This culture hates women.

The other day, I was on a Twitch stream to celebrate the conclusion of Feminist Frequency’s Ordinary Women campaign. It was fun. The campaign was successful, we hung out and had some cool guests and played games and were able to just relax. We weren’t too worried about what all the detractors and harassers and haters were thinking.

And yet, of course, the harassers and haters made their hatred known in droves, showing up in the chat and doing their cultural chest-thumping routine to loudly send the message that women, trans people and non-binary folks who don’t cater to their tastes are not welcome in these cultural spaces. These people worked to dehumanize us in two ways. Those of us deemed attractive and desirable were dehumanized by being described in degrading sexual terms. Those of us not deemed attractive and desirable were dehumanized by being misgendered, masculinized, and generally told that because we fail to serve even the basic function of being attractive to them, we have no value whatsoever and should not exist.

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(Believe me, there was so much of this in the chat. Just…so much. An unending stream of it.)

What saddens me so much about this is that I think these people are honestly so used to being catered to and centered by all the media in the cultural spaces they occupy that they legitimately feel “censored” and “oppressed” by the presence of women in these spaces who simply refuse to play by the dominant culture rules. Of course, they have no idea what true censorship and oppression are, but they seem to legitimately believe that there is something imbalanced and unjust about the simple presence of women there.

More than that, I don’t think that these people have any perception of just how much they hate women. By that, I don’t mean that they consciously think to themselves, “I hate women!” Not at all. Rather, like Donald Trump, they honestly believe that they have the utmost respect for women. It’s just that they have absorbed and adopted a cultural worldview that tells them that “respecting” women largely means valuing women as sex objects who exist for their benefit, rather than truly seeing women as full and complete human beings like themselves.