Victoria Brownworth Profile picture
Apr 8, 2018 12 tweets 4 min read Read on X
I admit to being stunned that there are still men shaking their fists on the white-males-only lawn over #KevinWilliamson.This piece is even more egregious for its casual claim that Williamson is cruel yet that's somehow intellectually pure.

It is not.
1/ politico.com/magazine/amp/s…
There is no world where it is mere envelope-pushing to call for the lynching--let's call it what it is--of women for exercising their legal rights over their own bodies, nor is it intellectually acceptable to assert the supremacy of whiteness nor claim refute LGBT identities. 2/
Since people from the center to the left casually refer to everyone as Nazis these days, when a man whose ideology & intellectual pursuit is aligned with the more brilliant minds of the Third Reich, its acknowledgement is ignored, its reality occluded.
Williamson is one such.
3/
We have the @ACLU to stand for the free speech rights of the most vile among us. In a free society as ours purports to be that is essential, if personally repugnant.

That said, the role of intellectual platforms like @TheAtlantic is not to give safe harbor to such extremism.
4/
When Tiki torch bearers march through a college campus chanting "Jews will not replace us," we know who they are.

But just as evangelicals can't recognize Christ in an immigrant, left men don't recognize a Nazi when he's given a place at our intellectual table to spew cant.
5/
It is not a "difference of opinion" to fail utterly to acknowledge the autonomy and personhood of women, LGBT and others Williamson and his ilk eschew. (Add NRO's Cooke to this list.)

6/
The same minds that continue to embrace The Bell Curve and other intellectually suspect Nazism reframe the discourse on women and LGBT as mere politik.

Our lives are not up for review. Stop thinking that they are.

7/
The blot on @TheAtlantic & @JeffreyGoldberg is not the firing of #KevinWilliamson, but the hiring.

In our clickbait culture we are reminded always (particularly those of us who write for a living) to push for edginess.

It's not an intellectual exercise to deny personhood.
8/
I'd suggest these impassioned commentaries on behalf of Williamson find replication in the ugliest annals of our collective history. Failure to recognize that what it is you are arguing for is not broader discourse, but a clear path to the ovens is disturbing beyond measure.
9/
Schafer's piece on @politico was the most extreme yet. I'd argue that none of these men has had the polemical cojones to switch out women for blacks nor gays & trans for Jews, but there's no putative difference except in not recognizing the slipperiness of their slope.
10/

10/
There may be a collective gasp at that last statement, but it's reality. If we were talking about anyone BUT women & LGBT, none of this would have happened.

Women have been called the n word of the world. Williamson and his cadre of apologists think that's as it should be.
11/
That there have been no white male takedowns of #KevinWilliamson nor a single notation of Cooke except by me is telling.

We will know them by their allyship,MLK said of white moderates.

Women learned a lot this week about our purported allies.Don't be too quick to forgive.
12/

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More from @VABVOX

Oct 9, 2018
I don't think men really understand how different it is to be a woman out in the world and how quickly things can turn dangerous.
When I was living in New Orleans, I was walking home from work one night. It was fall--dark early & foggy.
A man came out of the fog toward me.
1/
He said hi, I said hi.
As he started to pass me, he asked me if I had the time.
I looked at my watch, looked up, he had a gun pointed at me.
He hit me so fast I wasn't able to steel myself.
I fell to the ground.
He said, "I could rape you right now, but I don't have time."
2/
He wanted my money.
I had the grocery money for the entire house (I lived with 3 other people) in my purse.
He took it and disappeared into the fog.
The whole thing was maybe ten minutes, start to finish.
I was shaking so hard I could hardly get up.
My head was bleeding.
3/
Read 20 tweets
Oct 4, 2018
The majority of the working class in America is women and POC.
And white men as a group haven't voted majority Democrat since 1964--they stopped after LBJ signed the the #VRA.
Flip the narrative and start listening to the ACTUAL working class--the rest of us.
Stop centering white men for everything.
Stop claiming only white men can save us from the damage white men did to us.
Women are the working class--my investigation here:

damemagazine.com/2018/04/12/wom…
.@matthewstoller is very worried about white men, but it's really women of all races who are facing the worst effects of economic and social stresses.
My investigation here:
damemagazine.com/2018/05/10/why…
Read 5 tweets
Oct 2, 2018
The relentlessness of passing over superb women with strong credentials & election histories in favor of whatever man is a headline at a moment is exhausting.

Two months ago it was Avenatti. Now it's O'Rourke.

Bypassing the majority of Americans--women--is a national disgrace.
O'Rourke is fine. He is not, Harris, Gillibrand or Klobuchar.

▪Gillibrand is Congress' leader on women's rights & sexual assault victims.
▪Harris set NN2018 on fire with her speeches reclaiming identity politics.
▪ Klobuchar highlighted #Kavanaugh's unfitness for SCOTUS.
Americans MUST stop looking past women to find some man, any man to supplant them.

It took THIRTY YEARS of incredibly hard work for @HillaryClinton to get to run for POTUS. The rules for women are so different. No one sees a woman give a single speech and says "president!"
Read 16 tweets
Oct 1, 2018
I lived in NOLA right after college.
I drank most every day, as did everyone I knew.
We were all in the domestic Peace Corps, all in our early 20s, all hardworking activists with stressful work.
We drank too much at Mardi Gras, New Year's.
It's absurd to claim #Kavanaugh didn't.
Those of us who've had alcoholics in our lives--like Klobuchar--tend to be careful about alcohol because we've been damaged by the drunks in our lives. I'm a control freak, so never liked being drunk, but lots of my friends did. What IS true, is most 20somethings drink to excess.
This new tack from the #GOP to dismiss #Kavanaugh's alcoholic drinking--& I am not saying he was/is an alcoholic, but he certainly drank like one--is just wrong. It undermines their own credibility and ignores reality: statistically the vast majority of teens/20s get drunk OFTEN.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 29, 2018
Let's talk about sex, #Kavanaugh & Venn diagram overlap of male entitlement.

I've written a lot about sex in various contexts. In the late 80s/early 90s I also gave safe sex workshops back when folks my age were dying 24/7 from #AIDS. My 1st book was on juvenile prostitution.
1/
Most of us know consensual and non-consensual sex differ. The entirety of #Kavanaugh's defense and his defenders' outrage is predicated on the presumption that no teenaged boy knows what consent is.

THEY. KNOW.

Some, like their adult counterparts, don't care.

This is key.
2/
Since #MeToo we've seen egregious serial rapists like #BillCosby and #HarveyWeinstein exposed & attempts made to prosecute them.

But there are "lesser" sexual assaults we've given a lighter hand to: Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Louis CK--too many to list.
3/
Read 28 tweets
Sep 27, 2018
I gotta tell you, folks, I have been so sick for the past 2wks, I have really been scared.

Sept 22 House GOP passed their new cuts to Social Security Medicaid and Medicare out of committee. $1.2T in cuts.

That's the safety net.

I've always hoped I could fall there. No more.
I had to call my bestie today to have her come up and stay with me while The Wife is teaching.

Even with the oxygen, hard to breathe.

I had to cancel interviews for tomorrow, a radio appearance for Friday.

Chronic illness like #cancer is incapacitating at times.
We need to do better for sick and #disabled Americans.

It is so hard to work and be sick.

Never getting better sick.
Read 4 tweets

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