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user-inactivated  ·  4271 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Henry Rollins' Comments on Steubenville

Hm. Seems like a little bit of a double standard though, right? A lot of the articles I've read in the wake of Steubenville have more or less been clarion calls for men to speak up about the horrors of a culture (a patriarchal one, if you will) that might set the stage for such a terrible event. A lot of really good writing, by women and men, to the effect of "everybody needs to do their part to make sure things like this don't happen, and men need to become more vocal proponents for justice through gender equality."

So then to turn around and call the sharing of Rollins' essay- which was really quite good even in comparison to all the other stuff that's been written- a symptom of patriarchy seems a bit counter-intuitive, maybe arbitrarily vindictive. Why does it have to be another signifier of patriarchy? Couldn't his essay be seen and promoted as a prototype for that very feminist viewpoint that the other articles have been calling for?

The bottom line, though, is that it doesn't help anything to call attention to the gender of the author over the quality of the work. Don't know much on the subject, but it seems more in line with feminist theory to say that a work ought to be promoted for the strength of its ideas and execution rather than because of the gender of the person who generated it.