Y'know, Echidne of the Snakes is a pretty four-square feminist. So check out how she "hates" men.

It's hard for me to address [anti-feminist Caitlin] Flanagan's theories as they are based on such an odd concept of what adolescent boys and adult men are all about. At the same time, she refuses to even look at the question what the culture might be teaching adolescent boys (this is very evident in the interview, the way she slithers away from any attempt to move the question to both boys and girls).

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

Good for her! She approvingly cites Amanda Marcotte's assessment of Flannagan's notions of what boys are all about (in the process doing an excellent job of capturing Flannagan's complete investment in the bogus Two Rules of Desire:

[F]or all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:

• Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy.
• Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it.
• Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us.

Amanda said it here.

So what have we got going on here? Two died-in-the-wool feminists, Echidne and Amanda, standing up pretty vigorously for men and boys, and desperately anti-feminist Flannagan blithly running them into the dirt.

Look, are there women out there who really, genuinely, truely hate men's guts? Yeah. But they're not exactly feminists are they? Stereotypes notwithstanding, feminists mostly rock when it comes to men. And yeah, they get exasperated when men fall for the kind of bullshit Flannagan shovels. But that's not quite the same thing as hate is it? Not a bit.

Pamela Haag begins a post with the following tidbit:

Like other local and state governments, Topeka, Kansas is in the grips of a dismal budget crisis. So this week, Topeka’s City Council did something desperate. They debated decriminalizing domestic violence--because the cost of prosecuting these cases, and other misdemeanors, is just too high. The county has already turned back 30 domestic violence cases since they stopped prosecuting them on September 8.

One of the problems with these stories is that it’s hard to believe that we’re actually hearing what we’re hearing. Sometimes I think the 20th century was all a dream, and we’ve awakened back in the 19th. Could civilization unravel so much that we rip up paved roads to save money—or revive wife-beating to save a buck? It sounds like a satirical Onion headline.

Source: Big Think Proxy

My first inclination post this with the title "Oh for heaven's sakes, part 3,776" or something like that. But the rest of Haag's post is too important to miss. It's an essay on the extremely narrow definitions of marriage extreme right-wing "traditionalists" like, naturally, Kansas governor Sam Brownback emphasize is their "marriage encouragement" policies.

It’s not heterosexual marriage generically that’s promoted in Kansas and elsewhere. It’s marriage of a particular (patriarchal) brand and a particular (gender-typed) sort.

...

Ironically, in the classes and states today that have the very lowest divorces rates—the educated, affluent middle class, that is, and uber-liberal Massachusetts—it’s precisely this sort of gender role flexibility that you’re likely to see. The community welcomes stay-at-home dads as well as stay-at-home moms. Dads and moms are likely to perform a variety of roles in marriage, from breadwinning to breadbaking and childrearing and nurturing. These precisely aren’t marriages of interdependence, but of overlapping, multi-tasking competencies. Still, the defense of marriage tends to trash career moms for ruining the family, and privilege distinct husband and wife roles

...

If a view doesn’t punch our own life in the face, then we think it can’t hurt us.

But marriage politics today aren’t just about opposition to same-sex marriage and homosexuality. No, they’re interested in your big, fat, straight wedding, too. Campaigns for traditional marriage support particular versions of heterosexual marriage. To paraphrase from Animal Farm, some marriages are more equal than others.

Yes, the initial snippet about effectively legalized wife (and husband) battering is shocking but Haag reminds us that it's just one tiny foray in a very long, quiet, and persistent campaign to and to re-enact Biblical, capital-P Patriarchy.

Having rather enjoyed I can't imagine why anyone would want to effectively repeal the second half of the 20th Century as well as the first tenth of the 21st, let alone why they'd want to force everyone else to go back. But they do.

Holly has just knocked another one out of the park re. the imputed "intention" of SlutWalk to somehow recruit "sluts."

[Q] Are you encouraging women to act like sluts?

[A] Nope! We're just saying it's an acceptable option.

Lots of people at the Slutwalk were dressed very modestly, and I personally know that some of them were monogamous or celibate. Absolutely nobody was telling these people that they needed to be sluttier to fit in. Slutwalk is not an event to recruit sluts, but to defend sluts.

Source: The Pervocracy

And that's not, incidentally, to defend sluts from rapists (it's about defending everybody from rapists. Instead its to defend against the idea, again somehow shared by rapists, law enforcement, the general public, and and anti-SlutWalkers, that if someone actually happens to be a "slut" then she's got it coming to her because men are either a) unable to control their animal natures or else b) socially sanctioned enforcers of the bogus Two Rules of Desire and don't you forget it.

[Q] What is the message of Slutwalk?

[A] The message of Slutwalk is that SOMEONE BEING A SLUT DOES NOT EXCUSE SHAMING, HARASSMENT, OR SEXUAL ASSAULT.

In other words, if you see someone looking or acting like oh my god such a slut, you let her go on her merry way. You have no more right to abuse, mock, harass, or assault her than you do any other person. And if a slut is abused or assaulted, she did not want it and did not deserve it, and the people victimizing her are every bit as guilty as if they did it to a non-slut.

And meanwhile, there's the issue of what the fuck exactly does it mean to "dress like a slut" in the first place? (Emphasis mine)

[Q] But isn't it safer for women to dress modestly?

[A] Yeah. That's the problem.

Actually, there aren't any statistics on clothing and sexual assault, but there doesn't seem to be much connection. Sexual assault isn't a matter of "she aroused me so much I just couldn't stand it;" it's an act of deliberate violence. The majority of assaults are committed by people who already know the victims. Often the assaults take place at home. Speaking anecdotally from three years of experience as an EMT and an ER worker, most of the sexual assault victims I've seen were wearing jeans, sweatpants, pajamas, even hijab. (Or little footie pajamas with Elmo on them.)

It's that last little bit that keeps me coming back, and back, and back to this topic.

There's more though. And you really should to go read the rest of her post (actually if you're not already then you should immediately subscribe to Holly's RSS feed. In fact if you've only got time to read one blog a day maybe you should stop reading this one and go read her. And I don't say that lightly.)

But one of the points Holly keeps coming back to over and over is the near-uniform failure to distinguish the intense loathing so many people -- conservatives, liberals, libertines, prudes, feminists, and MRAs alike -- feel for women who look or, worse, act like their definition of a "slut" and the little matter that even if someone does offend you to the core it's still not ok for someone to rape them for you.

Talking Points Memo says

MSNBC announces Ed Schultz's "triumphant return" to the airwaves after all that 'slut' unfortunateness.

Source: Talking Points Memo

Wouldn't it be interesting if progressive and human-potential activists (feminist and otherwise) spent a tenth of the time slamming MSNBC's decision to "triumphantly" reinstate Schultz, who used the word "slut" in it's usual sense, than they've spent slamming the founders and imitators of SlutWalk Toronto, who organized their protests because they deplore use of the word "slut?"

Because Great Sticks of Butter there's a lot of heated opposition to SlutWalk.  And meanwhile, of all things, MSNBC executives have been more publicly demonstrative against Schultz!

And by that I don't mean that MSNBC execs have been all that great shakes.  Just that too many of the people* who might otherwise have sent testy letters to the network have been otherwise distracted.

I mean, not everyone's been thrilled with the name (I'm not thrilled with it) but you know what?  A lot of people have been thrilled by its spontaneous, non-organized emergence from a single online protest into a very wide-spread, frustration-fueled cluster of independent public actions.

For instance via Jill Filipovic, Jessica Valenti has written

[T]he success of SlutWalks does herald a new day in feminist organizing. One when women’s anger begins online but takes to the street, when a local step makes global waves and when one feminist action can spark debate, controversy and activism that will have lasting effects on the movement.

Source: The Washington Post

Yeah, this is definitely important for a lot of reasons.  Almost none of which have anything to do with the name itself.

Could the organizers in Toronto have come up with a title that was less offensive to collar buttoners of left and right? Sure, if they’d formed a committee and made an org chart and focus-grouped it and recruited Significant Board Members from Around the World and waited for the same brigade of professional-left activists and assholes to show up offering logistical support in exchange for including speakers for their laundry list of unrelated outrages that have diluted every other attempted march and demonstration for the last 20 years. And if they’d known or cared their rump outburst of irritation at a specific word uttered by a specific cop in a specific city in Canada was going to spread to 75 cities and counting then they might have done so.

But they didn’t because, um, they were too busy taking direct action against a direct insult by someone who was so “well-intentioned” but wrong he didn’t even know he had his head up his ass.

And dear sweet mother of pearl, that something like that should take off spontaneously? That it should have bypassed a bunch of amen choir members who’s “activism” consists mainly of leaving gotchas in other bloggers comments? Horrors!

I’m not a huge fan of “reclaim the word X” initiatives (almost 40 years after appreciating a friend’s “That’s Mister Faggot to you” button the word “fag” has lost only a little bit of its sting) I appreciate SlutWalk not just because their intention is more about deploring then word than celebrating it. Because, yeah, it’s pretty much always been a slur and in this instance the Toronto cop’s intention was pure unadulterated anticipatory victim-blaming.  But because they're actually doing something!

It's not that it's the first it’s the first spontaneous mass feminist demonstration ever (heh, um, no.)   Instead it’s the first in North America to originate and translate from the internet to civic action.

I mean yes, yes, the 1970s were a wonderful time for women’s marches! I remember hitch-hiking along with friends to rallies between in Boston and D.C. And goodness knows the sacrifices and successes women made 150 years ago, and 100 years ago, and 50 years ago.

But in the last 20 years though? Well, there was the million-women march (ooh, wonderful giant puppets and always good to see those Free Tibet signs!) And there have been some excellent hyper-local Take Back the Night events.  But otherwise? Not so much. Which is why, at least to me, this is so promising. Because, yeah, we really, really do need to see more activism that's not managed, and not arranged by professionals, and not so routine that the press already knows where to setup their cameras.

But as my dad used to say “you can’t steer a parked car.” I think instead of trying to put the brakes on Slutwalk it might be cool to start crowd-sourcing new points for real-world activism. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to get a rally going before the mainstreamers, t-shirt vendors, and the YSA “volunteers” and PETA demonstrators sign-waivers could set up for the cameras and otherwise get in the way? I say yes. Too many other people are saying no way… because a handful of non-professional organizers were too focused to pick the “right” name.

Who knows?  Maybe Ed Schultz will to a segment knocking SlutWalk.  To make "amends."

$%!#@y

* By which I mean people on the left: since Schultz used the word to label a conservative wingnut the right-wing noise machine was on it instantly.  Which is probably why MSNBC suspended him at all.