Tuesday, June 16, 2020

UMLAUT

Over the past week, the Malay population has been in uproar because three Malay men have been saying misogynistic, sexist, rude things on their podcast OkLetsGo. When pressed to apologize, they kept making insincere, half-hearted non-apologies, then reposting their supporters' posts about how they only said things in the vein of "done in jest" and "if you don't like, you shouldn't listen" as if, as if the problem is when you say bigoted things, it is about the audience's ability to receive such bigoted comments, and not on your own bigotry. Tweets were, well, Tweeted by Malay women in Singapore, along the lines of
I dislike OLG because they remind me of the Malay men in my life and environment who casually dehumanise and sexualise women and brush it off as jokes. Having that normalised and aired to the Malay masses does enable/shape the current and next generation of Malay men.
in the hundreds, if not thousands. It got so bad, the President of Singapore herself, who usually is a token figure and does absolutely nothing (the person calling the political shots is our Prime Minister) posted a lengthy Facebook post, rebuking the three men and calling on them to make a real apology. 

I've been saying it for years that we have an entrenched patriarchal, misogynist problem.... I don't want to say I told you so, but dang, I told you so. Did I not. Tell. You. So.

Ooooooft. I wouldn't be surprised if the internalized misogyny is so strong you start accusing the President of racism. If we're at that point, I would very much like to remove myself from the narrative.