They Don't Hate Men; They Hate You

From Lindy West's Jezebel article "If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?":

In fact, the most powerful proponent of misandry in modern internet discourse is you — specifically, your dogged insistence that misandry is a genuine, systemic, oppressive force on par with misogyny. This is specious, it hurts women, and it is hurting you. Most feminists don't hate men, as a group (we hate the system that disproportionately favors men at the expense of women), but — congratulations! — we are starting to hate you. You, the person. Your obsession with misandry has turned misandry into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (I mean, sort of. Hating individual men is not the same as hating all men. But more on that in a minute.) Are you happy now?

West goes on to outline a number of reasons why men should stop crying misandry in the comments section. Read them here.

Playing as a Critic

I have recently been amused by Scott Alexander's Dungeons and Discourse game, based on Dresden Codak's fictional RPG of the same name. D&Dis is an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons, set in a fantasy universe in which a person's philosophy can manifest in the world in the form of spells. It is full of philosophy references and has a fairly interesting mechanics system (says the person who reads up on RPGs but doesn't actually play them...). There are some misrepresentations in the system--as you might predict, I thought Protestantism was poorly represented, but hey! it's a joke--but I was amused. (Thanks, Leah, for the introduction.)

So amused, in fact, that I decided to write up a whole new class for the game based on my former discipline, literary theory and criticism. After all, this is technically Dungeons and Discourse, not Dungeons and Philosophy, and "theory," as we usually call it, is part of discourse. Furthermore, literary theory seems to me closer to what we think of philosophy than science--which gets a class--is, especially since critical theory has begged, borrowed, and stolen from Continental philosophy (a trait I tried to represent in the mechanics).

However, when I wrote the class spells, I had fundamentally misunderstood how class levels worked, so it is now dreadfully unbalanced in the Critic's favour. Or I presume so; since I haven't had a play-through there is no way to tell.

I wanted to have you download the document as a PDF, but I could not figure out how to do it. In the meantime, it is here.