You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas

[zdashamber]

scalzi posted cheerfully on his blog, the Whatever, about how his wife was awesome: she'd gone out for an evening at a bar with her friends, a drunk hit on her all night despite pointed ignoring and tellings-off, the drunk went to grab her, and she pinned him against a wall and made him apologize and slink off. Yay! Instapundit, the pretend-libertarian, noted the post, and then his wife Dr. Helen posts a OMG FEMALES ARE TEH OPPRESSORS response. A bunch of mouthbreathing knuckledraggers go over to the Whatever and leave indeterminate ultra-sexist comments. John Scalzi is like, "Why are the commentors of my friends the fake-libertarians such cretins?"

I've never in my life seen a situation where the phrase "You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas" is more apt. Why is it, John, that people who love smug poorly-argued sexist bullshit are themselves likely to produce smug poorly-argued sexist bullshit?

This all ties to a recent post of ginmar's:

"Are you sure?" is another way of invalidating a woman's ideas, of questioning her judgement, of changing the subject. How much of this second-guessing is part of women's daily lives, where they get people acting as if they're too stupid to think things through? Once you start noticing it, you can't stop, so my advice, is to notice it and keep noticing it---and then start calling people on it.

Notice how Dr. Helen says that only a man could possibly have learned when it was appropriate to apply violence to solve a problem?

Comments

[itsmrwilson.livejournal.com]

The 'best' response for me was the one where the drunk becomes a poor lonely sad guy who just wanted some company. OMG we're all victims of the oppressive women!

This kind of brings up some irony about sexism, though. Not all men benefit equally from patriarchy, but look where they direct their anger.