And what hapens if she doesn’t apologize? She said she wasn’t going to because she wasn’t sorry she used the word.

She said it. She stands by it. She didn’t try to explain it away, either.

So is she now anathema? Not a feminist? Not allowed to judge anyone anywhere for anything because she refuses to accept your judgment of her actions?

She honestly does not believe she needs to apologize. Should she do so anyway, to appease you?

Is she different in some measurable way from the Twisty/Jill of before, aside from that word and your disappointment in how she responded to criticism of it?

This would be a small world for me indeed if doing the wrong thing by my lights banished someone from it.

Not all anger is the same, and to label it “hypervigilance” skirts a bit too close to the mountains-out-of-molehills anti-feminist critique.

There were some comments at Twisty’s that were harsher than others. Okay. Maybe that does have a downside, like, you know, everything else, but people respond differently. My response (I didn’t comment) was: “wtf. Why would you say that? You know better.” It was her shamey “chill the fuck out!” comments that made me angry.

I am totally on Team Twisty, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have feet of clay. Just like me.

This is the heart of the matter.

Everyone thinks *they* should be getting a pass. Y’all think the distinctly white-bread flavor of this blog should be excused, I think I should get a gold star for being a man who dares to comment here, and Jill/Twisty thinks her linguistic transgressions ought to be excused. You know what? We’re all right. Coming to a forum like this and arguing over who’s more hardcore or sending an electronic raiding party to another blog to make sure they toe some mythical ideological line makes about as much sense as a circular firing squad.

Snaps to PS for having the gonads to put herself out here like this.

However I also take your larger point PS, and I agree that sometimes we need to keep the larger picture in mind and stop infighting to death.

Once upon a time, I used to consider myself my partner’s foil, a firm pessimist. After quitting my miserable job and then getting myself quite a bit of really good therapy, I’ve discovered I am not, as I’d previously thought, fundamentally pessimistic.

I’m fundamentally outraged. In the same way an optimist sees a glass as half-full, and a pessimist sees a glass as half-empty, my first reaction is outrage that the glass isn’t full. I have a lot of outrage in me; an endless supply, it seems.

In an attempt to channel this energy for good, or at least for lower blood-pressure, I have been attempting, over the past few years, to stop judging women. I started this project several years ago when it seemed like every feminist blog I was reading was having judge-fests about blow jobs and high heels. And I realized, after reading quite a bit of women calling other women unfeminist, that I wanted to Not Participate In That Discussion in some way other than simply keeping my opinion to myself.

I have made a pact with myself, to try to stop judging women for the choices we make. We live in an awful world, sometimes. The patriarchy is an environment in which we’re faced, over and over again, with no-win situations. I make hundreds of decisions each week where I find myself having to weigh the social consequences of my actions against how much energy I have left to struggle. So I have to forgive myself, on a regular basis, for sometimes having to just live in the world, instead of constantly struggling to change it. And that’s also taught me how to forgive other people for the same thing.

And from that perspective, when I first read Twisty’s/Jill’s not-an-apoloogy, I wasn’t really outraged at all. I’d wrinkled my nose a little when I saw her first post, as I don’t like it when people use women-associated-words as insults in general (I have a similar response to the use of “douchebag” over at Bitch Ph.D, despite a thoughtful deconstruction of the term-as-insult) and shrugged at the tone of her follow-up post. Of course she was defensive; she’d just got jumped-on by her allies. In that context, I think she gracefully acknowledged that she’s human, and she loses her temper, just like the rest of us do. And I’d rather see people do what she did — acknowledge that the word is, in fact, an anti-woman slur, and move on — than what I usually see people do, which is to cobble together a half-assed justification for why they weren’t actually guilty of speaking misogyny and then tacking on a “but I’m sorry if you’re offended” non-apology at the end.

And so, yes, I agree. We all need to cut each other a whole lot of slack, because we’re doing the best we can in an impossible world. And I think Twisty’s all the more the superhero for losing her temper & admitting it (even if she left the admission to herself-by-another-name).