The Creative Mental Twisties Women Do To Call Themselves Oppressed
With some frequency, I feel grateful to be living now, as opposed to any other time in history, because, as a Western woman, I have more rights and I'm safer than women have ever been.
Yet, amazingly, women find more and more reasons to complain about their circumstances.
Students at the Colorado School of Mines, a public university in Colorado for engineering and applied science, voted to name their athletic arena "The Mine Shaft."
But Jillian Kay Melchior writes at Heat Street:
In an email sent last August, a student (whose name was redacted) describes being "shocked and disgusted" at the nickname choice for the university's Lockridge Arena."The idea behind the name, at least from the students perspective, was that the students could tell the opposing team they had been 'shafted,'" the student wrote. In making her complaint, the student used another racially loaded term (and some misspellings) in an email to administrators: "The most common definition of the word means to get jipped out of a deal, which doesn't make since [sic] for us to be telling another team. But the other and most disturbing definition is to be raped. Bottom line, I think the name supports rape culture. If Mines is truly trying to diversify the campus maybe they should not have the student section have such a phalic [sic] name."
Administrators sprung into action after receiving the student's complaint.
Katie Schmalzel, assistant director of housing operations, took the complaint so seriously that she forwarded it to the university's Title IX coordinator. "I agree with [pronoun redacted] about the name being inappropriate, and goes against everything our work stands for," she wrote.
What, humorlessness, lack of due process, giving women unearned power over men and a democratic process, and treating women as eggshells, not equals?
Also, what a dipshit -- the two words are used together, first of all. And hilariously, "The Mine Shaft" is typically the name of a gay bar. If there are women there, the last thing anybody there wants to do is rape them.
Oh, and the original "Shaft"? (Cue 70s soundtrack!) Or did you just see the remake, you pussy?
Rape culture, by the way, is what they have a number of countries in the Middle East, and which is absolutely trivialized by women saying that it exists on campus because of the name of an athletic arena.
It's a nation-wide retard convention.
Adam Bein at July 19, 2016 6:02 AM
Did she spell "gypped" wrong on purpose? And why would she use such an ethnically-disparaging term, anyway? Such bigotry.
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com) at July 19, 2016 6:12 AM
The double-plus irony being that, if we're going to characterize everything by which genitals it resembles, a mine shaft is female. Sometimes a hole is just a hole...
Cousin Dave at July 19, 2016 6:31 AM
Compared against Utopia the US is a sad, backwards, and disgusting place. Of course compared against the rest of the world current and past the US looks pretty good.
(no one listens when I compare against the future, :
Ben at July 19, 2016 7:22 AM
I've never heard the word "shaft" used in describing rape before. I have heard it used in a phallic sense, but not in describing rape.
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If this unnamed genderless student has trouble with "shaft" being used for an athletic arena, what is he/she going to do when he/she goes to work at an actual mine and is told to go down the shaft?
What ever will this student do if they work at strip mine? Or, worse yet, a glory hole mine?
Conan the Grammarian at July 19, 2016 7:22 AM
Did she spell "gypped" wrong on purpose? And why would she use such an ethnically-disparaging term, anyway? Such bigotry.
___________________________________
The idea is that if you spell something differently, people will eventually forget the offensive source - and, being young, she may well not KNOW the source, since the only "gypsies" people tend to encounter in the U.S. aren't really that anyway - they're called "Irish Travelers," both by themselves and others. (And yes, despite their self-isolation, they blend right in with other white people, unlike the dark-skinned Romany, as a rule.) I recently found a fascinating - if slightly shallow - YA novel from 2004 told from the point of view of a 16-year-old Traveler girl: "See You Down the Road" by Kim Ablon Whitney. It even reminded me of Judy Blume's books for older teens, in a way. Before that, the first time I'd heard of the Travelers was in 2002, when Madelyne Gorman Toogood was caught on camera in Indiana, beating her 4-year-old daughter for not helping her shoplift.
Good article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2002/10/20/unwelcome-stares-at-quiet-clan/e790d280-13d3-4fe9-a1a7-35b24b07fd6e/
Anyway, the misspelling is for roughly the same reason many people say "jeez" instead of "Jesus Christ!" The latter is, of course, offensive to religious types. Even "gosh" used to be considered close to swearing.
Another example - "mother" instead of you-know-what.
lenona at July 19, 2016 7:48 AM
what is he/she going to do when he/she goes to work at an actual mine and is told to go down the shaft?
Not. Likely. To. Happen.
My father was an underground miner. He told me stories, mines called Magma because it was so bloody hot, and other that were cold. And sinking shafts? some of the most dangerous work you could do in the business.
Of course, my father also told stories of the mine engineers planning a new drift, and progressing from both sides and being off by a couple of feet. I have a feeling that if this student was in mine engineering, that's the likely outcome.
Measure twice, cut once. Also, miners can make sailors blush.
I R A Darth Aggie at July 19, 2016 8:17 AM
It's tough being a man.
These days, though, it must be downright embarrassing to be a woman, given how pathetic the people who speak for them are.
I used to think much more highly of the "fair" sex.
Jay R at July 19, 2016 9:54 AM
Conan: "I've never heard the word 'shaft' used in describing rape before."
Neither have I.
Women must have it pretty good on campus if they have time to worry about the injustice of mine shaft.
When I worked in the oilfields during the 1980's we had tools with names like rubber, nipple, asshole, prick and nun's cunt. I wonder how [name redacted] would have felt about that.
Ken R at July 19, 2016 11:20 AM
I work with a guy in the oil field who's name is Randy Riggs. True story. It's right there on his license.
Ben at July 19, 2016 11:55 AM
She's not going to like the real world of engineering at all. Presumably, that's where she wants to go, since she is attending CSM, which is one of the hardest of the hard-core engineering schools in the US.
All of the harder engineering disciplines are filled with terms-of-art which are horrifically non-PC if you have a mind to look for that sort of thing. Male and female (for parts which fit inside each other) is just the beginning.
My personal favorite, which gets double points because it is found on both sides of the pond, is schoolmistress/schoolmarm, a twin-parallel-beam tool using in forming heavy metal bars and sections. In olden times, this tool was often made from a suitably-formed tree stump. The commonality of the term on both sides of the water suggests that it is a very ancient term indeed.
She and her post-modern PC wittering are never going to eradicate such terminology from the engineering world. But something tells me that, for her, that is not a bug, but a feature - she doesn't want to eradicate the use of these terms, in fact, she needs them to continue to be used so she can continue to have an endless source of grievances. Pretty sad way to live.
llater,
llamas
llamas at July 19, 2016 11:56 AM
You fear the Trigglypuff?
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y69tkCbeC5o
She will devour your kind.
Canvasback at July 19, 2016 4:04 PM
Oh for Pete's sake; if "name redacted" ever gets in charge of anything we are all screwed!
charles at July 19, 2016 5:37 PM
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