Bucktown’s Filter Coffee House Gets a Mention on Feministing…
…and no, it’s not positive.
I always thought the sign was funny. I guess that makes me an insensitive bastard.
Frequent readers of feminist blogs know what time it is: time to cue up the circular firing squad and have a good intramural purging. Yeah, that’ll teach those coffee-selling, sexist, misogynist, heternormative, patriarchal jerks.
(Cross-posted to my friends call me nikkos. Hey, cut me some slack- it’s been a slow week content-wise)
I think they need to lay off the coffee…
Feministing or Filter? ;)
I just had a hilarious conversation with one of FIlter’s employees- I urged her to stop by and comment; hopefully she will!
She did point out, FWIW, that Filter is owned by a woman.
Honestly, I don’t think the Feministing comments were that bad. The differing viewpoints were tolerated and discussed, at least, unlike some other comment threads we’ve seen, eh, Nikkos?
As for the sign itself, I tend to think that probably at some point, some dude went up to the barista and asked if the barista saw where his girlfriend went, and thus the sign. I doubt anyone was trying to make a statement about women as property, or even people as property, but it probably would have been better to just say “companions” instead of “girlfriends” if they were going to write anything like that at all.
Some of the folks at Feministing do have a point, though, and it’s that some forms of marginalizing women (and minorities, and gays, and foreigners, and so on and so on) are so accepted that we barely notice them. And that’s bad because then we’re reinforcing ideas because we can’t be arsed to think about stuff. Examples of things like this that make me cringe: using the word “gay” to describe something in a derogatory manner, calling someone a “pussy” to imply weakness, and guys who ask other guys if they “squat when they pee” to imply weakness. Those are statments that get tossed around all the time that can subtly reinforce the archaic, and frankly ridiculous as far as I’m concerned, ideas that being gay is bad, and that being a woman or like a woman is being weak.
Artemis-
I was hoping you’d weigh in on this one!
You’re right, most of the comments weren’t as militant as we’ve seen before, although the commenters pulled no punches in telling one woman that said she was tired of the increasingly “shrill” nature of the blog to leave and never come back. (Mental note: don’t ever, ever, call a feminist “shrill.”).
Luckily we’re in broad agreement on these kinds of issues Artemis so I don’t have to get mired in a flame war over my opinion, which is: you have to choose your battles. In this case, I think Feministing did not choose wisely. Although I can’t really complain since I got a post out of it ;).
Thanks, as always, for your comment!