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Persecution complexes and self-pity may constitute exculpation in Ms Marcotte's mind, but reality is somewhat different. Reminiscent of Sarah Silverman's "Fran" in the classic "Indomitable Spirit" skit -- her "disability": "I'm a woman!" -- Marcotte cannot escape her internal narrative in which she is nothing but a victim, devoid of power, volition, or responsibility for the consequences of her own actions. In this, she ironically fulfills a deeply anti-feminist stereotype of the woman as a passive vessel, into which the faults and obsessions of powerful men are poured. She's not merely done nothing to deserve this, she's done nothing: her persecutors attack her not because of any accomplishment, but merely because of what she is -- not who, as in her own telling, she has no identity or action to be meaningfully and justly against.
Rest assured that this contradiction does not escape Marcotte, even if she cannot publicly admit it. A true ideologue, feminist or otherwise, lives as the ideology demands. The lazy or unintelligent person who loudly and publicly clings to an ideology typically does so in lieu of a well-defined personal identity. You can spot this sort of figure in her dramatic departures from her ersatz faith as soon as there are negative consequences to its practice. Amanda Marcotte is just this sort: having made her name by (to paraphrase the Shark and Shepherd blog) finding an audience that consistently mistakes her tantrums for wit and erudition, it takes her mere days to disavow the very source of her fame once those whom she purports to hate and disrespect pay attention to her. She belittles herself through disavowals, historical revisionism, and words like "noncontroversy": but most of all, she belittles herself through her supine submission to her enemies' demands. Whatever post facto snarling and sniping she may engage in -- and she'll do little else for some time -- this is the bottom line.
This, then, is not a woman with the courage of her convictions. This is a deeply immature and troubled person who is caught between simultaneous realizations that she is profoundly out of bounds in her views and means of expression -- and utterly unable to react to this insight as an adult, lest she lost the final shred of respect that she and her public have for Amanda Marcotte.
