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SoftBonds -> RE: Feminazis and Godwin's Law (2/26/2012 10:40:46 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SilverBoat
There's no such thing as real feminazis? ... There are sure going to be some very disappointed subby's who've wanked-off to all those old women-in-german-prisonguard uniform porno flicks. You ought to leave them a little something, and not destroy their visions of Sandra-Klaus bearing sacks full of cuffs and whips for all the bad little boys (and bad little girls, too, just to be EEOK, etc). ... They saw it in the movies, so it has to be true somewhere, right? ... [sm=crop.gif]
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Seriously though, the word "feminazi" riles up some people, in no small part because it's intended to do exactly that when it's used a broadly perjorative insult. The people who use it that way realize exactly what they meant to do, and in an ironic twist, the people most obstreporously offended by it often fit its portmanteau meaning better than they'd prefer to admit to themselves or others.
Yeah, sure, pseudo-conservative rightwingnuts like Limbaugh etc aim to advance their own politics by impugning the entire women's-rights movement because that's associated with liberal-leftish politics. Some members of the women's-rights movements (most of whom have reasonable goals and methods, IMO), however, won't disavow the radical elements (much like some muslims won't disavow their violent sects), because it forwards their respective goals to some extent, and so we're left with the reality of the negative-connotation-"ist" labels, and extension of that into words like feminazi, islamonazi, etc.
Those women who take their rights seriously, even to the point of calling themselves "feminists" would serve their cause better by acknowledging that some of their number behave with sometimes counter-productive aggression, and policing their own camp instead of ranting when a derisive term is applied from outside. That would disarm the rightwingnutz use of the "feminazi" term.
And yet...
Have you ever heard of the "Overton window?" It is the idea that there is a certain set of options in a political environment that are perceived as reasonable by the general population. The window is defined by the existence of ideas that are so far outside the mainstream as to be obviously unreasonable. That said, if you say (or have patsy's say) something far to the left or right of what is currently unreasonable, you make the previously unreasonable sound more reasonable by comparison. This makes more ideas on your side of the spectrum sound reasonable, and will make the other side's ideas start to seem less reasonable.
For instance, if you want to eliminate abortion, go after birth control. Then folks start to see "Birth control legal, abortion illegal" as the compromise stance because it is in the middle of the three main "reasonable," points advocated.
Of course, if you can make abortion/birth control regulation sufficiently unpalatable (e.g. financially painful for men), then there is no longer reason to try to shift the overton window...
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