During a recent session of late night internet surfing, I stumbled across this clip from the Fox TV show "Scream Queens." The series is a horror/mystery story centered around a college sorority whose members are being targeted by a serial killer. The clip linked above depicts a group of sorority sisters being harassed and demeaned by a pair of male students in the cafeteria, and the women respond with an intelligent admonition...quickly followed by some barbed remarks and an explosive display of physical violence against the men, which is met with applause from bystanders. The kicker? The clip was listed under the title "Scream Queens - Feminism Scene".

For the sake of full disclosure, I have to admit that a small part of me felt a sense of satisfaction at seeing these two men get verbally and physically dressed down for their blatantly demeaning remarks about women. When a college guy starts a conversation by asking which girl wants to have sex with him, his friend starts insisting they take it as a compliment, and then he responds to the statement that girls as young as ten develop eating disorders from societal pressure to be thin with "So you're basically saying I'm the one responsible for making you look hot? You're welcome," I'm most certainly not going to be on their side. But a much larger part of me was inwardly screaming "No no NO this is one of the worst demonstrations of feminism I've ever seen!" (Especially in light of the fact that the female characters in this show regularly call each other sluts and whores, betray each other's confidences, and get into screaming matches over boyfriends and clothes). What kind of message does that send? What does that say about the goals of the women's movement or the relationship between the sexes in general? Should we silence oppressors by any means necessary, including violence? Should we believe we're justified in demeaning and abusing anyone who has demeaned or abused us? I certainly don't think so. The girls' first reaction, to state exactly why the comments their peers made were so damaging, was perfect, but it spiraled downward sharply from there.

Even though this clip comes from a fictional TV series, it's a prime example of the kinds of attitudes that are poisoning modern day feminism. The desire to silence rather than educate and vindicate rather than empower traps us into the mindset of the jaded victim, and makes it pretty much impossible to accomplish anything worthwhile because we're too busy fighting every single battle that comes our way. This scene was clearly couched in terms of "female empowerment," but becoming what you despise is never, ever the answer, especially when it comes to social justice. If we say we want equality, we can't just mean equal opportunity; we have to mean equal accountability as well. As atrocious as the comments the boys made were, everyone depicted in this situation is grossly at fault, and what's being demonstrated here is definitely not gender equality.