This is Tom Arnold. You remember him, right?
Like accusations of racism and xenophobia, claims of sexism, gender bias and misogyny are increasingly useful to activists as swords as well as shields. Especially egregious recently have been the claims of Elizabeth Warren and her supporters that it was bias against women, and her not her own redolent awfulness as a candidate and a human being, that had the Massachusetts Senator running behind an ancient Marxist and poor, addled Joe Biden.
This is a problem when the objective is to build a fairer and a more ethical culture. Contrived accusations of sexism makes society more leery of genuine and justified complaints. Worse still is when alleged women’s activists shrug off or ignore the sexist attacks on women who they don’t admire or agree with.
The hypocrisy was in evidence when the repugnant HBO progressive scold Bill Maher referred to conservative women Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann as “cunts” and “twats” while his audience of enablers hooted. Feminist groups were silent until criticism from people like me (not me, but people like me who actually have more readers than the population of Mayberry) prompted a couple of them to make mild statements chiding Bill. Two years ago Democratic Congressman Cedric Richmond made a disgusting sexist joke about Kellyanne Conway, no feminist activists, nor Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris or any prominent progressive women, criticized Richmond. Conway, like palin and Bachmann, deserved to be denigrated because of their gender, apparently.
Over the weekend, B-list celebrity Tom Arnold issued this tweet:
Nice.
[In case you tend to forget marginal performers, Tom Arnold owes whatever career he has–had?— to marrying Roseanne Barr when he was an obscure comedian before she became a Hollywood pariah. He scored exactly one film role that wasn’t instantly destined for oblivion, the part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sidekick in “True Lies,” a James Cameron action/comedy that itself was blatantly misogynist. That was 26 years ago.]
Hollywood conservative critic Christian Toto decided to do an integrity check. Metaphorical tongue firmly imbedded in metaphorical cheek, Toto wrote, “Certainly the same feminists who rallied behind Sen. Warren would rise up against Arnold….No First Lady, regardless of party affiliation, deserves to be treated in that fashion. The comments play to the ugliest tropes that sexualize women. Feminists would lead the bipartisan charge against Arnold, no doubt.”
He knew what was coming, or rather not coming.
Toto contacted five feminist groups for comment on Arnold’s Tweet: The National Organization for Women (NOW), NOW’s Hollywood branch, UltraViolet, Equality Now, The Feminist Majority Foundation and asked for either a brief interview about Arnold’s comments or a statement reacting to his ugly tweet.
“No group so much as responded to HiT’s press requests. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, though.Feminists routinely look the other way when conservative women are under attack. Consider the crude comments made against Nikki Haley, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Laura Ingraham and other right-leaning women. Groups like NOW rarely, if ever, speak up on their behalf….It’s why the current First Lady will get no apology from Arnold. Nor will feminists rally around her in any way, shape or form.
Modern feminism doesn’t think conservative women deserve equality, let alone respect.
Bingo.
Ethics Alarms 
“Modern feminism doesn’t think conservative women deserve equality, let alone respect.”
These same groups will incuriously ignore a rather blatant 97 % Saturation of ideologically certified X-Chromosomal Units.
TIME’s “100 Women Of The Year” List Features Just Two Conservatives And One Republican
Time magazine?? Maybe they could begin printing on newsprint, so that it could br of use during these times of toilet paper shortages.
That from someone who has twice been Time’s Man/Person/thing of the Year. So there. 🙂
Powerful: Loggers Carved HOW DARE YOU Into The Forest While Cutting Down Trees For Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year Issue
Tom Arnold’s comment isn’t worthy of discussion because he is a nobody. Yes, he is a pig and the tweet was terrible. I would be more concerned if I saw this tweet come from somebody with power or popularity. He has neither.
It’s a valid point. How hard would it have been, though, for one of the groups Toto contacted to write what you just did?
I am not sure that power or popularity should play into whether feminist groups should speak out or condemn the tweet. Obviously, he has some reach otherwise this tweet would not have been picked up and repeated.
If it is power or popularity that determines what should be publicly condemned as misogynistic, why then does no one speak out when so many powerful and popular women use pejorative terms to describe many males; the one most often used is “old white men”?
Would they be willing to say James Clyburn should not run again because he is an old black male so as to make way for someone like Georgia’s Stacey Abrams who wants to have a chance at the reins of power? I don’t think so. Pray tell why is that only men should step aside to make room for women to move up when so many female members of Congress are themselves unwilling to hand over the reins of power they have? The most misogynistic and patronizing statement I ever heard was that men should step aside and give women a chance to sit at the table. That statement implies that they cannot do it on their own. Before anyone says that women have to work harder to get ahead in politics or other areas in life much of that depends who you are, where you started from, and how attractive you are.
“I am not sure that power or popularity should play into whether feminist groups should speak out or condemn the tweet.”
Of course it should. The internet is a toxic cesspool of stupidity, if national organizations felt the need to comment on every gross tweet on the internet, they’d need staff compliments larger than small cities to do so.
Arguing against that is in effect arguing in favor of the airtime the Covington kids were subjected to, Even if everything that was being reported was true (and I am very much aware it was not), these kids were kids, and there is no universe where a kid smirking “aggressively” at someone needs be national news. Unless power and popularity isn’t material, in which case it’s fair game.
The question is at what level does someone gain enough of a platform to justify spending time reporting on them. I’d argue that even washed-up has-been B -isters might make that grade, but I could be convinced otherwise.
@Spartan
Would there be the same silence had Arnold said the same to Michelle Obama?
I imagine that the collective cries of outrage from the usual aggrieved parties could be heard from space.
“…the collective cries of outrage from the usual aggrieved parties could be heard from space.”
And beyond!
See, I almost wrote that, but its so reflex by now. Of course there wouldn’t. It’s not really worth asking. These ground would erupt if Arnold tweeted that about Michelle NOW, and she’s not even in the white House any more, just collecting money. And Arnold would be cancelled, though in his case, I don’t know what that means.
Just another example of the left wanting a monopoly on a lot of things. I guess women are one of those things. I remember True Lies – it was Arnold as James Bond, basically, and that part worked. The part where Jamie Lee Curtis performs a pole dance for him, duped into thinking he is another spy, not so much. Some say the film was also blatantly anti-Arab, but I say it just told a cartoonish version of the truth.
Conservative women don’t have enough pure revolutionary fervor. You have to be willing to murder your unborn child to deserve fairness and civility.
It has never been primarily about treatment of females with these groups. Yes, they highlight issues of treatment, but only to collect political power. It has always been about galvanizing women voters into the leftist vision against anything that is traditionally American. Don’t follow what the leftists believe, especially abortion…no matter your sex or sexual preference or anything else…you’re a nobody or a target. Period.
When Nikki Haley runs for resident in 2024, she’ll be the most qualified female to ever run for president. She might not get as close to winning as Hillary, because Haley doesn’t have the funds to buy the RNC, and the RNC isn’t for sale quite the same way the DNC was after Obama gutted it… But if I were an American, I’d vote for her and feel good about it.
Regardless, when she announces her candidacy, I’ll be waiting with bated breath for all the newspapers to endorse her, NOW to rally by her side, and feminists to don their pussy hats in solidarity for the sisterhood. I mean, we all know that the Democrats are far to sexist and racist to seriously platform anything other than the whitest and male-est of geriatrics.
I think you can save your bait. She MIGHT get some endorsements from the newspapers, although after 2016 that means a LOT less than it once did. NOW won’t say a word, and I think you’d do better expecting the Hudson River to turn to lemonade and all the buildings in NYC to turn to cake and ice cream than you would expecting them to say one. Sisterhood? That and brotherhood are more words the left wants a monopoly on. It’s a great thing when black people or Muslims call each other “brother” and feminists talk about the “sisterhood,” of course, ’cause ain’t it great when the oppressed all stick together? However, mention the Irish Christian Brothers or the Franciscan Sisters, suddenly it becomes all about corporal punishment and sexual abuse. And should anyone not of color mention brotherhood, suddenly those white supremacy alarm bells go off, because it’s not at all good when white people, leave alone like-minded white people, gather. In fact, maybe white men, like rangers in the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, should be restricted from gathering in groups larger than three, on pain of being declared part of a riotous assembly and arrested.
I’ve always been intrigued by the silence of leftist feminists toward leftists like Clinton and Kennedy and Weinstein — the long line of men who talk one way but behave another. And why aren’t these feminists marching in the streets condemning Islam’s subjection of women? Silence again.
Do most feminists march on foreign issues?
Constantly. But only if the foreign nation is primarily white and Christian. The number of British feminists yapping about Trump is profoundly and by orders of magnitude more prominent than the number of British feminists decrying FGM in Somalia, for instance.
The brown people don’t count, you see… It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations on a global scale.
I believe author/activist Yasmine Mohammed pointed out the same issue in regards to the treatment of Muslim women in the Middle East, a human rights issue that feminism is extremely quiet on/actively avoids.
And for that Amazon banned her ads because her book is more controversial than Hitler’s works and Facebook removed her posts complaining about it for violating ‘community standards’?
I have been watching these interesting debates taking place within the Muslim community. These Head to Head talks are pretty good really. It might be interesting for you to know that there is a good deal of feminist critical analysis and activism, in this case a lesbian Muslim critic of Islam: