Which is not something I have done. If you’re going to put up strawmen so you can have something to shoot at, could you at least have the decency not to paste my face and name on them?

ORLY? I seem to recall a hell of a lot of reaction when Hillary Clinton was called things like “a ball-breaker” or “castrating shrew” because that’s always a nice way to dismiss and marginalise uppity ladies, isn’t it? Trot out the metaphors of sexualised violence and genital mutilation to dog-whistle that she’s not a real woman and therefore can safely be ignored.

Is it so strange to you that more than one person might independently come to the same conclusion?

Not at all, and that isn’t what I was labeling as “groupthink”. What I labeled as groupthink was the attempt by those who had come to that conclusion to engage in coercion; in effect, to say to me, “Summer, all the other women here have decided that we think X, and your stubborn refusal to get with the program and stop maintaining a different opinion is a betrayal of your gender. You can’t be a real feminist unless you agree with us on X.”

There are other words I could use to describe that sort of thing, of course. Trust me when I tell you that “groupthink” is by far the kindest.

Of course it does Ann — just ask the wing-nuts who front up to town hall meeting with “Hitlerized” pictures of President Obama, while Glenn Beck has another crying jag about Obama’s secret socialist agenda to smother Trig Palin with his own hands.

They’ve certainly done a good job of dominating media coverage the health care debate, yes?
Personally, I’d rather have an polite, nice, civil … reality-based and more or less sane debate between adults on a matter of public policy that affects the health and well-being of millions.

But whatever… If you decide being a cyber-bully is some grand feminist statement and you’re so righteous you’ve no responsibility to treat others with civility or respect, fine. Sounds a lot like the same old bullshit in a brand new box to me.

I remember back in teh 80′s I think, when everyone was talking about the metric system, Ohio decided to convert to a metric calendar. Their weeks were ten days long. There were ten hours in a day. and somehow they rearranged it so there were ten months a year. It was totally messed up.

I readily agree that the weight of society and history makes the ovary version sound violent and horrific, while the balls version is used so often that it doesn’t provoke the same reaction. Part of this is because there’s no equivalent slang term for ovaries, and this is an aspect of the general problem of gendered language…yet another form of silencing women. So many phrases that have masculine overtones or undertones, reinforcing the view of the world as belonging only to men.

Gotta cut this short before I run out of time.

No you can’t — I’ve spent way to much time today dealing with someone else on-line who is trying on that derail double-flip (thankfully, nobody else is buying) so I’m out of patience. It’s a nice trolling tactic to accuse others of your own behaviour, in an attempt to change the subject onto safer ground but I’m not going to take the bait.

Thanks for playing, come again.