Reading over a post of Caleb’s, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest the whole girls with guns meme is precipitously close to, if not already jumping the shark. I say that not because I have a problem with women in the gun issue, quite the contrary. I think the shark jumping may be close or occurring because women in the gun issue is becoming more and more commonplace, and the schtick of using sex appeal to attract hoards of male readers has been wearing thin on me, and since someone else has written what I’ve been thinking for a while, perhaps others too. Most of the female gun bloggers I’ve kept reading over the years I’ve kept reading because I like their writing, and think they make useful contributions to the community.
15 thoughts on “Jumped the Shark?”
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Yeah, me too. I read Playboy just for the articles!
Oh, and the term ‘Jumped the Shark’ has jumped the shark!
“Jumped the shark” has “nuked the fridge”, actually.
And, you know, those female gun bloggers only just came out recently and started talking about that!
To be honest, I don’t have many female bloggers on the old RSS feed anymore. Pretty much only Tam, Heather from AK, Shellie Rae, Dr. Helen, Megan McArdle, and that’s about all I can think of right now, and two of those are co-bloggers with a male counterpart.
Oh, and Jennifer… but that’s it. I guess I’m an unconscious sexist when it comes to blog reading :)
They said Zombies jumped the shark, but they are still #1 with a bullet. So to speak.
There’s gun bloggers who happen to have two X chromosomes and no Y (which since I’ll never meet ’em, 99% of the time they might just as well have three Zs and a W for all I care), but then there’s self-promoting girls who pose in hooker heels and other feminine social-media attention-whore stunts, and also write about clothes and guns and stuff. Which I find kind of silly. But if they write well about guns, the poor s/n ratio would bore me less than Les Jones going on about camera lenses.
If they write tritely about guns, I don’t waste my time reading ’em. And it embarrasses the hell out of me when other men drool over the attention-whoring. But you can’t fix the whole world, can you? Not last time I checked.
And there are Y-chromosome gunbloggers who are gear-whores and vidiots too with all their strap-on tacticality tools – and some even have three holsters and guns.
But I’m all for declaring some kind of Fonzie-Law on anybody who connects aquatic predators and a leaping motion in the same clause of a sentence.
Then there are the real writers who happen to be involved with blogging… and guns… and women… and who quite interestingly, happen to be women. Not the high heeled street walkers who happen to have a gun or two… but a real Woman. Any man or woman can read them and understand what they’re saying. Women, who happen also to be Ladies- such as Brigid at http://www.mausersandmuffins.blogspot.com/
For one, I’m failing to understand why women with guns is a meme at all- aren’t they Free Americans as well as we men? Or we ‘males’, since obviously not all are ‘men’.
JSW – thank you. It’s probably why as a pilot I never joined the “99’s” or any other such group. I’m a pilot, not a lady pilot, just as I’m a shooter, not a female shooter. If folks like my writing they visit. Some just like my dog or recipes with bacon. But I’d like to think most of them would still visit even if I looked like a yard gnome.
Brigid, Good thing you don’t write about “dog recipes with bacon” or President Obama might start reading.
Copypasta from another forum but it makes an interesting point:
There is an internet rule that state “there are no girls on the internet”. On this surface, we know this isn’t true. However, if you think about it, they are 100% correct. In real life, men like girls for being girls. They want to sleep with them, so they pay attention to girls and they pretend what girls say is interesting or that they’re smart and clever regardless of how interesting or smart they actually are.
On the internet, however, we don’t have the chance to sleep with you (with the obvious exception of certain VERY rare circumstances). This means that the advantage of being a “girl” does not exist. She doesn’t get a bonus to conversation just because a guy wants to sleep with her.
So when a girl makes a post like “hurr durr, I’m a girl” she is just begging for attention. The only reason to post it is because she wants her girl-advantage back, because she is too vapid and too stupid to do or say anything interesting without it. She is forgetting the rules: there are no girls on the internet.
The one exception to this rule, the one way to get her “girlness” back on the internet is to post her boobs. This is, and should be, degrading for her. It is an admission that the only interesting this about her is her naked body.
Caleb writes, “D. says ‘there is this mentality of disrespect towards females at the range.’ And right there, I have to call bullshit.”
I would call bullshit also.
I’m past 60. Have been shooting since college days. NEVER, not once, have I been treated with disrespect or “an attitude” by male shooters at a range. And I’ve never seen any woman treated that way.
There has never been any assumption that I didn’t know how to shoot. And I’ve never attempted to pretend more skill or experience than I have, and I’ve always been willing to accept training and advice from someone who knows shooting better than I know.
Generally, I’ve found men shooters at ranges to be among the least sexist around. They have been willing to put a firearm in my hands and teach me how to use it. Doing so, they have helped me to be “equalized” in power. … A firearm is a great “equalizer.”
I wonder if, perhaps, women who claim they are being “disrespected” are bringing it on themselves. One does not appear at a shooting range wearing hot pants, low-cut tops, and painted long fingernails. I wonder if, perhaps, woman who claim to have been “disrespected” showed up at ranges looking as if they were there for purposes other than shooting or learning how to shoot.
But I repeat, in my decades of shooting, I have never experienced sexist treatment by male shooters. They are among the least sexist men I’ve ever dealt with. But shooting is a sport where you can’t “fake it.” If you can’t hit the target, it shows, to everyone there.
I’m very surprised at some of the hostility.
It’s been my impression that Destiee is intelligent, entertaining, and very gun positive. Yet some people are reacting as if she is making up or misunderstanding her own personal experience. Almost as if Destiee had some kind of nefarious anti-gun agenda lurking underneath her complaints. Or that Destinee is some kind of attention whore bimbo. But have those critics considered that they are wrong in their assumptions?
I watched the Destinee complaint video, and I have no reason to doubt her own personal experience. And I can only imagine how angry she must get when critics claim that the kind of behavior she witnessed just doesn’t happen. As if she didn’t have the brains to understand her own personal experience.
Now I don’t doubt that the critics are correct when they claim their own experiences at the range or gun store have never been like what Destiny described. But Destiny wasn’t claiming that this was some kind universal problem, she only described her experiences over a couple of days. Maybe she was just unlucky. She even describes her video as a rant.
I suppose some people got butthurt over the title of the video. “Women will never be equal to men at the range?” I suppose I can appreciate that. The video is unartfully titled. Yet I point out the question mark at the end.
I say, take the video for the rant it is. Some people pissed her off, and she ranted about it. So what?