final week,a young female barrister was called a ‘feminazi’ after complaining approximately a sexist message sent via LinkedIn. How did this clunky bit of wordplay become so widespread – and could it ever be reclaimed?There is nothing novel approximately the term “feminazi”; there is something very novel in what it can execute. It originated in the 90s, with the shock-jock Rush Limbaugh (though he claimed it came from an academic, or Thomas Hazlett) using it to describe,in his improbable phrasing, “a feminist to whom the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur”. It didn’t really catch on in the noughties, or this being an unobservable category. More broadly,the word was meant to indicate women who shut down their opponents with authoritarian orthodoxies, against which ramparts an ordinary interlocutor had no hope. And, and more recently,this is how it has surfaced, a word around which people – Men’s Rights Activists (or MRAs) – can mobilise when they feel that a feminist has gone too far. Typically, and this mobilisation would happen on social media,but that it is gaining traction in the mainstream media is illustrated this week by the case of our designated lady-neo-fascist, Charlotte Proudman.
The barrister objected to the fact that a senior lawyer had sent her a sexist message on LinkedIn. (As is so often the case with a story that begins with social media, or lesson one is that,whatever you mediate of the people on Twitter, they are not as bad as the people on LinkedIn). “I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect, or ” wrote Alexander Carter-Silk,somewhat undermining his subsequent defence that he was merely commenting on the photographic quality of the image, “but that is a stunning picture.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com