That Suzanne Moore article about feminism in the Guardian today

Yay for these girls!

Girls fined for defacing lap dancing club poster

I agree with other posters who say that feminists are generally nice and polite.

It's quite funny whenever I do comment on newspaper articles, particularly in the local press. During the Hooters campaign, articles appeared in the press all the time. I - and others - were called things like "rabid hags". Yet, IME, feminists have to be very articulate and polite so that they are not accused of 1. attacking men, 2. attacking women who, for example, choose to work in a place like Hooters.

I spent hours putting forward our arguments in a nice, polite, reasonable way to people who asked questions only to get called a "rabid hag" back. If you respond in a similar way, you would get the "see, knew all you feminists were man haters/nasty pieces of work/whatever insults they throw at you"!

So I agree that we are all angry but we are trained to express that anger in nice and polite ways!

Excellent posts FlamingoBingo. Especially your first one. Women are sleepwalking into a more unjust world.

'Well I've done my best to put people off with my anger and bolshiness, but it doesn't seem to work.'

rofl Dittany.
keep trying, eh?!

I think just don't bother. No publicity is bad publicity, as they say!

What annoys me is how I said to my mum the other day 'if only more men were feminists, then people would take more notice' and then realised the fucking awful irony of that sentence, and how true it is!

My mum had a great photo of Bill Bailey on her FB profile pic a while ago - he's wearing a tshirt saying 'this is what a feminist looks like'. It's great...but it's so depressing that, yes, feminism would be taken more seriously if men stood up and said they were feminists! Why!?

It's an argument that feminists are never going to win because for every step you back down in order to stop putting people off, someone will come along and tell you that they will support you if you will only back down another step.
But if you do then by the end you will have compromised on so many things that another bunch of people will say they're not going to support you because you don't stand for anything.

Oh my head is going to explode

I am tired of having the same argument about feminists putting people off feminism. It is getting tiresome now.

I'm just realising quite how angry I am now. Having thought of myself as a feminist for years...but just because that's what I was brought up to believe. It's only just now that I'm really actually starting to feel real passion and rage about it.

And, yes, that passion and rage is what is making me want to start acting, not just talking and living it IYSWIM. Just because I have a nice cushy life that is equal with my partner, doesn't mean I should rest on my laurels - I'm in this lucky situation thanks to feminists of the past and I'm now becoming more and more aware that there's a lot more to be done before my daughters will experience true equality in their lives. And not just my daughters, but billions of daughters aroudn the world. I'm absolutely fuming!

I would say Naomi Wolf went polite and smiley in Fire With Fire, it is all 'thank you very much men for giving us so much power, now we only have to stop seeing ourselves as victims and reach out and take it'

Isn't Natasha Walter's The New Feminism polite and smiley too? Fortunately she's moved on since then.

In what way do you think it's rubbish, CabbagefromaBaby?

I like the one about alienating people who would "emphasise with your position".

I do wish she hadn't said about having balls though. Like men have the claim on being gutsy and bold.

Thanks

Maybe we need more threads where we are more upfront about how we feel. There was one teh other day "actually I realise I am pissed off with men" which when you read the thread was a perfectly reasonable thing to say and a good point to discuss, but normally we would all shy away from "admitting" something like that for fear of being labelled bonkers/bitter/man hating which of course is an instant "lose" IYSWIM.

I think that hiding anger and being terribly calm and approaching it all from an intellectual sort of a standpoint does mean that something is lost.

Which is the reason we all came to it in the first place ie noticing injustice and inequality and feeling really upset/angry/pissed off about the whole thing.

Reducing it to a dry emotionless debate loses passion. I suspect that is the reason we are told over and over that feeling things isn't good enough reason to be angry. That we have to posit a debating point and then discuss. But this stuff isn't debating points, for us, it's something that affects us and women all over the world. For the people disagreeing with us it's often no more than a debate. Interesting that getting emotional about these things is seen as a bad thing, when getting emotional about things is also something that is stereotypically female. So even in the feminist section we have to discuss things in a way that is an approved male constructed way IYSWIM.

I think it's a rubbish article, haven't read the comments but can imagine they are even worse.

I have never noticed that Dittany