TL;DR - TL;DR Doesn't Understand Anita Sarkeesian

hello everyone this is a video about T L semicolon D R or teal dear you see because it's a teal dear yeah and in particular this video is a response to his video Anita sarkeesian doesn't understand how to be a feminist concerning Anitha sarkeesian speech at the how to be a feminist panel at all about women 2015 but before we get to that well you know the drill by now so the videos I'm asked to respond to broadly fall into two categories Leslie for want of a better word intellectual videos you know they cite studies and news stories and sources and at least attempt some sort of academic defense of their positions and on the other hand we've got the peanut gallery the hecklers and what they do is watch someone usually a feminist and usually Anita sarkeesian to be honest say a sentence and then they cut away to a cartoon animal do in the DreamWorks face and they say a naughty word and I've honestly struggled to come up with a response to this sort of video you know quite a few people have suggested that I look at bearing and well let's briefly look at bearing and here's one of his responses from his video The Young Turks have finally lost the plot and listened to you or be near you or whatever okay fine try to make that case human but you can make that case they're claiming that day that there are meant a man or a woman or whatever you know your face just pisses me right off [ __ ] [ __ ] you you know how do you respond there what could I possibly say back to that or this you are they're trying to pretend that it's only so that guys can go into women's backroom bathrooms no that's not the way that being transgendered works like a bucket of dicks you [ __ ] I'm not even gonna argue with you you know there's no argument here it's just mindless preaching to the choir it's not substantive enough to get a grasp on and well I'll be honest I've not watched all of Bering's videos so maybe I'm being unfair if he has ever made anything better than that someone please let me know absent an argument I guess one way to respond to these heckling videos is to turn the particular stick of whichever heckler it is back on themselves but I don't want to do that with bearing because it just be me calling him a [ __ ] for 20 minutes and I don't think anyone really wants to watch that and I don't want to make that either it'd be entirely too negative a butt would teal dia I think I found my man you see teal dia has a particular quirk but I have no problem at all with turning back on him you see he's a pedants as a woman on YouTube I would describe my experiences careful empowering brave all right I'm gonna go full grammar nazi' autist on this because I can careful and brave are not experiences those are methods of acting they are a way of being it's not something that you experience the actual sentence that you'd want to use would be my experience on YouTube has involved me needing to be careful my experience on YouTube required me to be brave it's realizing that being a feminist is a lifelong learning endeavor and that we will make some mistakes on the way and we should be compassionate to ourselves when that happens and speaking of mistakes that you make Anita I really think that you should look up the definition of the word compassion because it doesn't mean what you think it means that's right a patent an honest-to-god old-school dictionary quoting pedants and that's going to be our angle right there we are going to be smug and pedantic right back at Silvia and I admit I'm cheating a bit here by responding to a video about Anita sarkeesian who for whatever reason always brings out the worst in these guys she's the red rag to the dump YouTube bull or deer in this case so let's get to it so throughout high school and college I was involved with clubs organizing against wars in the Middle East raising awareness about climate change and demanding gay and lesbian rights oh yes because women have truly always been the primary victims of war they are also quite obviously the group most affected by climate change and it's a well documented fact that homosexual men need feminism the only thing that you've mentioned there that even comes close to being an issue for feminism is lesbian rights and that is purely because some lesbians may choose to identify themselves as being feminists but you do realize that you can be a lesbian and not a feminist right so you really shouldn't presume to speak for all lesbian women everywhere you heterosexual oppressive shitlord after all nothing quite says I'm fighting for equality like speaking over all of those marginalized voices so we're off to a good start Anita say she was involved with a bunch of social justice causes and then Tod 'cut sent to explain how he thinks those causes aren't feminist causes and there's a problem here till the ax-cut Anita off in the middle of a sentence you see the start of an ease of speech reads like this but that's not the end of the sentence right there she goes on to say so I was heavily involved with social justice causes but I still didn't call myself a feminist now nowhere here is the implication that Anita does actually think that say climate change for instance is a feminist cause she's merely listing some social justice causes she was involved with the implication being that one might expect someone who is heavily involved with a bunch of social justice causes to be a feminist however Anita's point is that despite being involved with these various causes she wasn't a feminist cutting into explain how those issues don't make you a feminist is jumping the gun because that was her point she wasn't a feminist you see Tod is responding to only a sentence fragment here so he got the wrong end of the stick and for that the examples are Nita listed were exclusively examples of what she thinks are feminist causes but they weren't or at least they weren't necessary I mean Anita might think that war for instance is a feminist issue and there's plenty of arguments for that one of the arguments for that is that it's mostly men who are expected to go and fight in wars which Tildy actually mentioned incorrectly thinking that he was contradicting the idea that war is a feminist issue but you know there are other arguments the necessary relaxation of some traditional gender roles during wartime is certainly an interesting feminist issue in my opinion and I say in my opinion because it's just my opinion something to keep in mind going forward is that there is no one fixed meaning of feminism whether or not certain issues our feminist issues is arguable you know feminism at a fundamental level is an idea there is no feminism element on the periodic table there are no feminism atoms we can look at under a microscope to see if something is actually really feminist or not is this pedantic enough for you all by the way it's basically this for the rest of the video I'm afraid and I'm very sorry you know everything seems trivial after the election I need to do a lazy one to get back into it I'll get back to responding to something worthwhile soonish leave me alone let's move on so like most people who grew up immersed in the neoliberal ideology of the West what neoliberal ideology of the West let's just break that one down for a moment shall we neo meaning new liberal the idea that the world should be governed on a principle of liberty and equality for all people and this is supposed to somehow be a bad thing to think oh wait what am I saying of course it's bad because it's the patriarchy right but wait hang on what is modern feminism well it's new so we could certainly describe it as being a neo ideology and it keeps saying that it wants to push for equality for all people so yeah that word actually kind of encompasses modern feminism as well I know you're trying to invent a load of [ __ ] nonsense buzzwords that be and then go home and throw out on their twitter and tumblr accounts to try and make themselves look intellectual while they're talking about some mythical patriarchy but I really don't think you've even considered what these words actually mean someone doesn't know what neoliberal means ahahaha oh man this one takes me back so long time Sean and Jan watchers will remember my take on leafies video about milo stewart and in the course of making that video I had to read thousands of leafies comments and one thing I saw over and over again was people who were confused by Milo's language you know Milo's just making up all of those big words to seem clever and this shows how sheltered and kind of arrogant to be honest that I was at the time because the first few of those comments that I read I assumed were jokes I was like what big words you know not that Milo isn't well-spoken or anything but nothing he said was all that complicated or so affort anyway I now realize that it's all relative of course a lot of concepts are just new to a lot of people there's nothing wrong with that it's entirely possible to have just not encountered the word neoliberalism before there's no shame at all in being ignorant of that concept at what there is shaming is assuming that because you haven't heard of it before it must therefore be a [ __ ] buzzword someone else is just making up to look smart and then breaking it apart into its component pieces in an attempt to decipher its meaning rather than just admitting ignorance and looking it up now of course YouTube commenters were quick to point out teal Diaz mistake which led to him claiming it was just a joke which led to the rather obvious follow-up question what was the joke and I guess after getting a bunch of comments explaining his mistake teal dia got sick of it and added the following disclaimer to the video description to all the people telling me I don't know what neoliberalism is you missed the joke so here it is spelled out for you she's ignoring the actual definition of neoliberalism and contour to get into some nebulous term regarding oppression and privilege and basically ignoring the economic aspect of it so I simply redefine it as well so it can quite easily include herself which well that's not actually true is it teal dia because you explicitly accused Anita of inventing the term sorry the [ __ ] buzzword I know you're trying to invent a load of [ __ ] nonsense buzzwords that people can then go home and throw out on their Twitter and Tumblr accounts to try and make themselves look intellectual while they're talking about some mythical patriarchy you see what actually happened here was an ether sarkeesian knew something that you didn't know in this one instance Anita sarkeesian was smarter than you but of course teal dia can't possibly admit that because that would unravel his whole video the foundation of which is that Anita sarkeesian has to be an idiot so he has to do the just a joke defense you know I was just kidding it was just satire I was doing the Socratic method I don't know what I was doing but whatever it was it wasn't not knowing something also two more points firstly Anita is not ignoring the economic aspect of neoliberalism because she goes on in her speech to draw explicit comparisons between the neoliberal economic ideas of individualism and privatization and the individualist ideas of choice feminism secondly teal dia mentions the actual definition of neoliberalism so pray silence everyone for professor dictionary the inventor of all the words come to tell us what they actually mean you see if you do what teal dia should have done and Google neoliberalism you can read all about it for free and one of the first things that wikipedia tells us about the term is this the definition and usage of the term has changed over time and it goes on to lay out all the differing and changing meanings of the word neoliberalism speaking of definitions of words back then I thought sexism basically boiled down to a few bad apples with misguided personal beliefs born out of ignorance or overt hatred right stop there that is exactly what sexism is just like racism just like homophobia they are not the wider pervasive views of society they are the views of a select few vast minority of society so that's what sexism racism and homophobia mean for anyone who was wondering they're not societal or cultural problems they're merely individual problems and that's all and that's quite nice isn't it to finally have that issue resolved however till via later quotes the dictionary definition of the word compassion at Anita in an attempt to catch her out on something and he uses Google's dictionary feature for this so let's see what Google's dictionary feature thinks of the word sexism and here's their example of the word sexism in a sentence sexism in language is an offensive reminder of the way the culture sees women and while we're at it let's just see what dictionary.com thinks of the word sexism ingrained and institutionalized prejudice against or hatred of women so the dictionaries at least seem to think sexism is more than just an individual problem hey you know the dictionary quote it when it agrees with you and quietly ignore it when it doesn't with the help of some amazing mentors and by reading a lot of feminist writing especially the words of women of color and queer women from around the world because the opinions of white women and straight women are apparently lower on the hierarchy of importance than all of those people also you know what I'm starting to lighten up to this idea of calling folks people of color and queers because now when I want to go on a good old-fashioned [ __ ] Lynch your [ __ ] drag I can use the correct terminology thanks feminism you [ __ ] bigots so I don't really know what was going on with that last bit I think it was just a joke that didn't quite hit the mark there to put it lightly but let's address the part before that where Anita say she especially read the words of women of color and queer women from around the world and teal dia takes this to mean that Anita is discounting the words of straight white feminists however this is another example of teal dia cutting Anita off in the middle of a sentence you see the rest of Anita's sentence reads like this and it's the intersecting social systems bit that I really want you to pay attention to here it's not that Anita saying the words of straight white feminists don't matter it's that they're not enough by themselves she's saying you need a bunch of different viewpoints from different people so the words of women of color and queer women would be especially important for someone trying to understand interacting social systems because they will have particular insights about things like race and sexuality that you wouldn't necessarily get if you exclusively read the works of straight white people unfortunately many contemporary discourses in and around feminism tend to emphasize a form of hyper individualism which is informed by that neoliberal worldview you are really offended by this idea that people can and do think for themselves aren't you or is this just some sort of subtle manipulative way of you trying to say yeah it's okay for you to think for yourself as long as what you think agrees with me because if you agree with me that's the only way that you're not going to be a hyper individual neoliberal shitlord and this part represents the main misunderstanding of teal Diaz here teal Diaz here Anita is going to go on to denounce so-called choice feminism and argue that feminists have a responsibility beyond the individual now key to this idea is that individual actions do matter quite a lot that's the whole point in fact that individual actions have ramifications beyond the individual Anita's argument here relies upon the existence and importance of individuals teal dia completely misses this and thinks Anita is arguing that individuals don't or shouldn't exist and that feminism should be some sort of borg collective and he does this a lot so to save coming back to this point over and over again let's go nonlinear and quickly bang through some of the other times you get hung up on this individual point because the individual choices of individual women do not matter the only thing that matters is the public image and branding of feminism which is more important than the freedom of choice autonomy and liberty of any woman bend your knee and submit puny mortal women submit to your goddess Queen feminism there you go straight from the horse's mouth you as a woman cannot be entrusted to empower yourself st. sarkeesian will decide what will empower you for you because you are too weak pathetic and stupid to be trusted and any action that you take that is not directly approved by st. sarkeesian could risk damaging the holy image of feminism you actually have no concept of the individual do you all you can see is the collective and anything that is not of the collective is against the collective you don't even seem to want women within that collective to identify as being individual women you just want them to be one large congeal okay you get the point he says it a lot and I think the only other point to be made here is Tod is completely ridiculous stretching of Anita's words to their most absurd possible extent Anita's language is actually very measured and restrained to restrained in my opinion you know she'll say something like some choices might possibly have negative ramifications and Tod responds hysterically casting you're some sort of self declared feminist dictator and I wonder if it's just feminism that sets him off or if TL diya takes this approach to every sentence he hears you know for instance if I say I'm quite tall ah right so Shaun thinks he's the tallest man who has ever lived on the entire planet in human history it was quite nice at Elia to stop by there for that little cameo wasn't it he's got a good sense of humor about himself at least anyway let's go back in time to where we left off okay so this is the part where I say things that may ruffle some feathers ah so after demonizing the white man dehumanizing women people who aren't white and people who aren't straight down to the point that they have no autonomy of their own this is the point where things are going to get offensive this is the line in the sand past which the offensive stuff begins apparently now then what on earth is he talking about here just to pick one point out of that mess dehumanizing people who aren't straight down to the point where they have no autonomy off their own where in her speech did Anita do that I think what he's talking about here is earlier when Anita said she was involved with clubs arguing for gay and lesbian rights and to which teal dia responded so you really shouldn't presume to speak for all lesbian women everywhere you heterosexual oppressive shitlord after all nothing quite says I'm fighting for equality like speaking over all of those marginalized voices you know it's that it the only other time Annie tomayto mentioned gay people is when she said that she read the works of queer women so it's got to be the first one right I need to say I support gay and lesbian rights until the ear response are so you're dehumanizing gay people to the point where they have no autonomy that's ridiculous I thought it was meant to be the social justice crowd who were overly dramatic and easily outraged anita is not the humanizing gay people she isn't demonizing the white man in fact if you read the neatest whole speech she hasn't even directly mentioned men at all up to now you know no offense to your dear but you know chill out but I think it's a critical discussion to have so no it really isn't but you know what is a critical discussion to have the blatant hive mind that is on display in front of us right now notice how every single woman is sitting in exactly the same way bar the one notable exception who is anatomically unable to do so because her legs are in fact beginning to fuse together in her chrysalis stage at which point she will emerge as a full-fledged hot just an observation anyway let's keep going so completely unnecessary unfair and tangental attack on an unrelated person aside I absolutely love the concept of a hive mind but with exceptions you know if we look at the source video and the next wide shot of the whole panel we see that the two people - Anita's left are sitting differently Jemaine Greer has both of her feet on the ground and the person on the end has her legs crossed in the other direction how did it come to this so look at all these women sitting in the exact same way except for the ones who aren't four out of seven what a hive mind that is the fact of the matter is that some choices have ramifications beyond ourselves and reinforce harmful patriarchal ideas about women as a group and about women's bodies and our wider shared culture and because of how systems of oppression intersect and compound one another it's women of color indigenous women women living in the global south women with disabilities queer women and trans women who bear the brunt of these ramifications so how do you live with yourself because you're a white woman which means you're obviously oppressing every non-white woman you're of Armenian descent which means that you are not indigenous to America and are therefore oppressing all of the people who lived in America before European colonization you live in the global North which means you're automatically oppressing everyone in the global South you're able-bodied so you're instantly oppressing everyone who is disabled and as far as I'm aware you're straight and not transsexual so you're oppressing every non-straight transsexual in the world honestly with the massive amount of oppression that you're exerting on this world I'm quite surprised you haven't killed yourself you know just from the guilt of it all well teal dia allow me to shed some light on this you see Anita said that some choices have ramifications beyond ourselves and reinforce harmful patriarchal ideas about women as a group and that it's the various minorities and disadvantaged groups she mentioned that bear the brunt of those ramifications although if you notice Anita used the wrong bear in bear the brunt there anyway what she's saying is that some individual choices lead to the ramifications of which the disadvantaged groups bear the brunt an implicit here is the contrary some individual choices do not lead to these harmful ramifications and it is these choices that Anita sarkeesian is advocating for she's explicitly not saying that oppression of minorities is automatic and inescapable she's saying that one can choose to be aware of these oppressive systems and help put an end to them so Anita sarkeesian hasn't killed herself because she thinks that the oppressive systems can be stopped and that she can help to stop them by her choices you get it yeah women can choose from a pre-approved palette but we cannot meaningfully choose liberation okay you know what I am getting really sick of all of this feminism social justice [ __ ] so I am making a patriarchal decision and announcement as of immediate effect feminism and social justice warrior are now removed from the patriarchal palette of pre approved roles that women can fill in society so I'll give that a couple of days for the message to get around and then feminism and social justice will just go away right oh wait no it won't because this mythological patriarchy palette doesn't [ __ ] exist our teal D is doing the misunderstanding the patriarchy thing seen that one before a bunch of these dudes here patriarchy and see this like a secret male Illuminati who decide everything and then they project that misunderstanding back on to where they heard the word patriarchy and they don't bother to go and check if it's right I think this just comes down to having no faith at all in women's intelligence you know any idea they come up with automatically has to be the most stupid possible interpretation of that idea it's understanding our own intersections of privilege and oppression and how that will fundamentally change our behaviors and attitudes and values it's realizing that being a feminist is a lifelong learning endeavor and that we will make some mistake on the way and we should be compassionate to ourselves when that happens yeah mistakes will be made like demonizing half of the population and then telling the remaining half of the population that they're too incompetent to be trusted forming their own destiny in life but you should only be compassionate to yourself when you make those mistakes and speaking of mistakes that you make Anita I really think that you should look up the definition of the word compassion because it doesn't mean what you think it means and here we go it's the reason I decided to respond to this video so as I mentioned before this dictionary is Google's dictionary the same dictionary that previously disagreed with TLD is narrow interpretation of the word sexism so here Teil dia is upset because Anita said that we talking about feminists will make mistakes and she'll be compassionate to ourselves when that happens because he thinks the word compassion can only be used with regards to things other than the self and that is the common understanding of the word if you just say you have compassion the listener will generally assume that you mean for other people if you want them to understand the idea of having compassion for oneself you'd need some other words in that sentence you know some surrounding context that modifies the meaning of the word compassion and Anita does seem to afford of this let's see how she starts off trying to get the idea of having compassion for oneself across to her audience compassion right but we all know what this means sympathetic pitying concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others uh-oh Anita bad start there you're going to have to do better than that how are you going to dig yourself out of this hole oh hang on what does two mean a preposition used for expressing aim purpose or intention very sneaky Anita you see she's given a self an out if her next word whatever it is differs from the dictionary definition of what is understood people usually have compassion for she will have successfully modified the word Anita sarkeesian is a literary genius I can't wait to see what she comes up with next and holy [ __ ] the roller coaster ride is over and taken this all together we understand the idea we should be compassionate to ourselves now when I make these videos I usually end up saying something like if you watch the whole video the points clear but I'm gonna have to say - teil dia if you listen to the end of the sentence the point is clear not content with responding to sentence fragments anymore TLD is now responding just to individual words which looks quite fun to be honest so I'm gonna take a crack at it hmm so how do we a feminist um I of course that is how st. sarkeesian would start off a speech isn't it talking about herself oh don't mind all those other people there Anita you just go ahead and make everyone listen to you talk about your favorite topic yourself and you know what I'm sure they will look at this hive mind just over half of whom a sitting in a similar way listening with rapt attention as their God Empress tells them what they're allowed to think today peddle Oh what's this Anita you had to do something you really despise the idea that women can have free agency don't you was it the patriarchy that made you do this unspecified action I must have missed that meeting maybe I was off oppressing everyone by being a straight white male so go on Anita what was it that the evil patriarchy made you do learn oh you had to learn well how awful for you I guess it must be difficult for a feminist learning things must be some eh liyan concept for you how evil of men to literally force you to learn something oh but don't let me interrupt you Anita go on what did you simply have to learn about how to be a feminist ah yes there we go straight from the horse's mouth feminism is unnatural you know what somewhere out there in the multiverse there's a version of my channel with a lot more subscribers I'll say that anyway let's get back to this because I do have one more point to make about this and it concerns the word ourselves what does ourselves mean it's a plural pronoun we or us personally used to emphasize the speaker and one or more other people considered together but that's not what teal Diaz said he said yourself but you should only be compassionate to yourself when you make those mistakes teal dia really should have said yourselves plural Anita is talking about a group of feminists having compassion for themselves plural which may include but does not necessarily require each individual to have compassion for themselves singular if every feminist feels compassion for all the other feminists they all feel compassion for themselves plural but not themselves singular which perfectly fits the dictionary definition of the word compassion now that's not really what I think Anita exclusively meant there I do think she was also talking about having compassion for oneself or I guess he could say self compassion weight self compassion that's a thing well [ __ ] you see that's the problem with the dictionary you think you have it memorized perfectly and then people keep going around making up new [ __ ] it's realizing that others will make mistakes and we should extend that compassion to them as well unless of course that person is a straight white male at which point you can presumably just condemn him to the pit of hell yes not really straight white guys are the touchy estas fragile people on this planet I swear to God grow a spine outro don't know why I said outro I apologize about this one I needed a little post-election catharsis you know I'll do something more substantial next time if you'd like to get in touch Semyon I'm still sick by the way send me a message on Twitter or ask fm if you're feeling very charitable there's a donation link on the YouTube banner but don't donate because of this video go watch one of my better videos and then donate because of that right see ya

Channel: Shaun

Views: 999,724

Keywords: tldr, teal deer, shaun jen, tl;dr, anita sarkeesian

Id: UQ-gXvWTIRI

Length: 33min 54sec (2034 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2016