Proof We Are Not Alone!

Hello my Feminist Friends, the other day I was introduced to a blog by our social media guru called “Feminist Law Professors” and I just had to share some of it with you. If you couldn’t tell from the title it is a blog consisting of feminist law professors from around the U.S. who hope to build a stronger community for themselves, and I couldn’t believe how many of their blogs related to our class.

Firstly, of course is the picture I have posted to ploy you into reading my blog. It was posted by Professor Bridget Crawford who links us to the original author Richard Darell. He asks the question “is this every woman’s dream?” and it just so beautifully tied into our discussion from Monday that I couldn’t resist posting it.

However, the blog that I really want to bring to your attention is by Professor Kaimipono D. Wenger “Harassment, male privilege, and jokes that women just don’t get”. He discusses what our class has been struggling with for the past couple of weeks regarding rape jokes on the internet. His explanation reminded me of what Wjachman might call “pessimism of the 1980’s feminist approach” which stressed the “inherently masculine nature of technoscience”…

Why is the internet a different place for men than for women? There are doubtless a number of contributing causes, but one of the major factors is that the internet is largely a male-constructed discursive space, and internet discussion norms often build on assumptions of male privilege.

Men build discursive spaces and discursive norms based on their own experience. And for instance, in a male-built discursive space, a threat of sexual violence may be viewed by male participants as an obvious joke.

So as much as I would like to agree with Castell– that the internet has created horizontal networks where hierarchies do not exist. I have to see rape jokes on the internet as an example of the fact that men still dominate cyberspace.

Then it was as if Wenger was in our class Monday responding to the outrageous response that one of our fellow colleagues has been receiving…

And then when someone (almost always female) stands up against the male-constructed discursive norms in which threats of violence and sexual violence can be characterized as merely a joke, she is attacked for being oversensitive. These attacks are another instance of denying of the reality of women’s experiences.

He goes on to describe how people like this– who discount women’s experience as irrelevant because it does not “conform to male discussion norms”, are being labelled by female bloggers as Mansplaining. They actually have their own Mansplaining jokes that we could use as a response to Facebook’s site “You know she’s playing hard to get when…”

Instead…

You might be a mansplainer if you have ever accused a woman in an argument of being “irrational” or “emotional”, when you are arguing about something which has no emotional basis, or when you simply disagree with them.

You may be a mansplainer if you have ever used evolutionary theory to justify the objection of women… ‘But we have to look at teh boobiez! We EVOLVED to look at teh boobiez to find a mate!’.

So what I’m taking from this blog is that we shouldn’t dismiss our Second Wave Mother’s as pessimistic and perhaps we can find examples of how their arguments do run truths. However, through the development of cyberfeminism and classes like this one we are being introduced to terms and approaches used by Third Wave feminists to help us defeat patriarchy in cyberspace.

I would love to know your opinions!

Do you agree with Wenger? Are rape jokes on the internet a result to the web being a male constructed space?

If so then does this set back cyberfeminists? Or does it further emphasize the need for cyberfeminism?