Author
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Topic: Frustrating experience on the Ms. Magazine boards
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audra trower williams
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2
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posted 19 March 2004 02:03 PM
This made me really thankful for y'all.I don't get in there until the 3rd page, at what point I was told: quote: audra -Women are MORE than "boobs and curves" - we have BRAINS !! - you might want to think about putting the down the latest issue of Cosmo (20 ways to please your man !) and pick up a book by a REAL feminist. Enlighten yourself, it`s not 1957 anymore.
[ 19 March 2004: Message edited by: audra trower williams ]
From: And I'm a look you in the eye for every bar of the chorus | Registered: Apr 2001
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Madame X
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4531
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posted 19 March 2004 05:06 PM
I spent several years there, much longer than most of the members of the cliques have and was treated like a woman-hating troll merely for disagreeing with some moderation decisions and the tactics used by the two ruling cliques. Ms was not always like it is now but a lot different. Most of the regular posters, probably 3/4 of them have left in the past six months. With all the bannings of feminists there by the moderation and insistance by the moderation that those bannings were final, it's ironic that the one poster who got reinstated had used an ethnic slur and refused to apologize. She belongs to the "women as women if they only identify themselves as women first" clique. Another who used the same slur but apologized, is still banned. She didn't belong to any of the ruling cliques. Some great women were banned and those who defend them are called "women-hating trolls" b/c the cliques didn't like them, others were banned for speaking on their behalf. Even banned posters can get other posters banned, b/c you don't need to be registered to use the "whisle blowing" function. Certain people even when they're abusive towards posters apparently can't be banned at all. When all the true feminists left, the place was taken over by those who are just there on power trips, while calling themselves feminists. Some of the biggest bullies claim it's a better place b/c they felt "silenced" before, ironic considering how many women they've chased off. [ 19 March 2004: Message edited by: Madame X ]
From: here or there or eveeeery where | Registered: Oct 2003
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Ruby Tuesday
recent-rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2823
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posted 19 March 2004 05:11 PM
Hi audra. I'm a longtime lurker here, but I haven't posted much. I saw the thread you're talking about at Ms, and recognized your name. I've been registered at Ms. for a while, and have had to take long breaks from the place. I'm in the middle of one at the moment, but somebody gave me a link to the thread you're talking about, when we were discussing Rich's territorial pissing. To call the Ms. boards cliquish is quite an understatement. There's one clique that sort of acts as the board enforcers, and make a kind of sport out of running women off. Some of us lovingly call them the Goon Squad, or the goonies for short. Rich is one of the nastier trolls at Ms, whom the goonies have embraced, and the moderators have chosen to tolerate, along with the goonies themselves. I do find it so ironic that these women, who claim to be "woman centered" after the fashion of Mary Daly, will defend a man who consistently shows that he doesn't even like women very much, and attack women who happen to have a different view of feminism than they do. They basically give Rich a free pass because he despises pretty much the same women they do. I'm sorry your experience there was so frustrating, Audra. A lot of women who used to be regulars there have bailed in the past few months, for just the reason you're discussing here. [ 19 March 2004: Message edited by: Ruby Tuesday ]
From: would never say | Registered: Jun 2002
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Loony Bin
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4996
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posted 19 March 2004 05:38 PM
I've been reading the Ms board all afternoon (don't tell my boss!!) after following the link to the forum where they all jumped on Audra. Seems to me they're pretty wrapped up in a small, exclusive definition of feminism, and they're pretty defensive about it.They're so wrapped up in this particular feminism, in fact, that they miss a lot of the rest of what's going on. Fer instance: Howard Stern's show being cut from the Clear Channel lineup seems to be nothing but good news to them. Very little mention of the freedom of speech side of his existence, or the important role that agitators like him play in the mass media, and only one poster in the two-page forum mentioned that he might actually have been cut because of his anti-bush sentiments and not because he's otherwise offensive at all. I found most of the boards I read there to be pretty frustrating, actually. They're definitely not the same kind of feminists that I consider myself to be. But then, I'm often frustrated and irritated by Ms. magazine too. [ 19 March 2004: Message edited by: Lizard Breath ]
From: solitary confinement | Registered: Feb 2004
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Ruby Tuesday
recent-rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2823
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posted 19 March 2004 11:46 PM
As a former "insider" there, I agree, verbatim.There are some at Ms who consider patriarchal dominance games to not only be feminist, but radically so. And of course, they also consider any criticism of this behavior to be antifeminist. And worse, they appear to have sold these ideas to the person who is currently acting as moderator. This week, someone who had been banned for anti-Semitic slurs and stereotypes was reinstated. The same day, a woman who had strenuously denounced her anti-Semitic slurs and stereotypes was banned. So it appears that anti-racism has been declared antifeminist on Ms, that their version of feminism is centered strictly on white middle class gentiles, and that any woman who has a problem with that had better keep her silence. If I really mistook what's happening at Ms with the state of the women's movement, or even thought it had anything to do with feminism, I'd say the movement was doomed. [ 20 March 2004: Message edited by: Ruby Tuesday ]
From: would never say | Registered: Jun 2002
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beachcomber
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 678
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posted 20 March 2004 02:28 PM
Hi Audra,I saw you over there and seriously considered just warning you away. But I figured you'd see the place for what it was in no time. The Ms Boards long ago ceased to be about feminism. I started posting there 4 years ago and have seen it decline into a mire of warring factions. It was a cool board once, but I doubt it could ever get back to that. Discussion is nearly impossible if you disagree with the feminist rhetoric pushed by a small but strangely powerful handful of members. Cut your losses! You've got a much cooler community around you right here.
From: Vancouver Island | Registered: May 2001
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athena_dreaming
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4574
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posted 20 March 2004 02:54 PM
i remember a number of years ago i used to post at the bust magazine board quite a bit. one day one of the regular busties came back from an excursion to ms., and pointed out that there was a whole thread dedicated to dismissing BUST magazine and everyone who posted on the BUST boards as imitation feminists without any political consciousness. Oh, the flame war that resulted. The cross-posting, the calling of names, the formation and buttressing of clique lines. I'm not sure if any of the ms.ers from back then are still around, but if tey are and you really want to get their goats up, start a thread called "BUST magazine is great! I love it!" They will be on you like stink on socks. It is a *very* cliquish board.
From: Toronto | Registered: Oct 2003
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Ruby Tuesday
recent-rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2823
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posted 20 March 2004 09:05 PM
quote: There's a problem with basing a consciousness on "the personal is political": it taints all argument with a certain amount of ad hominem flavouring.
Only if you insist on misreading the originally intended meaning of "the personal is political," as so many of the Msers do. And that could be a real good discussion in itself. [edited for clarity]
[ 21 March 2004: Message edited by: Ruby Tuesday ]
From: would never say | Registered: Jun 2002
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Ruby Tuesday
recent-rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2823
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posted 22 March 2004 09:06 PM
quote: Originally posted by Madame X: Starting a thread on Bust magazine is definitely going to get you off on the wrong foot. There were a lot of really good people there at Ms, believe it or not. The majority of them have split, because of the clique battles and the intolerance for more than one brand of feminism that is the dominating force there now.
Yeah, it was really a good discussion space when I first found it. There was even a brief moment of sanity last summer and fall. But of course, that brought on the backlash you're seeing now. It's mostly being trashed a small but arrogant and insistent handful of self-annointed "radical feminists," who in my opinion are neither radical nor feminist. Until I saw the turmoil they created at Ms, I thought "feminists" like that were the overblown figments of some crazed right-wing misogynists' imaginations. Now I see that yes, they do exist, but mostly as an unconscoius parody of the movement, not as the movement itself. [ 22 March 2004: Message edited by: Ruby Tuesday ]
From: would never say | Registered: Jun 2002
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verbatim
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 569
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posted 22 March 2004 09:52 PM
As an outsider to the feminist movement (i.e. I am not a woman), but as a male feminist (if you can accept that possibility), I have to say that the phenomenon on the Ms. Boards that people are describing seems to be a microcosm of what has happened to the feminist movements on the university campuses I'm familiar with, and perhaps even in society at large. It's almost as if certain minorities within the female population, for whatever personal reasons, have decided that they will counter what they percieve as the definition of female identity, but by appropriating the methods of dominant power used by men themselves. Some of the discomfort some of my female friends and acquaintences felt with feminist activity on campus was because these other women were coming along and attempting to force them to abandon their sense of who they were and what made them women. These women were lost to the cause because the internal dynamics of the feminist insititutions, in attempting to throw off the power dynamics of patriarchy, assumed that patriarchy was only something men could deploy.I only took one feminist theory class at university, which taught me a lot and awakened me to a lot of things that had been invisible to me beforehand. Toward the end of the class, I realized something: the male power being described as being used to dominate women was very similar to the power dynamics I saw within my own experience of male culture (that is to say, being a man amongst other men). Because at its most fundamental, it is about power. The power to define other people, and to make them believe that your proscription for their identity is the valid one, or that they have no choice in the matter. [ 22 March 2004: Message edited by: verbatim ]
From: The People's Republic of Cook Street | Registered: May 2001
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Anchoress
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4650
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posted 23 March 2004 12:25 AM
OMG, verbatim, you're killing me softly with your song!!I had that exact same experience, not in university, but in a very (supposedly) progressive, collective, left-wing, political, feminist, gay friendly, etc etc etc workplace where I worked as a teen. It was my first exposure to what was called feminism there, and it really turned me off because it seemed to me to just be a bunch of women bullying a bunch of other women. I remember thinking to myself 'Oh, I know why they're feminists. They want someone to push around but they're too chicken to push around men'. I also remember the totalitarianism of their moral judgements. I recall mentioning to a co-worker a novel I had recently read that explored the outer edges of female sexuality. My co-worker scowled at me and said 'Yes, I've heard of that book. I haven't read it...because I don't read PORNOGRAPHY.' I remember feeling shamed and shut down, and doggone turned off feminism. Because of my experience there it took me about 15 more years before I could bring myself to associate with the term.
From: Vancouver babblers' meetup July 9 @ Cafe Deux Soleil! | Registered: Nov 2003
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Loony Bin
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4996
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posted 23 March 2004 11:15 AM
I've had similar experiences in classes and social settings with feminists who out-raadicalled me and made me feel deficient and stupid in my own feminism. At first, when I was younger and more naive, it really made me feel dumb, and I definitely felt that I should somehow measure up to the standards being set by the more radical and vehement feminists around me, even though I didn't really dig their philosophies or methods, or really much at all about them...And then we watched a film by/about Andrea Dworkin and porn in a sociology class. We had a pretty lively discussion after the movie was over, and something in me just clicked. I didn't want to be a feminist if it meant I had to be raging angry all the time about everything. I was especially disheartened by the argument that all het sex was rape. I managed to articulate this frustration and tension in the class discussion and a lot of other women piped up to agree and express themselves as well. So from that moment on, I started to be more critical about the kinds of feminism I encountered, and somehow, over the years I've grown fairly confident that I'm definitely a feminist, even if I don't meet anyone else's expectations in the radicalism arena. But, that said, I think the movement needs all kinds. Reacting against Dworkin and her ilk helped me to concretize just what parts of the movement were and are important to me. It helped me to think about what it is we're (I'm) working for, and how I think the world should work. We aren't all going to care about the same things, or have the same objectives in this struggle. We can hope that our respective struggles will support and encourage each other, and that in the end it's all productive. It's too bad that there has to be so much acrimony between and within some of the "factions", and it's too bad that the women posting on Ms. feel the need to defend their position so ferociously that they've closed their minds and hearts so much (yeah, that's a bit of a generalization), but it takes all kinds.
From: solitary confinement | Registered: Feb 2004
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dnuttall
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5258
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posted 29 March 2004 01:08 PM
[I'm just posting my observations, from firmly on the fence]I see a close relationship between saying "I don't like Isreali aggression in the Middle East" being called anti-semitism and saying "I believe women should express themselves however they want, even if that is deemed by some to be porn" being called anti-feminism. Most people, I suspect, do not have the what it takes to learn quickly from other peoples perspective (myself included). In email forums, responces fly fast and furiously, and people have little time to re-evaluate their own position before attacking someone else's. [ 29 March 2004: Message edited by: dnuttall ]
From: Kanata | Registered: Mar 2004
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writer
editor emeritus
Babbler # 2513
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posted 30 March 2004 04:48 PM
With apologies, my inner editor demanded that I post: quote: Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet. Status: False. snopes.com
Audra, that e-mail was truly bizarre.
From: tentative | Registered: Apr 2002
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Loony Bin
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4996
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posted 23 July 2004 05:57 PM
Seems that the boards have disappeared from the Ms. Magazine site.A cursory snoop around there turns up nothing... www.msmagazine.com Anyone know what happened?
From: solitary confinement | Registered: Feb 2004
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