-ism's on tumblr

[The Clown]

I've been on tumblr for a few months now, and I've been seeing a lot of stuff that's been putting me on edge mostly to do with sexism. It puts me on edge mostly because I am not sure whether I'm wrong in thinking what I am. The people on there seem to be treating feminism like a war on men, as if it's them or us, not actually preaching equality, I saw a post that said "Patriarchy backfiring on men is not sexism against men" with thousands of notes and it bothered me that people could be so sexist when fighting for feminism. A small other thing that bothered me is that people are treating fat-shaming as a deadly sin, I might be wrong, but I see fat-shaming on the same level as calling someone ugly, it shouldn't be done because it's mean to hate on someone for any reason.

I might be over-reacting but I was wondering if you the most intelligent of communities had any insight to whether my moral compass is off a little.

 

[PsychicTaco115]

People love to exaggerate things to get attention, Tumblr's no different

It just focuses on social justice and whatnot exclusively because of the users

Just treat it like an echo chamber and you'll be happy

 

[Wraith]

Have you been to a page dealing with misogyny? It's the same shit, but coming from [air quotes] feminists [end air quotes]. "Die cis scum" this, and "I never want to have a son because I know he'll grow up to be a rapist" that. Social justice of any type can take a very evil form there, from BOTH sides. Which is why I don't go there and if you can't shake off the idiocy that ignorant assholes post there then maybe you shouldn't go either.

 

[Scolar Visari]

I've been on tumblr for a few months now, and I've been seeing a lot of stuff that's been putting me on edge mostly to do with sexism. It puts me on edge mostly because I am not sure whether I'm wrong in thinking what I am. The people on there seem to be treating feminism like a war on men, as if it's them or us, not actually preaching equality, I saw a post that said "Patriarchy backfiring on men is not sexism against men" with thousands of notes and it bothered me that people could be so sexist when fighting for feminism. A small other thing that bothered me is that people are treating fat-shaming as a deadly sin, I might be wrong, but I see fat-shaming on the same level as calling someone ugly, it shouldn't be done because it's mean to hate on someone for any reason.

I might be over-reacting but I was wondering if you the most intelligent of communities had any insight to whether my moral compass is off a little.

Congratulations. You've been exposed to the end result of an "Echo Chamber" being allowed to fester to toxic levels.

 

[EternallyBored]

Welcome to Tumblr, these groups used to stick to places like Livejournal, but now they exist on this particular website. There are plenty of sane people on Tumblr, even sane feminists and social justice advocates, but there is a dark side to the place.

What you've stumbled on is basically the liberal progressive version of freerepublic.com, stormfront.com, or whatever website extreme libertarians hang out on. It's a dark corner of the internet where nobody is allowed to challenge the members opinions, so they become more and more extreme as they continually circlejerk their own opinions into ovlivion.

Your best bet is just to ignore them, there are plenty of rational people on Tumblr, conflating these small groups with anything wider will just cause you frustration, it's like equating the extremely misogynistic, racist conservatives of places like freerepublic with anyone who expresses conservative opinions in general. It creates a false image and poisons otherwise rational and reasonable people against each other. Chase off enough people with this spiral of destruction, and you end up with places like that, where the extreme opinions start feeding into each other, creating a downward spiral straight to crazy town.

If anything, be glad that most dedicated social justice advocates think that the tumblr social justice warriors are pretty out there too, and don't pay them much attention.

 

[Vegosiux]

You know, sometimes I just want to claw my own eyes out and rely on audio. At least when you hear the person, you can tell how serious and trustworthy they are by the tone of their voice.

I realize I could save my eyes if I simply switched off the internet, but, hey, internet.

Bottom line is, you get circle-jerky echo chambers all over the place, and if you want to participate, you simply need to find people worth responding to and ignore/weed out the rest.

On the topic of fat-shaming tho, I guess overweight people are still acceptable targets, aren't they? Yeah, so much for social justice.

*slightly tipsy and very cynical, will likely hate myself in the morning*

 

[Thaluikhain]

A small other thing that bothered me is that people are treating fat-shaming as a deadly sin, I might be wrong, but I see fat-shaming on the same level as calling someone ugly, it shouldn't be done because it's mean to hate on someone for any reason.

Well, it's more complicated than that. Fat people face discrimination in various forms. You get simple stuff like not being able to find clothes in your size, but then you get very sinister medical issues as well. If you look around, you'll see lots of stories about people who've gone to the doctor for one reason or another, and they automatically get a diagnosis of "you're too fat, lose weight". Which has predictable results when it turns out they had some serious, unrelated ailment the doctor didn't bother checking for.

You also get cries to end disability payments for fat people, on the basis that you can't be fat and disbled, or something.

 

[Kyogissun]

There is a girl who posted on tumblr that she wants her children to be gay and if they're are not gay, she will have them adopted.

This girl is in her late teens but let's just make this clear:

There is a decent number of people on tumblr for, whatever reason, think that becuase they are on TUMBLR and for that reason alone they can spout out the most INSANE things possible.

I don't know what it is but since I began browsing the site about a year and a half ago, I have seen a baffling number of fucking INSANE statements on there. Everything from artist elitism to batshit crazy transgendered people who will attack any male regardless of circumstance and all non-transgendered to feminism extremists to fat shaming to...

The point is that with the easy abuse the reblogging system suffers, it's not even REMOTELY surprising how bad things are over there. With there being a difficulty to make your protests heard amongst a sea of endless praise or criticism, not to mention how tumblr will OCCASIONALLY just decide to NOT let stuff hit your dashboard, it's nigh impossible for some actual balanced discussion to happen when the Social Justice Warriors have turned it into their own personal stomping grounds.

I watched an INCREDIBLY stupid 'rape culture' thing go down at one point where one person basically had an overreaction to something they saw and then LATER when asked about it, revealed they had absolutely no proper understanding of the issue at hand or the source material they claimed was 'supporting rape culture'.

Honestly, it's mostly got to do with entitled teenagers/young adults thinking that with their wealth of followers, they can say whatever they want because 'My followers will support me' and sadly, they often do for the most part.

But just do what I do, stick to people you see seeming to have a level head on their shoulders, swap art and avoid too much debate and drama. The moment you see someone on tumblr take up a 'cause', investigate it, determine if their logic is sound and whether or not you want to be part of something that is MOST LIKELY another whiny white teenager complaining about something to make themselves feel important, because that's about 95% of the 'debates/movements/etc' on tumblr, just some egotistical white kid who thinks they can change the world by sitting on their ass and complaining and potentially profit from it.

 

[norashepard]

A lot of people on tumblr have missed the point yes. Just like a lot of people on the internet in general have missed the point of everything. Many people on tumblr and the internet in general do this thing where they will see a point made well in one place and then forever repeat it, without the background information or sources or anything, until it just becomes a, for lack of a better term, meme.

However, that post you reference isn't missing any points. It is talking about things men point out as sexism (such as their inability to show any emotion and the ridiculous need to be super successful), and how they are actual resultant from the patriarchal system that requires men to be on top. It has just been condensed to that one tiny sentence so the original idea is hardly present at all.

Similarly, a lot of their crazy shit does come from a place of sanity. Fat-Shaming IS wrong. It is not as wrong as murder or stuff like that, but it does hurt. My best advice is to research the idea more thoroughly if you find its concept strange, or if you are unsure of what someone says. Be better than them and educate yourself.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

I'll agree wholeheartedly with the Fat-Shaming/Thin Privilege one.

I mean yeah, don't be a dick to people. That's a good axiom for life. But people actually trying to create movement out of unhealthy lifestyle choices is silliness. The Thin Privilege is even worse. Actually putting down average people and thinking that decent eating and exercise is some kind of evil conspiracy. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. Actually strike that, it's extremely funny.

The other one that I find a bit nonsense is the Asexual thing. Not actual asexuals mind you. Not at all. It's a minority that needs to be recognized more.
No, the people I mean is [i/]gray-asexuals[/i]. Because apparently you can have sexual desires, have intercourse and still get to call yourself part of a minority because you don't do it as often as some people do.

The simple fact is, if your entire movement is on Tumblr, it isn't going anywhere in the near future. It's a lost cause only cared about by the easily offended and the internet SJWs.

 

[superpandasauras]

There's this thing about Tumblr. It's divided multiple ways. About 50% of Tumblr are the Social Justice Warriors, 25% are the crazy ass fangirls who'll ship anything as long as they can get off to it, and the last 25% are level headed people. Of those factions, about 20% of the Social Justice Warriors are level headed people, and 100% of the fangirls are crazy. All in all, Tumblr is a dangerous place, and you need to be careful when going there. Sure there are good places, but, they're just so few and far between that it's just not worth it most of the time.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Ya know, maybe just take what a wise man once said before he grew up and made a terrible terrible Godzilla movie...

"Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus."
- Ferris Bueller

Granted its only a movie but a good quote that sums up how I see -isms.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I'll agree wholeheartedly with the Fat-Shaming/Thin Privilege one.

I mean yeah, don't be a dick to people. That's a good axiom for life. But people actually trying to create movement out of unhealthy lifestyle choices is silliness. The Thin Privilege is even worse. Actually putting down average people and thinking that decent eating and exercise is some kind of evil conspiracy. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. Actually strike that, it's extremely funny.

Yeah, that's not what privilege is about at all. It's not about some shadowy conspiracy, it's about how society favours some people over others.

 

[Boris Goodenough]

Well, it's more complicated than that. Fat people face discrimination in various forms. You get simple stuff like not being able to find clothes in your size, but then you get very sinister medical issues as well. If you look around, you'll see lots of stories about people who've gone to the doctor for one reason or another, and they automatically get a diagnosis of "you're too fat, lose weight". Which has predictable results when it turns out they had some serious, unrelated ailment the doctor didn't bother checking for.

The reason for the medical side of that is that being obese gives so many symptoms that makes it hard to tell the causes apart.
Surgery on fat people is very hard, takes loads of extra time, increases risk of complications, and exponentially increases infection risks among other things.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The reason for the medical side of that is that being obese gives so many symptoms that makes it hard to tell the causes apart.
Surgery on fat people is very hard, takes loads of extra time, increases risk of complications, and exponentially increases infection risks among other things.

Not entirely. Yes, there are problems, but often the assumption is automatically made that that is the sole cause of any given ailment.

 

[Boris Goodenough]

Not entirely. Yes, there are problems, but often the assumption is automatically made that that is the sole cause of any given ailment.

Since I don't know the data for it, and I find it unlikely to exist, it would be interesting to see how often it was or was not cause by another thing/obesity.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

I follow some really nice and moderate feminists on tumblr and trust me when you find them they are real gems, especially if they are also talented artists.

It takes a lot of trial and error to weed out the more crazy people but when you find legitimately interesting people its actually rather refreshing.

Hell i follow an anarchist libertarian even though im pretty fond of socialistic governments just so i dont live in an echo chamber. Tumblr is useful for this kind of thing.

 

[Grace_Omega]

I don't know which specific posts you've been looking at, but if you want to understand someone else's opinions there's no better substitute for just asking them directly. You might be wildly mis-interpreting what they're saying. For example:

"Patriarchy backfiring on men is not sexism against men"

What people actually mean when they say this is that acts of "sexism" against men don't, outside of some specific scenarios like family courts, fit into a wider systemic framework of discrimination. Our society is still in many ways geared to privilege and value men and traditional notions of masculinity over women.

I guess to illustrate this with an example: attitudes toward sexual promiscuity still widely favour men over women, in that men are in many places allowed or even expected to have a lot of sex with different partners but women who do the same are shamed and made to feel guilty for it. So referring to a woman who has sex a lot a "slut" is considered an act of sexism because it reinforces a damaging attitude about women, while calling a promiscuous man a "slut" doesn't reinforce any systemic damaging attitudes about men. That one person who called him a slut might be giving him hassle, but society is still by and large on his side. Men are largely the ones in power, not on an individual level but on a society-wide level.

To give a really hackneyed and extreme example of what I'm talking about here, a group of non-Jewish Germans beating up a Jewish man in Nazi Germany reinforced a prevalent attitude of anti-antisemitism present in that society. A group of Jew beating up a non-Jewish German person out of hatred for anyone not Jewish is bad, but it's not "reverse anti-Semitic" or something because the Jews in that example are the ones being oppressed on a society-wide level. And before anyone comes at me, no I'm not saying women today in our society are oppressed as badly as Jews in Nazi Germany.

The attitude you're presenting here- "let's drop the different labels and the -isms and just try to be nice to one another equally"- is a nice idea, but it assumes everyone is on a level playing field and that our society doesn't discriminate against different groups of people on a systemic level, and that is unfortunately not the world we'e living in.

(Also just an FYI, if you're looking for intelligent discussion on any subject Tumblr probably isn't the place to go for it)