You exemplify pretty much everything that is wrong with feminism. In response to an insightful post that considers different reasons and influences behind a phenomenon, you're content to rail "DUH! IT'S PATRIARCHY!" as if that were an explanation in itself rather than a catchy word, and as if 'patriarchy' is some sort of essential magical force that has existed since the beginning of time and cannot be broken down into social and economic factors, much the same way Bush supporters refuse to examine any of the underlying causes of terrorism other than "evil". And in response to someone proposing that women can move forward by taking a more active interest in the things that would enfranchise them, you call them a 1950's misogynist. Great.

I'm sure you'll dismiss this as just another sexist attack, but really, try examining your own ideas and assumptions sometime. It could be fun. Or, you know, you can just keep walking around thinking that all men just secretly hate vaginas.

Well, if patriarchy is a complex, ever-changing matter with lots of subheadings, perhaps we should be discussing those complex factors and subheadings. You know, like Rebecca was doing in the post before you chimed in with your snarky declaration that it's not any of those things, it's PATRIARCHY and that's what happens under PATRIARCHY, case closed.

The argumentative tactic of trying to paint a reductive image of where your opponent is coming from instead of engaging their arguments directly is generally unproductive. Yet it's also unavoidable to some extent, because we are programmed to make deductions from what people say that go beyond the bare meaning of their words. All we can do is try to make accurate deductions based on what we see. And what I saw was that you came into a fairly nuanced discussion about the specific causes behind why female bloggers aren't taken more seriously with an exasperated battle cry of "IT'S PATRIARCHY!" which was both an unhelpful contribution and served to paint you as a caricature.

Nowhere did I say "feminazi" or imply that you hate all men. Unlike our troll friends, I know that that particular caricature doesn't really exist. What I did mean was that your willingness to use "patriarchy" as a catch-all concept that requires no further explanation implies that on some level you believe that misogyny is some kind of primal impulse that men have for its own sake. Of course you will say you don't mean that, I am just trying to show you that it's what your kind of reasoning implies.

Then there was your response to Jim (not the Parson), who made a legitimate point that the media is market-driven and that in order to make a change in how they are perceived and marketed to, women will have to make a change in their consumer habits from the bottom up. Now, maybe he's wrong, but I still don't see how that particular point makes him a 1950's troglodyte. But of course, after your response to that effect, he instinctively strikes back with an equally reductive statement that confirms your originally unjustified opinion about him, and the cycle continues.Now, as for your conception of me, I'd direct you to my first post on this thread.

The other problem with trying to get a mental picture of your opponent is that when you have trolls like Parson Jim polluting the discussion, people tend to move further to the other extreme in response, and anyone who attempts to articulate a more nuanced or moderate viewpoint runs the risk of being lumped in with the trolls. Parson Jim and James T. Kirk are pretty much permanent fixtures around here, and I'm almost sure they're just different usernames of the same disgruntled right-winger who's been posting on Salon with childish sarcasm under different names for the past couple of years. They are irrelevant to the discussion here.

This is probably the most hilarious campaign tactic I've seen. After attacking him on just about everything else and failing, McCain is now going after Obama for...being popular? How exactly does he think elections are decided?

This will be hilarious to anyone who has read my other posts here: I got 28% male, 72% female. I looked at what sites could have been responsible for this gender confusion, and the results were somewhat surprising. Apparently, buying plane tickets (Southwest, Continental), having social networking pages (Facebook, MySpace), abbreviating URLs for forum posts (tinyurl), playing web games (arcadetown, miniclip), and going to college (NYU homepage) were all strikes against my masculinity. Even something as simple as having an email account (gmail, hotmail) is apparently skewed towards the womenfolk. And a bonus fact for those who have been 'concerned' about Obama's supposed difficulty in winning over female voters: apparently the male-female ratio of barackobama.com is 0.68, which is probably what did me in.

One obvious drawback is that it only factors in what individual sites you've visited rather than the number of visits - in my defense, I spend far more time at gamefaqs and ign than I do at Obama's site, to which I was just directed once by a link from a news story I was reading. What I'd like to know is how quantcast (the source of the site's data) gets their demographic numbers.