Related to "Terfs, just like the trannies they hate do all of their own worst PR," and since r/GC became Ovarit, an overview of the batshit insanity that Ovarit has become. If Mallory Ortberg hadn't been driven mad by Joe and hormones and chubbiness, she'd love to be able to write parody like this.
I joined Ovarit because I loved the idea of a forum where nobody gets in trouble for ‘misgendering.’ I’m firmly on team ‘
Pronouns are Rohypnol.’ But I'm also fairly libertarian. As a sane adult not in jail, you have the right to do what you want, including role playing whatever you want. And I have the right to decline to play along.
Ovarit is billed as a RadFem site, but not a lot of women there understand, or have read, any serious texts; lots of references to five minute YouTubes, though. Much splashy denunciation of capitalism while discussions of what things to buy abound. I’m with them on porn and prostitution generally existing to monetize women’s bodies for men. I see abortion as a necessary evil, not “yay, abortion is fun!” but some of them are reasonable on that. So there was a lot I liked about it almost a year ago, when it started.
I also have to say, one of my biggest points of contention with the trans movement is giving children - whom we know are rapidly changing, whose brains aren’t fully formed until into their 20s, and who are famously vulnerable to parental and peer influence - treatments that have lifelong consequences. Unlike most of Ovarit I don’t think all transwomen are evil or perverts; I think they’re nuts, the same way I think people who spend their lives training dogs to run obstacle courses are nuts, but de gustibus non disputandem. But we don’t let kids get their tubes tied because they think they won’t want kids; hell, we don’t let kids get tattoos. So a community that defends children’s right not to have experimental procedures that are irreversible appealed to me. But then the “children are bad for the environment anyway” and “who wants children?” crowd grew, in numbers and noisiness.
This thread is a good example, both of the vituperation and general lowbrow tenor of debate:
It’s also significant that a lot of the newer and weirder posters are, like this one, autistic, sorry, non-neurotypical. It’s not their fault, but when a signature problem of your brain disorder is an inability to reality-test and to understand how humans work … maybe don’t take up quite so much space telling others how the world should be?
FedUp is a
foster mom. She’s American, 25 but talks about all the things she used to believe when she was “younger,” and makes feminist art. To give you a sense of her moral serieux, she is
boycotting Kraft because of their silly pun.
But also believes George Floyd was evil and deserved what he got, and throws tanties when someone disagrees with her. Or
when she thinks someone does: her reading comprehension isn’t great, but to be fair she is the self-described child of alcoholics who is saddled with children she finds repulsive, so I'm guessing she doesn't spend her evenings studying formal logic.
Another “
I hate men” (but don’t you stereotype me!) thread. Note that the person who tried to push back - wasn’t me - got kicked.
A thread on how men are almost metaphysically evil:
FedUp is also the kind
who LOVES Lana del Rey - that, hating children, and embracing body hair seem to be her defining character traits. One of the saner posters tries to
push back on hating kids being ok. But that never happens, see, because women don’t have power over children and if they did would never abuse it. (Tell me again how your opposition to kids transing is your abiding concern for children?)
Also, as if the man-hating, baby-killing stereotype weren't sufficiently fleshed out,
Good RadFems should abort male babies (most redacted, but only after the posters were embarrassed. It was fair game, to the mods.) Also, in another deleted thread, a woman in an abusive marriage was told her sons were future rapists. That’s some good sisterhood, there. Another poster (also kicked out) started a thread entitled “Children are the most vulnerable people in society and normalizing disgust for them is not ok.” It got deleted too, before I could screen grab/archive.
A thread on how all men, indeed,
are awful.
The context a screen cap doesn’t capture is that the women saying “no, men are not uniformly evil, and despite having been abused by one I want a loving relationship” etc are the older posters- both in terms of age and activity on the site. The ones saying “yes all man are awful, and women + cats = awesome!” are younger in both senses. It’s trending in the wrong direction. The older lesbians are also much more sensible, and way less man- and child-hating, than the Gen Z heteros. We are not, as a civilization, looking promising.
In terms of how the Ovarites respond to criticism, a 90 minute long
YouTube sperg out to the Atlantic article.
Also, the
longest thread in the forum’s existence was a long rant about the Atlantic piece. Scrutiny drives them nuts.
The numbers skyrocketed from the Streisand effect, and I think that’s what led to the influence of angry unshaven girl-children, who think “can you fucking read?” and “fine then, don’t read my posts” is a useful contribution to a discussion of Foucault, Fanon, and the relationship between bodies and carceral power, eg.
So, I’m hoping to draw some of the less crazy ones here, because there is good content here and we can ignore what we dislike, like grownups. I figure KiwiFarms can balance its (incredibly robust, encyclopedic, authoritative) catalogue of tranny craziness with some good old TERF craziness. And frankly I’d like to see you mocking the hell out of them, because sanctimony pisses me off most, and that’s something thick on the ground at Ovarit but not here.
