Boards
The Ariel Pink/Madonna thing, and how men speak about women.
This has probably been mentioned somewhere on here, though I did a search and couldn't find anything. Basically Ariel Pink, typically dickishly (I really hate that guy), says he was asked to write a song for Madonna, then needlessly slates her and her music, says she's got worse since her first record etc. Grimes and some other similar Pitchfork-type people call out Ariel Pink for misogyny.
http://pitchfork.com/news/57072-grimes-did-not-like-ariel-pinks-comments-about-madonna/
I can't remember what exactly, but I'm sure I read that Ariel Pink has made some misogynist comments before, so within that context his comments about Madonna can certainly be seen as typifying his views towards women. But without that context, are his comments inherently misogynist? Not meant to be a rhetorical question.
What I'm getting at is- should men be careful to speak about women in a different way than they would other men? Women are criticised much more than men about pretty much everything imaginable, therefore is it even possible for a man to make a non-gendered criticism of a woman?
For example (and coincidentally), I really dislike Grimes- I think her music is shallow, I don't like her Tumblr hyper-postmodern aesthetic, and I don't like her wafer-thin hip pseudo-ethicalness (typified by her claiming that it was okay for vegans to eat Ben and Jerry ice cream because "the cows are treated well"). To me, these have always seemed perfectly reasonable criticisms, however I've begun to realise how they could easily be read as gendered. For example, in relation to my first point, women are constantly criticised as being shallow and concerned with looks and aesthetics over substance. Secondly, Tumblr is a mainly female space, therefore criticising a woman for being 'tumblr-y' could be seen as attacking women who want to associate themselves with one of the few places that isn't dominated by men. And in relation to my point doubting the sincerity of her ethics, there are any number of problematic issues with that; it could be argued that I'm trying to deny her political agency, or that I'm reiterating the stereotype that women are fickle etc.
So when I can so easily pull apart criticisms that I am so sure are entirely non-gendered, where exactly does that leave me? How can I ever really know whether those criticisms are (subconsciously) gendered or not? Or is that beside the point- is criticism of an individual an inherently 'male' thing, that never actually needs to be expressed, even privately? Or is that impossible to achieve?
Sorry, probably TL;DR, and I've basically just used the Ariel Pink thing as a way of talking about something I've been thinking about for a long time. Also apologies if this sort of stuff was covered in that huge Courtney Love thread. I've just always been very much "I'm not a misogynist, and I believe in equality, therefore I can talk about men and women as if I can see no difference between them", but I'm really starting to reassess that opinion, or at least find huge problems with it.
p.s. I really hope no-one reads this as me whining that the feminists are trying to control how I talk about women or something. That's not what I'm talking about at all- I'm just wondering if men need to speak about women in a different way that they would other men, in order to compensate for a culture in which hating women is pretty much the default; or whether this would be anti-equality and therefore counter productive.