Tiger Beatdown

Guys: It’s been a fun weekend. I went out with some ladies, including the lovely C.L., and drank “ironic” Amaretto sours (here’s some advice: DO NOT DO THAT. IT’S AWFUL. And no-one but you thinks it’s funny) and did various sensual dances which resulted in me tripping and falling face-first into a couch. Sensually! On the following morning, I felt a heretofore-unknown spiritual kinship with Ke$ha. I cooked up some pretty good risotto. I firmed up our new Tiger Beatdown Contributor Roster, which: More news on that to come. My best friend and I found a bar like three blocks away from me, and it had a smoking patio, and the music there wasn’t awful! I was excited! So, yeah, I had a good weekend.

You know who didn’t have a good weekend, though, was Freddie’s [BONER]. There is some sadness going on in its vicinity, it would appear! Sadness of the extensively blogged variety!

And you know, it occurs to me that there is maybe a 3,000-word post to be written on how exactly Freddie’s sadness is a textbook demonstration of the Dude Privilege at work, and a stunning, nigh-perfect lesson on How Not To Be A Feminist Man. We could start that blog post out, for example, by talking about that first post he so generously promoted on this blog, which attacked this blog, and basically boiled down to saying that Freddie knows his feminism way better than most people because he’s read some books, and therefore he is not required to privilege the voices of actual women, who have actually experienced sexism and oppression in conversations about feminism. Even before we get to the closing paragraph, which is about whether Amanda and I would be good dates who are mature and enlightened and Authentically Feminist enough to basically tell Freddie he is right about everything, there’s this:

That guy you see in the picture there to the right (that handsome fellow) is indeed what a feminist looks like, a particular feminist, this feminist. And this feminist is not looking for validation, confirmation or blessing from any particular female feminists. Feminism is not lady business; it is the business of all people who pursue equity and liberation, and who take the elimination of entrenched power imbalances as their ethical duty…

[Blah blah blah there should not be] an excuse for female feminists, whether cisgendered or transgendered, to be empowered to have a constantly shifting definition of how male feminists are allowed to operate within feminist discourse. Far too often, the expectation that male feminists should be equally devoted to advancing the feminist cause is carried by female feminists who will turn around, when an argument arises about what best represents and advances feminism, and assert their privilege over feminist discourse based on the fact that they are female.

Read that passage. Read it, like, several times. Because what Freddie is saying, in fact, is that he is such a good feminist that he should not have to listen to women. He is such a good feminist that, when he enters feminist spheres, he should not have to give up the privilege that he, as a man, has experienced his entire life. He should not have his authority, his experience, or the validity of his insight questioned on the basis that he has not actually experienced the oppression he claims to be fighting. For women to assert their own primacy, their own knowledge and expertise, which is gained not primarily from “intellectual” sources such as works of theory, but which is based on the simple, practical, gut-level experience of being oppressed every day of their fucking lives, with (in my case, and many other cases) theory consumed and utilized, not to teach them much that is new, but to help them verbalize and explain what they already know… well, that’s “privilege,” it’s “privileging women,” and it’s unfair, because it means that Freddie isn’t treated as the World’s Foremost Expert. On our fucking lives.

Yes: Freddie, as a feminist, wants to be regarded as knowing more about women than women do. And he gets really, really sad and angry when you tell him that, because he is a man, he will never know more about womanhood or women’s oppression than women, and he will never be allowed to define feminism for women, and he will never be able to engage in feminist discussions without having his privilege pointed out to him. That’s what’s at stake here: Whether Freddie’s “feminist” engagement should involve listening to women, and valuing their voices enough to make them central to his understanding, or whether (as he explicitly seems to wish) he will be allowed to be a “feminist” while keeping his ability to oppress women, his privilege, intact and unchallenged. Don’t think for a second it’s anything more advanced or “intellectual” than that. Freddie is a man, and it makes him mad that women don’t listen to, agree with, and obey him. Because of his “feminism.” Which, as he explicitly states above, is not based on any obligation to listen to or learn from the people that feminism is intended to help.

(Continued)

You guys, Tiger Beatdown is a blog. And, on this blog, we have a comment section! Sometimes the comment section is pretty interesting. And sometimes, the comment section gives us some shit like this! From “Freddie”:

I would ordinarily never, ever do this self-linking deal, but this post kind of compels it.

[LINK DELETED BECAUSE NO-ONE CARES.]

Look, I have to tell you: your whole enterprise here, the whole long and short of it, appears to be an edifice designed to give you a platform that paws at discourse while denying the possibility of you ever getting called on anything. I mean the whole apparatus of the place. It’s like this constant recursion of LOLspeak/serious speak/LOLspeak, this Russian dolls style thing you’re so enamored with. It’s just a mechanism to introduce a self-limiting aspect on what you want to say; you want to be heard and to be taken seriously, but you want the out to be able to say that you were just goofing. Well, goof away, it’s the Internet, and it’s your dime, but understand that you are denying intellectual rigor when you do so.

This is your space, your place of power, and you can define it any particular way you choose. I am not particularly impressed with this post or the assumptions that undergird it, but mostly I am unimpressed with your defense mechanisms. Say what you have to say. I do, I have, and I will.

You guys, I think Freddie is unimpressed with our deeply unserious, unfeminist tomfoolery! But, SINCE FREDDIE ASKED, there are a few reasons why Tiger Beatdown has jokes on it. AND THEY ARE:

1. We present serious, and subversive, and controversial subject matter here. More or less continually. We also make jokes. This is because serious, subversive, controversial subject matter tends to bore people, or scare them. If people are bored or scared, then they’re not learning. When they read Tiger Beatdown, they are entertained. They end up learning through the serious, subversive, and controversial points presented over the course of that entertainment. Also, they don’t feel like someone just had to shove a pill down their throats. We sneak it into the applesauce instead. Who doesn’t like applesauce, really?

2. The primary provider of content to this site is me, Sady Doyle. I’m continually looking for people to delegate to, to bring more content onto the site so that I can have or look for other jobs without Tiger Beatdown going blank, but the fact is, I have found some people, and the vast majority of the work published on the site is still written by me. Therefore, the site, being largely comprised of work by me, reflects my personality. And I make jokes.

Here’s the thing: I’m a person who gets scared or sad or angry a lot. I feel these emotions very intensely. I’m a passionate person, and I’m also a person whose experience of the world has been, at times, almost unbearably hard. I’m not going to tell you how or why, Freddie, because — among other reasons — I am keenly aware of the fact that I owe you jack shit, but if you have ever wondered if the more common and violent mechanisms for enforcing women’s oppression have affected me, personally, the answer is: Yep! And, like a lot of people who are oppressed in violent ways, I didn’t have the power to stop it or to erase it from my history. I was, in a sense, powerless. But then, at around the age of eleven or twelve, when things started getting really hard, I figured out that I did have one kind of power, after all.

My power was that I could make jokes.

I mean, not out loud. I would have been punished or hurt for that. But I could tell myself jokes, privately. I could make myself laugh. And I figured out that, when things got scary or sad or infuriating, when I was on the verge of being overwhelmed, I could make myself feel safer and more in control — I could, in the vernacular, empower myself — by making myself laugh about it. I could laugh at myself; I could laugh at the situation; I could laugh at the people who were hurting me. And I could console myself with the fact that I was far more powerful than the people who hurt me could imagine; they thought they were in charge, they thought they were going to destroy me, they thought I existed to be used and hurt and cast aside, but what they didn’t know was that I was laughing at them, the whole way through. I saw through them, I saw precisely how weak and ridiculous and pathetic they were, and I thought it was fucking hilarious. They were the chumps. They were my entertainment.

And so, I honed the art of making myself laugh. And, after about twenty-five or twenty-six years on the planet, having honed this skill, I registered a blog on Blogspot. And I didn’t tell any of my friends about it, because I thought my politics might be too out-there for most of the folks I knew. But what I did, on this blog, was to type out some of the jokes I told myself, over the course of a day. And then, suddenly, more or less unexpectedly, people started reading.

And now, Freddie? Now, I’m Sady fucking Doyle. Of Tiger fucking Beatdown. Which gets roughly one hundred fucking thousand pageviews per month. And if you don’t like my jokes, motherfucker, then what you can do is, you can just. Fucking. LIVE WITH IT. Because these jokes, this secret little mode of resistance that I developed because I had no other options, have become the way I pay my rent. And neither you nor your various Serious Theory Friends nor God himself nor ANYTHING short of my own unexpected and sudden death in a car accident can fucking stop me. This is maybe self-aggrandizing, but you know what? I’m fine with that. I made myself who I am today, and she’s a pretty fucking great lady to be. And the thing is, if you can work harder than I have, if you can write better than I can, if you can equal or surpass my accomplishment, I’ll aggrandize you, too. God knows I don’t hesitate to sing the praises of people like, I dunno, Choire Sicha or Jessica Valenti or Jill Filipovic or Josh Fruhlinger or Clay Shirky, all of whom have done way better work than I have. But you can’t do even as well as I have, Freddie. Can you? Which is part of this whole deal. You’re not better than me, and it makes you sad.

Tough shit, dude. And don’t fucking come for my jokes because you think it’s where I’m vulnerable. Jokes are how I’ve survived, and jokes are why I’m here, and jokes are the one thing I won’t give up. Because, as it turns out, that whole “jokes = power” thing wasn’t just some crazy consolation prize I made up in my head, after all.

3. I do it to piss you off.

It didn’t miss my attention, Freddie, that the jokes you specifically took exception to were about creepy dudes pretending to be feminist to get laid. Or, that you took exception to them because they made you think that the two feminists who made the jokes, Amanda Hess and I, might not sleep with you even though you are totes feminist and stuff:

I  guess what I’m saying is that I am thinking about that date that Amanda and Sady are talking about. If I went on that date, with either or them, they would indeed find themselves on a date with a feminist. But as I am a feminist whose feminism is not a product of feeling obliged to any particular women or to some vague category called “women,” but rather to the principles of equality and human liberation which inform and support feminism, they are unlikely to find me the kind of feminist whose feminism is guaranteed or even likely to please or flatter them. What I wonder is, what if their questions reveal a man who is a feminist that has ideas about feminism that differs from theirs? And what if that feminist man isn’t inclined to back down from his position in an attempt to please them?

There are a few answers to this question, Freddie. The first is that I am never, ever, EVER going to fuck you, and Amanda has had a boyfriend for approximately forever as I understand it, and I have a boyfriend TOO but would STILL avoid fucking you were that not the case, so you REALLY don’t need to worry about how this theoretical feminist date of ours might go. It would always end with you not getting fucked, is the answer. From the massively whingy tone of your post, I get the sense that this is not an unfamiliar experience. But if there were something I could do for you that was the OPPOSITE of fucking you, I might do that. Like, maybe feed you saltpeter so that your all-important feminist erection ceases to exist and/or become a determining factor for how you will allow women to talk about their own oppression: I would do that, on your magical Fantasy Date With Sady. Because dudes like you make me understand ladies like Valerie Solanas, for real. Because when I think about the above paragraph, my pussy fucking ceases to produce all moisture, possibly forever. You are, Freddie, as far as I am concerned, literally unfuckable by any stretch of the imagination. So, there’s that question, answered.

The second answer hinges on the first, and ends with a question mark just basically because I can do that, and it is: How the HELL can you presume to describe yourself as a feminist, Freddie? Like, how the fuck do you listen to two women talking about an experience, of feminism, and confirming with each other that they’ve both had similar experiences, and write a post about how they are not being considerate enough to men, and still sign off as a fucking feminist man at the end of the day? You’re not. You are not a feminist. You have, actually, nothing to contribute to feminist discourse. Because, still, the experiences of women are less important to you than how eager those women are to accomodate your personal fucking boner. You want to be a feminist, Freddie? Listen closely, because I’m about to tell you how:

SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

I mean it. SHUT THE FUCK UP, Freddie. Shut the fuck up and let the big girls talk. Because we know way more about this than you. And every time you want to pitch in with an observation? Shut the fuck up a little bit harder. And maybe, after a few years or decades or whatever, you might have absorbed enough from listening to people with actual feminist insight (possibly related to their actually being women) to contribute productively to the conversation. But, in the meantime, actual feminists are going to get a lot more done, simply by virtue of not having to listen to the ungodly noise that comes out of your mouth. Truly, Freddie: You should shut the fuck up. Shutting the fuck up is, in fact, the biggest contribution you can make to the feminist cause.

Also, delete your blog. Because it is, can I tell you, just awful.

4. I tell jokes because it’s my blog, motherfucker. And I decide what gets published on my blog. We publish some dudes! Some ladies! Me! All selected for their skills at making jokes that enlighten the reader as to the nature and mechanisms of oppression! I tend to think, for all of the reasons listed above, we are doing the public a service. A feminist service, in fact!

Oh, hey, speaking of: I’ve been shy about this, because I’ve been looking for other work lately and have therefore not been posting as much, but I do believe it is Tiger Beatdown Pledge Drive Time! AGAIN. Yes, it’s that very special time of the every-two-months-or-so when you can donate money to Tiger Beatdown to keep it financially viable and running as a site. (And if I ever make enough money to live from it, it will be the ONLY site I work on, hence more posts.) This time, we are having a Tiger Beatdown Pledge Drive with a special purpose! Donate as much money as you can, or as much as you can reasonably manage, and I promise — PROMISE — to report how much I make. Because the amount of money I make will determine the minimum number of jokes I am contractually and ethically obligated to make on Tiger Beatdown over the course of the next year. You donate a thousand dollars? I have to make a thousand jokes! Two dollars? I have to make two jokes! And so on! And so forth!

You guys, it is an experiment. A feminist experiment. And I entitle this feminist experiment, “Let’s See How Many People Think Freddie Is Wrong.” Here’s the button, where you can demonstrate his wrongness!

Press if you don’t care about Freddie’s boners. For real.

— UPDATE: MYSTERIES OF FREDDIE, REVEALED! —

It turns out, Freddie did not just spring full-fledged from the earth like a malevolent Rumplestiltskin of blog comments! According to Megan Carpentier, formerly of Jezebel, Freddie is in fact immediately identifiable by his writing style. He is Freddie de Boer, who cares so intensely about Freddie’s de Boners that he likes to (a) get himself banned from lady sites, (b) personally e-mail Megan Carpentier (at the least!) to share his thoughts on how mean she is, and (c) have his e-mail address — freddie7@gmail.com — posted on the Internet. Also, the conservative web magazine to which he contributes accepts donations! Who wants to give Freddie de “freddie7@gmail.com” Bo(n)er’s employers negative donations? It is pretty easy! It turns out!

Also: Thanks, Megan.