest possible behavior out of twitter users, and I am never disappointed.
`Winnebagos' would also have been acceptable.
haha wow
Try another browser.
Try another shark cage.
cagy comment
it’s the sharks
This is not a joke. Dozens of people are bitten every year.
There are dozens of us!
That one shark needs to chill out
This comment wins the thread. Everybody else go home now.
I use the Brave browser which doesn't sell my privacy.
When I got a new computer with McAfee and let it monitor my email program it started blocking all my emails from substack and conservative websites. They wouldn’t even show up in junk mail. When I realized what was happening it took weeks to unblock the emails and re-request them so they’d come through again. I never got the conservative emails to work again. I had to send those to a different email and some still don’t work.
The thing about great white sharks is that everyone thinks they’re the bosses of the ocean, but ACTUALLY they need to learn that they are the interns.
(Actual quote from the book, probably.)
They think they know how to shark, but actually they are very bad at sharking. Great white sharks don't have the culture to know how to shark.
Equating sharkdom to a culture is problematic
The nurse sharks do the real work, but do people write about it. DO THEY??
And for every Sharkmoiselles d’Avignon painted by a Great White, there are 20 quilts by a Nurse that you’ll never hear of.
Thanks for making me chuckle.
Besides even Great Whites don’t have a backbone.
how DARE you DISPARAGE the ALTERNATIVE CARTILAGINOUS SUPPORT STRUCTURES of our AQUEOUS BRETHREN???!!?!??!?
I'm sure great white sharks can be just as unaware of their privilege as white women. Does the book cover that too?
Six years in and no one's ever told me what "white women" are supposed to do to be "held accountable" for the purported fact that the majority of white women voted for Trump. A lot of men with misogynistic streaks have, however, managed to get away with saying some very vile stuff about women just by appending "white" to the front.
Handmaids tale style group stoning?
The fanatical self-regard of some people and their desire to exercise zeal on others. . . is weirdly fascinating.
The SJW left is the current version of the 90s Christian evangelical right. My beliefs will be imposed upon you you unclean immoral heathen and you shall bow down and acknowledge my righteousness.
Said humbly
This is common to any group that gets the whip hand.
Can I have a turn? I DEFINITELY won’t be like that, I promise.
Great article.
I would add that the whole "controversy as advertising" scheme really took off with Trump during his first presidential campaign. When Nike signed Colin Kaepernick to an advertising deal I wrote that the company was taking a page out of Trump's play book: why waste money on paying for ads when CNN/Fox/etc. will do your publicity for you?
The downside of course is that it's a race to the bottom. If there's no such thing as bad publicity and what counts is generating controversy then each new public announcement has to push the envelope, has to be ever more outrageous than the last. The effect on the public discourse is obviously going to be corrosive.
All in the service of selling a shark book.
Reminds me of something Jon Kay pointed out the other day with companies using the predictable coverage of their virtue signaling to self promote.
https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1542178596944547840
Hbomberguy did a video about this a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06yy88tLWlg
What made Gillette especially egregious is that they were getting their asses handed to them by Dollar Shave Club and other low cost competitors. That was the background for that ad.
Anybody who went with Gillette over a lower priced competitor based purely on that ad was a moron. But did anyone like that actually exist? I doubt it, (at least in large numbers), but Gillette clearly had such a low opinion of the public that it felt that virtue signaling was sufficient to fool people into paying more money for the same product.
Some women pay more for the "pink tax" on things like razors, so there's probably a handful of men that would bite.
Now did the people choosing to buy Gillette after stunt outstrip the customers they lost? Doubtful.
I'm still thankful though as it made for a pretty solid meme format.
And Memability, let’s face it, is the ultimate criterion by which any cultural phenomenon should be judged.
Would love to know if there was any actual data to show if there was an impact in any direction ? Same with the Nike series. So many exogenous things going on , it seems pretty hard to reliably tease out the effectiveness of a single ad campaign. I am sure there are many metrics they can point to, but I always wonder how good the content validity is to some of those measurements.
Does the fact that ww are the no. 1 killers of sharks change your opinion?
Also, without white women's tears, there wouldn't BE any oceans for the sharks in the first place!
👆 underrated comment
Love the idea of curated guest authors. Happy to use you as a "gateway drug" to additional interesting writers :)
I'm guessing the shark opus isn't going to make 'book club' status around here?
I would say the issue for progressive white women is they spent way too much time pushing unpopular ideas and not enough time protecting what they had. It’s like the idea that things could go backward never entered their minds.
This is what happens when you brainwash kids with bullshit like "You will change the world". Never mind that a) every generation's been told that b) not everybody in every generation agrees with one another, much less with everyone else who's younger or older and c) that's not actually how history works.
Well it's not like they ever finish the sentence with "... for the better".
progressive white women aren’t a monolith. I know the ubiquity of lululemons makes it feel that way.
The thing I found even more appalling than Forster’s suggestion that white women are only suited to secretarial work were some of the responses, for example:
“YES MA'AM. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 We're late, we're unprepared, and we don't get to walk in like that and lead the meeting. But we can bring everyone a coffee and take allll the notes, and do it happily and humbly.”
Decades of work to get society to see women as capable of more than taking notes and getting coffee, years of saying “I don’t have to smile just because you ask me to” have shifted with absolute whiplash pace to the most progressive white women willing to eat it up and say thank you.
Absolutely nothing wrong with secretarial work, nor telling new recruits to activism that they have to start with the grunt work, but the explicitly gendered language and attitude here is straight out of the 1950s.
It's part of the revenge of the patriarchy, which is in full swing on the Left as well as the Right.
Whereas in fact… Steinem, Friedan, de Beauvoir…
PM Mindset
Praise the Master 😇
The far Left (definitely including the Socialists) has been gaslighting women for many years now, completely ignoring the urgent need to protect the most important women's rights (bodily autonomy) when not actively working against them (backing men who claim the right to invade women's spaces), and deciding to walk away when an actual woman (HRC) was in sight of actual power (POTUS), because said woman was just not cool enough for them.
What's cooler than a Jewish septuagenarian from Brooklyn who gesticulates wildly when he speaks?
Don’t forget his mittens
Does part of the love for Bernie Sanders have to do with how much people hate their dads?
I love my dad, and I can't stand Bernie, so that fits.
Lol of course. Hate on that guy who ran to bring us inclusive healthcare for all (with, again, no Hyde Amendment). Makes total sense to not be able to stand him.
Mark, I support your right to not feel the Bern
So you’re saying… a Bernie/Romney ticket?
Or the hair. That perpetually wind-strewn effect is pretty cool.
I saw a bumper sticker today that read “BERNIE - Hindsight Is 2020.”
Which must be painful to have on your car in 2022. (I say this with all the affection in the world for Bernie.)
Whatever it was, was it really important enough to lose Roe over?
Or for you Greens, was backing Stein a worthwhile trade for today's loss of executive-branch greenhouse gas regulation authority?
It seems very clear that the only reason Biden won was due to the left flooding in to vote for him.
It may be worth asking what Biden has done with control of two of the three branches of government. Or what the DNC did in the two months between when this ruling was leaked and when it went into effect. Or what their long term concrete plans are with regard to abortion.
Because it seems like they don't have a plan and haven't had a plan the last two months. But the fundraising emails sure did go out fast!
I agree with that. It’s tendentious to put it this way, but you could say Biden didn’t win, Trump lost.
Biden controls the Senate? Perhaps you've heard of the filibuster ...
Democrats have majority. If a supermajority is needed for any legislation, how was Trump able to do so much with only a slim margin in the senate and a deficit in the house?
Also, the fact that Biden and the DNC have no interest in doing anything about the filibuster has caused his major legislation to collapse.
If HRC would have reached out to the middle of the country instead of calling everybody "deplorables" and hanging out on the coasts, she would have one. And the cabal of white feminist hags screeching that America OWED her the presidency is another reason she went down.
Bright side for decent liberals is that Roe being struck down is going to slow the red wave considerably. And by 2024, should the Dems somehow conjure up a young, charasmatic candidate who isn't property of the woke mob, I think they get it; many idiot Republican politicians are going to try to make birth control illegal and it's going to lead to moderates holding their nose and voting for Democrats.
"cabal of white feminist hags"
More viscious misogyny from the Left.
I take Freddie as my default socialist, who also voted for HRC, oh so reluctantly; and more importantly declined to use his superpower of persuavive writing to help out at all, instead writing some pretty nasty shit about Hillary.
And HRC, as POTUS, would not have needed to codify Roe; all she needed to do was not appoint three ultra-right-wing justices, which I believe was fully within her limited capacities.
And I care because things could have been different, and I lament that world that could have been, but is not, because the Left (me included, for not persuading enough of you) fucked up royally.
I am not claiming any moral high ground. I'm just mad.
And now, the Left has now gone so far off the rails (I am 100% Team TERF and 100% Team Anti-Racism = Racism) that I have reluctantly concluded that the Republican Right is today, amazingly, the lesser evil.
This is so bizarre.
Also, if he couldn't convince you to vote for Sanders, what makes you believe Freddie could convince others to vote for Clinton?
You're confusing the primary and the general. I had no problem with people supporting Sanders ih the primary, until it became clear that he had no chance to win the nomination, at which point he should have dropped out and urged his supporters to back HRC. (He did that finally, but only after fighting uselessly to the bitter end, denigrating her in speech after speech, day after day after day.)
There was a strong progressive case to be made for HRC over Trump, because of SCOTUS. But our most skilled and most powerful voices chose not to make that case.
And so here we are. Roe is gone. Executive action on climate change is gone. Much more will be going soon.
We, the Left, could have done something. But we didn't. We sat on our asses and sucked our thumbs and dreamed our foolish dreams.
And then we went insane, backing racism and the worst kind of partriarchy, the kind that says that women aren't good enough as they are and so teen girls should go lop off their breasts because maybe they're really boys (which is such a much better thing to be dontcha know).
So all in all I'm pretty pissed about the way things have turned out.
I'm not going to detail all of the ways that HRC was an unacceptable candidate---for those on the left or not. Just remember that she was roundly rejected in the 2008 primary and was nearly defeated in 2016 primary by a self-avowed Socialist from Vermont. This is evidence that she was a toxic candidate who only won by capturing a large portion of the party apparatus...and if the party isn't even enthusiastic then why do you think the rest of the country would be?
Be mad that you could support a candidate so transparently awful, and known to be, that they could lose to Trump.
Sure does seem like everything is someone else's fault
Yeah, that was sort of the thing. Bernie was more "out there" so you get more street cred saying Bernie or die because you get to pretend you are more extreme (than these capitalistic neoliberals and centrists - ewwwww).
That's what every cool girl says.
Now now. Don't start derailing this conversation on the forbidden topic. FdB will ban you.
I dunno. I think there was an alternate history where, in the face of demonstrated movement energy behind Medicare for all (which got rid of the Hyde Amendment btw), the major institutions of “womens issues” supported that effort instead of trying to wall the abortion fight off in the service of Democratic leadership. These divides within the wider Left are not simply or even primarily the result of individual moral failings. Lots of powerful actors and institutions have failed to build or even encourage solidarity at the base.
All true, but here in our timeline (or branch of the universal wave function), once it was down to HRC or Trump, it was time for the base (that is, you and me) to put aside differences and go all-out for HRC. And if we didn't do that (which we didn't), we would get the result we have today: Roe gone, executive-branch action on the environment gone, voting rights eviscerated, etc etc etc.
Before the 2016 election, Andrew Sullivan wrote that a Trump victory would be "an extinction-level event for American democracy". He was right. That extinction is taking place over a longer period of time than we envisioned, but it is in full motion.
And all of us on the Left who knew better in 2016, but refused to act affirmatively, share the blame.
Are you under the impression that the feminists who did not vote for Clinton in 2016 were engaged in mass gaslighting?
That doesn’t sound plausible. Like many on the Left, they may have some silly ideas about tactics—and I would leave it at that.
The Left does indeed have many silly ideas about tactics.
All of you anti-HRC folks got your wish. She lost, she did not get to appoint the last three SCOTUS Justices, Trump did.
As Dr. Phil would say, "How's that workin' for ya?"
You are so brilliant that you missed where I said it was silly tactically (because I made the opposite choice obviously), but I notice that you didn’t defend your earlier implication that leftist feminists who didn’t vote for HRC are somehow involved in “gaslighting” women.
I am sure I will regret this comment.
I was a socialist who voted for hrc in 2016, but in retrospect I wish I hadn't. Not because she isn't "cool" but because she actively opposes many of my values.
Like abortion?
Like Medicare for all.
It is almost as if Roe alarmism was used by liberal institutions to hate on Bernie instead of do much of anything to push back for the last decade, considering how flat footed these institutions that supposedly didn’t have “time” for primaries or movements or swells of support for expanded and universal healthcare for all. That and a half decade of RBG fandom. Maybe we actually did have time for a big universal healthcare movement and it was…squandered.
Roe alarmism would indicate that it was unwarranted fear. So I guess we disagree there.
The fear was more than warranted, and yet it was also used cynically by people who could have actually done something about it other than fundraise and help crush the left.
I feel comfortable where the socialists are and have been on this issue:
https://jacobin.com/author/anne-rumberger
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3095-without-apology
Seems a bit more concrete than a poem and call for donations...
We've longed recognized that the Democratic approach is insufficient. Rather than rejecting the Hyde amendment or passing legislation codifying Roe, the Democratic response has been `vote for us to prevent the Supreme Court from taking away your rights'. A bit convenient for them...
Yeah it is weird. One way they beat back the Left was to say “these folks are too focused on stuff that isn’t defending Roe,” but like, then how were they caught off-guard this week? Their faction won and they just…didn’t have much more than fundraising emails?!?
Love Phoebe! Good call Freddie. You’ll make a good middle-manger yet!
My god — it’s like you called him a Kulak!
Apparently, being a ww (note the lowercase) is some kind of disability that one must overcome in order to become an "activist"?
I understand the criticism that much of the SJW movement is just Militant Karenism, privileged and overeducated white women confusing their banal insights with universal truths and expecting the rest of the world to treat their personal gripes as cosmic injustices and to lend a hand in getting the manager in here to fix this, already!
That said, it is equally absurd to start from the assumption that ww have nothing and can for the time being have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, all because of the simple fact that they are ww.
Lordy, being a cat is so much easier!
[John Cleese voice]
"Alright, alright, fine: besides the 19th Amendment, the Catholic Worker's Movement, criminalizing marital rape, establishing workplace protections against sexual harassment, Title IX, the first birth control clinics, the Equal Pay Act, and the Violence Against Women Act, and establishing the basic framework of American women's rights activism, WHAT HAVE THE WHITE WOMEN EVER DONE FOR US?!"
This is the funniest part. Like activism just got invented yesterday and white women only heard about it this afternoon.
Hey Mister, what’s “acty-vision”?
They just got bought by Microsoft, last I heard.
Nicely done. 😹😹😹
Can sharks survive being passive aggressive and over-represented in mental health problems?
YES, if they include their traumas in their bio