Hi Jewel,
Thank you for your comprehensive and thought-provoking commentary! You can observe where I've highlighted spots that I felt had a particularly profound impact amidst your discourse.
As I tried to make clear in the article, the women of "The View" aren't all good or all bad all of the time. Joy says a lot of funny things that I think are often perfect zingers when commenting on individuals' despicable behavior. Her group blame / group culpability mentality is where she loses me...witness a smattering of the other derisive jibber-jabber from certain people throughout this article's Comments Section who've been trying to misrepresent my position while pushing their own agenda (and essentially defending Joy, in the process).
When Sunny made the comment about people diminishing the panel for "having opinions," she wasn't being intellectually honest about the context. Only a shrill minority of people would claim that celebrities or other public figures shouldn't have the right to free speech. But, on the other end of the spectrum, many of those celebrities seem to believe that sharing their opinions in public venues entitles them to be inoculated from constructive criticism. That latter allegation is the fallacy I reject. Sunny would further perpetuate such a fallacy by claiming that people are only criticizing her "because she's a woman" or "because she's Black and Latina" -- her narcissistic tendencies don't allow her to consider the possibility that somebody might be criticizing her because she's hypocritical or just plain wrong!
That's why I was a bit surprised to see both Sunny and Sara push back against Joy's misandry...the two of them have been very involved in the ubiquity of male-bashing that manifests on "The View," so the fact that they were challenging Joy's misinformation was something I found to be surprisingly refreshing. But I still content that Sunny (and Joy, as well) are steeped in their own celebrity privilege (iconism) -- they are so accustomed to being attacked by right-wing shills that they've now gone on the offense against ANYBODY who dares to disagree with them about *anything* they've said on the live program.
As for all of the points you brought up, I pretty much agree with most of the conclusions you've spotlighted. The only place where it seems we *might* disagree is when you say that hatred/disdain for one sex over the other doesn't automatically make it misogyny or misandry. I disagree. I view group-based disdain and hatred (for one sex or gender over another) as inherently entangled with misogyny and misandry...although I agree with you that there are different levels of each. I also agree with you that misandry doesn't have the same systemic component surrounding it that misogyny does. However, the cultural components to both are extremely intense and pervasive.
In his book "Man Enough," Justin Baldoni acts as though body-shaming against men/boys has suddenly "just become a thing" because we only have social science research supporting it as far back as the 1980s. I'd argue that body-shaming men and boys has most likely existed for centuries (albeit missing the systemic component inflicted upon women and girls for so long) -- and our LACK OF research into male body image is a testament to how we ("we" meaning society) assumed it just wasn't a problem or an issue, and thus there was no (or very little) research conducted to delve into the topic of male body image in the first place. But, again, part of this is attributed to how "the male gaze" (mostly that belonging to heterosexual male power-brokers) has been systemically centered in media and pop culture for so long -- which comes back around to, as you've accurately identified, patriarchy!
