In theory, Despicable Tweets should allow a real renaissance in what I’m trying to do here with Emphasis on Twit. It’s a veritable goldmine. But I haven’t felt a strong desire to pull material from them because, a) that’d be cheating, and b) it’d be redundant. It’s a fantastic Tumblr that, for the most part, lets the despicable tweets speak for themselves, which is a skill I never really mastered. That said, here’s one that I felt compelled to crib from them:
I am going to straight up tell the class: I.Have. No. Desire. To. Be. Equal. To. Men. #TakeThat
— rikki (@RikkiWilliamsXO) November 27, 2012
Okay then. There are two points to make here: 1) Who gives a shit. You have every right to feel that way. In a similar vein, there were and are non-white individuals who believe that their own race really is inferior to whites. (Read Ellison’s The Invisible Man for a vivid portrayal of such a person.) But feeling that way does not invalidate the cause of racial/gender/sexual/everything else equality. Nobody’s forcing you to participate. Well, except when you reap the benefits of a century’s worth of feminist activism, but that’s a landmine I don’t intend to further traverse.
2) As Despicable Tweets points out, the ensuing conversation makes it clear that this person doesn’t really have any coherent idea of what feminism is or is trying to do anyway. Most of it devolves into half-witted transphobia anyway (what any of that has to do with the core of feminism, which doesn’t have the most amazing history of trans acceptance in the first place, is beyond me, but if I know one thing about conservatives it’s that they’re still in the three-year-old phase of being fascinated by their own genitals). In fact for the most part it’s all pretty boring—somebody who thinks they’re hardcore because they cling really hard to the status quo. Bravo.
With that in mind it’s almost not worth making a whole post about this person, but there’s a distinction here that I think is important to keep in mind. As most any feminist knows, you will meet women on a fairly regular basis who do not want anything to do with all that feminism business. On this basis alone I believe it’s important not to judge a person. As a man, telling a woman that I know what’s better for her than she does—i.e. “it’s in your best interests to be feminist, dumbass”—would be just a teensy bit antithetical to feminism. Moreover, many women may well have good reason to choose not to identify as feminists: as I said above, trans people have not always felt 100% welcome within that community, nor, needless to say, have women of color or various other non-white, non-middle-class women. I strongly believe that feminism is getting far better in this regard, but that history doesn’t just go away and I would never fault someone who’s been at the receiving end of it for refusing to ignore it.
And then you have people like the tweeter above who’s just a fuckhead. Again, I try not to make snap judgments, but she really lays her fuckheadedness out pretty plainly for us, which on Twitter takes quite a bit of doing.