The Feminist Pub is Open - Chat, Rant, or pull up a chair here!

Congratulations sinistersal.

Drunk my tea+cardamom. But I think tea+cloves is nicer.

(I'm allowed to say that, yes? No fights in the feminist pub car park, right?)

Congratulations, sinister

Is it first baby sinister?

Congratulations sinistersal

But....but.... you're a feminist, and you had sex...? I thought we were all man-hating, sex-hating prudes?

(non-alcoholic of course)

Yes, bombard away! I'm bursting about it really

Due the very end of May, so early days yet.
My third, please God, all going well

Now that's interesting.

But I can't have any

I'm pregnant! hurray!

LRD, my mum swears on vinegar in hot water to regulate her bowels!

Ooh, hello! Keep me a seat! I've just got to finish my lesson planning for scary new job tomorrow

Good evening. What a busy day. Am tired... I need a drink or three. Not sure what. A cup of strong milky tea with 3 cloves in it. That's always nice. Has anyone else tried it?

Oh, I'll have a Slippery Nipple. Or a Shag At The Beach...

I hate that kind of innuendo or I suppose it's not actually innuendo, is it? It's a (v small part) of gradual but accelerating pornification of life.

Sorry, I'll stop. 'Tis a subject dear to my heart. My boys are too young to have seen porn yet, but my 5 year old has been heard to use 'cunt' as a swear word and my 9 year old refers to his 'tits' (he has moobs ).

I'll have Campari on the Rocks.
My getting drunk drink. Doesn't take much these days.

Chablis sounds nice - make mine a large one.

The porn thing is depressing - I know a woman who is sure her marriage broke up because of it. He expected her to act it out in the bedroom and called her a bad wife if she didn't come up to scratch.

I can't remember who it was on here who said the answer is to tell your boys that if they watch porn it will make them crap in bed with real women, so don't watch it. I think I'll go for that one

Another Chablis please bar woman. Is it a woman? Or a man?

Penguins I have a DS and a DD. they are both very small but I already worry about the influence on them as they grow up. I agree with what you said there.
Not sure how to anage it tbh they're not even in school yet

bourbons all round.

pacific you can arm teenager with all the self esteem in the world, but it's also a question of what she and her partner understands sex to be.

I'm late 20s now and don't think my shagging days were anything like as influenced by porn as it is now for younger people. So it's difficult for me to gauge how much modern porn seeps into the bedroom. I slept with a guy once who had clearly seen far too much porn and it was a terrible experience, but thankfully a rare one in my day . In 2013 I imagine a lot of younger women than myself are having a lot of very rubbish, demeaning sex.

I guess my generation and above were, for the most, part already sexually experienced before they saw any brutal hardcore porn, so we know that that's not how sex really is. But this generation are seeing it before they experience it. Along with arming them with high self esteem, making them understand that it's so far from what sex is really about is important. Not sure how easy that is in practice.

Thanks for the congratulations.

Pacific - Yes, it is an interesting passage. I don't think I would have been able to really follow the thought process through on consent as a teenager. I recognise that she had limited choices given Gilead and the other options, but I don't think I'd have joined the dots to current society the way I would today. The thing I remember being most struck by was the sort of disengagement from her own body Offred is displaying.

Which kind of links back to your point about porn. I worry about my young DD's and what the sexual environment might be as they get older. There seems to be so much pressure on young women these days to automatically leap into behaving like a porn star - threesomes, anal, blow jobs for just about anyone - when they have very little actual sexual experience. No building up to experimentation you might fancy after years with a trusted partner. As a teenager of the 90s, the boys had seen porn mags, maybe the odd video, but nothing like the plethora of material they see now. And they think it is normal. Normal. That that kind of 'take it passively in every orifice and groan in ecstasy at a tweaked nipple' stuff is how sexuality is. It must take enormous disengagement from your own body for the average woman to routinely behave that way. Not saying that there aren't some women for whom that represents their sexuality. But I'm willing to bet that they are a fairly small minority.

A bourbon that is.

Yes please bunny