Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Doug Henwood vs. Sady Doyle

Sady Doyle posted an excellent piece on Tumblr three weeks ago - Progressive - I assume she hasn't seen my blog posts about Doug Henwood and his feminist-hating Ladies Auxiliary, so her using the term "Women's Auxiliary" in her piece is no doubt an example of great minds thinking alike:
You can use sexism to rally people for a “progressive” cause, but you can’t then claim that the sexism is invisible, that it doesn’t exist, or that it doesn’t matter, or doesn’t compromise you. You can frame women and feminists as your Women’s Auxiliary, people to be tapped when you need their time and effort and platforms and organizing skill, and discarded or flat-out trashed in favor of better, more male politics whenever we step out of line or whenever it’s convenient. But you can’t do it and tell me that your gender politics are “progressive.” You can’t be a feminist on some days and a person screaming about Hillary Clinton’s vagina on the internet other days, as a wise man might say. So go ahead. Type about how Hillary Clinton is “pandering for votes with her vagina.” But don’t do it and then tell me your opposition to Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with her gender. There is a limit to precisely how many times you can feed me horseshit and call it chocolate frosting, and right now, the taste in my mouth says your time is up.
I also used the chocolate/shit metaphor for sexism ten years ago.

I was blocked on Twitter by Doug Henwood over a year ago, when I got a little too contrary for him - he's used to his Ladies Auxiliary who are compliant and deferential to him as a Great Man of the Left - but Doyle has had an ongoing and increasingly bitter war with Henwood for months now. Perhaps because they were once friendly Twitter colleagues it has become so bitter - I was never friendly with Henwood - my first introduction to him was him attacking the Fawcett Society as "bourgeois feminists" and me giving him shit about it.


I could tell Henwood was a misogynist Radical Chic type from the moment I encountered him. And his online interactions with Sady Doyle have only proven I actually underestimated his shitheadedness. From another article by Doyle: Beware of the angry white male public intellectual which justifiably links other infamous shitheads like Richard Dawkins to Bernie Bros like Henwood:
In many cases, online attacks are set in motion when well-bylined men publicly point their followers to the offenders in question. It’s hard to document every incidence of this, because it’s a bit like a fish documenting water. I called Doug Henwood’s anti-Hillary book cover sexist and blocked him. He began tweeting about how I’d blocked him and suggesting that I was lucky he wasn’t planning to sue. Soon enough, I was getting hundreds of angry tweets. 
Greenwald and similarly left-leaning writer Matt Taibbi, meanwhile, linked to an old article about left-wing sexism against Hillary Clinton by Rebecca Traister. “We got more or less the same argument about ‘Obama Boys’ years ago,’ Taibbi complained. Traister reported that a few hours later, her mentions now include “many suggestions that I am a paid shill hack who should suck a vinyl dick.”

Brad DeLong, colleague of the Mighty Krugman and who Henwood insinuated was saying good things about Clinton out of careerism has Sady's back.