Am furious with NUS Women's Campaign

Mephistopholes - it could well be if only groups comprising solely of women were taking this stand. But they aren't (Occupy was/is not predominantly female, neither are the groups mention by NotCtirus). So it's probably not.

gently - no, definitely not wilfully so.

I'm sorry if I am not grasping it, but I think I am just disagreeing.

I'm sorry, I don't know what an SEP is.

I have seen that you have disagreed about effort being put in by men. All I'm pointing out there is that the logic doesn't follow (which doesn't mean you're wrong, just that, as you are saying it here, you're not supporting your own point).

Take the total number of useful advances. Say 80% of them involved men.

Take the total number of people in the world who could contribute.

Take the total number of people involved in the NUS women's campaign.

The last number is going to be tiny compared to the middle one, which is why pointing out that men have done a lot of work making advances for SEN doesn't mean that the NUS campaign isn't spending a disproportionate amount of time on this too.

I have also said upthread that I think, all thing being equal, men should put more time in. As they should with many other issues. I am aware this is difficult, because it requires men to recognize inequality and act, but some men do do that.

NotCitrus Exactly. I wasn't aware that Quakers had opted to do this (I did of course know that its usual for deaf people). But I'm not surprised.

YY about the misuse and misappropriate of the word triggering. Although in this context - the phrase 'trigger anxiety' - it was used entirely correctly.

As someone who is, essentially, a student of the practice of sociological warfare I would be fascinated to see where this memetic attack structure originated.

From the outside it certainly looks like a trojan-horse vector for a fragmentation attack, delivered via the principle of intersectionality itself.

Jeanne - no, it's you who is not grasping what I am saying. Wilfully so.

Quangle - I don't believe listening to requests from people with genuine issues (which is apparently what happened in this specific case) makes feminism or the NUS look foolish. But even if it did, personally I'd rather look foolish than ignorant or nasty.

Your claim, which I believe to be inaccurate, was that the effort being put into these issues by women is not matched by men. I don't think that is necessarily the case. Many of the more useful advances in recognising these issues have at least involved men.

It seems like you want to designate it as an SEP.

Waving hands in the air or at head height (jazz hands) is the usual way of doing applause for Deaf people and adopted in many communities as an effective way of communicating agreement without interrupting the speakers and enabling deaf/hard-of-hearing people to still follow (background noise is a major problem for hearing aids as well as for many people with autism and other conditions).

It's been adopted by Quakers, bisexuals, various co-operatives, just to give examples I know of.

The explanation they gave is poor (I hate the word 'triggering' being used inappropriately, but the idea isn't.

I think, btw, you are still not grasping what we're trying to get across.

This isn't about 'do women's movements spend too long thinking about clapping' or even 'do they spend too long thinking about accommodating members with different and incompatible needs'. It's 'do they feel, and encourage other members to feel, that women are responsible for all the accommodations to be made, and does this perpetuate a situation where women are likely to withdraw into silence?'

I know, and I have said all along that it is my perception.

I don't think my experience is more valid. I just don't think it is less valid, either, which seems to be your view here.

As I said (perhaps you missed it, I have posted a lot, and probably more than is sensible), I do actually spend a lot of time on these issues too. I have SEN. I teach people with SEN. These are important issues.

I have not noticed the women's movement being dominated by this issue. I don't think you can say 'issues like this' as though there are a whole load of issues relevant to people with ASD/SEN/similar issues that are constantly at the forefront of debate in women's groups. IME this couldn't be further from the truth. Your experience may be different but that doesn't make it more valid. You clearly seem disinclined to regard these issues as worthy of your attention - which is a shame. Although not entirely surprising. Your apparent views reflect those of the wider society.

This is not an important point but I think clapping is an innate human behaviour. I remember with a leap in my heart the first time my son clapped - at 9 months. We were on a boat and the wind and speed were so exciting he spontaneously clapped for joy.

I could understand if this was about the jeering and roaring at PMQs which is dreadful but clapping in approval approval/enjoyment? No.

That's not to say some people don't find it uncomfortable to hear but all human behaviour has the potential to be uncomfortable on some level to some people. Let's not pathologise something so ordinary. And please let's not make feminism look foolish.

BTW, jazz hands would be triggering for me as I'd be worried I'd accidentally wondered onto the stage set of a musical and we were all just about to launch into a Liza Minelli number.

And no, to me, it's not at all obvious.

You have your logic back to front. Yes, many things that help people with sensory issues happen outside the women's movement. That does not prove that the women's movement is not dominated by worrying about issues like this.

The women's movement is considerably smaller than the world in general.

If you are saying that women should only care about issues that exclusively effect women, then the corollary is that men should only care about issues that exclusively effect men.

Well, fortunately, I am not saying that, and I don't accept the corollary anyway. That assumes we live in a world where men are not obliged to recognize that misogyny exists, and fortunately, I do think many men do recognize it.

Btw, if someone did come up to me and ask, can we do something that isn't clapping during a lecture, because clapping exacerbates my sensory issues/sets off my PTSD, I would try very hard to make that happen. I'd figure out whether I had other students who might be excluded or upset by alternatives, and we'd go from there.

But, I would still face the problem that, if I do lectures to 100 students, 50/50 men and women, at the end of term I will have answered questions from perhaps three or four women. And the other people who'll put their hands up will be men. This is not because men are innately more bold at speaking or more interested, or better. It's because men are socialized to make more noise in public than women.

If the women go off and attend the NUS conference on the weekend, they'll come back feeling vaguely bad about clapping. Maybe they should be quiet? Does this lecturer know what she's asking when she asks them to clap? Maybe they had best clap very quietly. It feels awkward. They do not feel especially like asking questions today.

That's how these things transfer from one situation to another.

If you are saying that women should only care about issues that exclusively effect women, then the corollary is that men should only care about issues that exclusively effect men. It would certainly be open to them to argue that way.

Jeanne - my point is that to my certain knowledge men can and have been occupied with these issues. So it is not just women who are being expected or asked to address them and it's not clear that the energy that has been expended by women, to this point, isn't matched by the energy that has been expended by men, when you consider that at least some (and maybe the majority) of the pioneering attempts to include people with sensory issues have actually taken place outside what we could broadly describe as 'the women's movement'. I would have thought this was fairly obvious.

Well, I think it is.

People have pointed out both the disability implications (blind people, people with physical disabilities that means they can't do it), and the implications for social conditioning.

I'm not saying women shouldn't care. I am simply saying that, from where I'm standing, I am really worried at how much time and energy feminists and women are expected to put in to demonstrating they're not excluding anyone. It's not the same sort of energy expected of many other groups, and it's very rarely expected of the 'normative' mixed-gender groups who form the student and faculty bodies of universities. I have never heard of anyone requesting jazz hands at the end of a lecture.

I don't at all follow what you mean by 'by that token men shouldn't care'. Of course men should care. All things being equal, men have more time and energy for this than women. The onus is on them.

I don't believe that not clapping is in any way detrimental to the women's campaign.

I agree with you that being arsed about these issues shouldn't be the sole preserve of women and AIUI it isn't. I do not agree that women shouldn't care at all because there are men with these disabilities too. Because by that token men shouldn't care because there are women who have these disabilities, not just men. So, nobody will care (which is pretty much the status quo right now). Which works out just fine for those not affected and nobody has to think about it or adjust their behaviour.

As I said, despite having some issues myself and my kids having some issues, and actually knowing about the Occupy and arts world initiatives - I hadn't really thought about it in the context of political meetings etc. I have now, and I am quite annoyed that people seem to be completely fine with the status quo.

gently - yes, but if someone has additional trauma on top of a sensory condition, then that is trauma. It's not the sensory condition.

The distinction matters, because we would need to deal with them differently.

Cross post.

Ok, to be fair, then, your experience and mine are wildly divergent. My experience is that these issues constantly dominate the attention of women's groups and of a certain strand of feminism.

Obviously, many people with sensory issues are men. What's the point there?

I'm not wanting to 'twist' anything. I'm just pointing out that the rhetoric of trauma isn't appropriate to sensory issues. It's inappropriate in both directions.