Men bashing

mousse

Standing there peeking through the little glass squares was one of the most uncomfortable and unpleasant experiences of my adult life. I've had the usual groping and sexist bullshit and I hand it back to them with a snarl. But just the feeling of helpless humiliation, awful.
It was a funeral I was already upset, but fuck I hated it.

But in terms of activism I personally would not go into a mosque unless it was for a funeral or something like that, and I would try to find out from Muslim women what else I could do to be helpful. It's certainly not islamphobic, though.

I personally don't think feminism and religion are compatible but that's a whole other thread.

Hi Mousse I think it is okay to prioritise your feminism but it is also okay to not feel like taking a stand at a funeral out of respect for the friend who has passed.

It is just one of those infuriating things - rights of passage are connected with religion and the majority of people follow patriarchal religions.

Perhaps it is not something that a non-muslim can do anything about apart from support the muslim women who take a stand?

Mousse- I would say that a funeral isn't the place to take a stand-although that might be a bit pathetic.....

Mousse, I recently visited a Muslim country and went to the National Mosque there. Even in the National Mosque in that country, women were permitted into the main hall most of the time to take part in prayer. There was a "ladies stair" though and that lead to a mezzanine for women on high days and holidays. It made me extremely uncomfortable as a feminist, in the end I had to wait outside because of some other things that weren't related to worship, but to other stuff and my inability to keep my fat mouth shut.

It's not Islamophobic to ask these questions imo, however, there are a fair few Muslim feminists and I try to take my lead from them as to what kind of solidarity they are looking for from non-muslim women, if that makes sense?

I'm probably breaking some rules but I don't want to start a thread as I'm not sure what I would call it and I don't want to attract racist nutters and it does fit into this thread in a way.

I went to a funeral yesterday of a friend who was a Muslim. There is a thread about it. Anyway, very sad, still very upset etc

At the mosque I went up the 'Ladies' stairs. There was a main entrance but the 'ladies stairs' were round the back - it was clearly a back entrance. It felt like something from 1950s America - 'coloureds only'.

The friends I was with both men, both black were horrified at sending me up there. When I got up everyone was lovely, but it was obvious the main service was downstairs and we were not it. You could look at the main service but the glass was frosted with tiny clear squares you could peek through. I felt like a child peeping at the grown ups. It was humiliating.

When we got out my male friends were saying they felt they should have refused to go in out of solidarity with me. If it had said 'coloureds only' I sure as fuck wouldn't have gone in the white entrance.

Did these men do enough to help and offer solidarity? Am I islamaphobic? Should I have gone up the stairs? Are any Muslim men capable of being feminist in these circumstances?

Apologies for kind of diverting the thread but I am struggling to fit this into my head and my life.

I concur Xenophile!

I think that the cleaning of loos is an excellent proxy for feminist debate. Men leave their pee and shit for women to clean up because the power balance in the relationship makes it possible. Every time he goes to the loo he reminds her that he is actually in control of her. And that, at some level, he despises her. And every time a woman says "He just doesn't notice" or "But he is so good in other ways" she is colluding in her oppression and that of other women.

And of course in a lot of these relationships the wife would describe the man as being 'good' or 'decent' and apart from those 'other bad men'. This feeds the idea that it's a minority of men only that we need to be worried about rather than the majority.

Bollocks! Had to go and do life things and the thread has moved on. Excellent posts by the usual women though.

who fundamentally don't respect them

I think that this is key. 'Women's work' is often belittled and disrespected by men. Sometimes by women too.

For me, it's more than that. I think there's a massive hangover from the days of the so called housewife of the 1950s, and many women who have been married to men or in relationships who fundamentally don't respect them, but hold the earning power in the household feel that cleaning the toilet etc are ways of 'earning their keep'. As a wise older feminist I now realise how very wrong I was.

This is what I think regarding relationships with men who tend towards strop. Most women minimise it in order to keep the peace because they know that the person who is doing it is stronger than them and that it might well escalate. They accept 'roles' because it's not easy to upset the apple cart. They clean the toilet because it becomes their job within the household. It becomes such a habit that it becomes part of their lifestyle and they meld into the pacifier role. For protection for them and their children. It becomes normal and so therefore no domestic violence exists.

CruellaDeVilsEvilSister

I've had a look, but it was a comment on a Facebook page that has since moved on.

I'll keep looking, though. It was about trans. He was very clear how gender is purposely assigned in order to keep men on top and women on the bottom.

He didn't even have to align any of it with transgenderism. It was about patriarchy.

I've gone back over several of his comments because they were so interesting. As soon as I find the one that explained it, i'll post it.

PrincessLeia80
But I guess most posters will say that's what women have to put up with everyday so he deserves it?

In that case you have a low opinion of women on this forum, and you havent listened to anything thats been said.
Perhaps you could get your clued up husband to explain to you why that comment is so offensive. He probably has a pretty clear analysis of why some women act like one of the lads to fit in as well.

Datun

Yes I see how that makes sense from your perspective that it's patriarchy that determines male violence. I'm much less sure about that. It makes more sense to me to see patriarchy as the expression of male violence. So a matriarchy wouldn't eliminate male violence it would just enable women to control it.

Would be interesting to read the post of you can find it. Thanks!

Noneed- if you're referring to my list of th ings I said men could do immediately I think I said "Stop hitting women". If, as I assume you don't, that's one you can tick off at once! I'm not saying, obviously, that conversation about domestic violence will stop it, but we need to think very carefully about the language we use-the language of consent and of victim blaming. The undercurrent of "she must have done something to provoke him" The feeling that women are possessions and men have a right to do what they want with their possessions. Does that make sense? Obviously, this sort of stuff is very rarely overt. But it is a constant undercurrent in our society.

Noneedforasitter

Interesting post. And thanks for breaking down statistics.

I think you are still operating from a position that there are 'some men' who are just bastards. And it's difficult to stop them because how do you know?

The feminist perspective is that men are conditioned to be violent from birth. They are conditioned to see women as second-class.

Whereas nearly all men would never abuse that attitude, there are those who will. If you can't identify the perpetrators, you could change the attitude instead.

I am a long-term reader of this board, but I very rarely post here. I read it because I am interested in what can be done about the various issues identified upthread. In this thread, it seems to me that the posters arguing against the grain are trying to ask exactly what it is that willing men should be doing to prevent these problems. The challenge is that there are a range of issues and the debate flicks from one to another, making it hard to build any sort of consensus. But to focus on one of the biggest issues (as Bertrand Russell suggested upthread) - domestic violence - what can men do?

Two women a week are killed by their partners. It's an appalling statistic and one that any rational person would want to lower. 104 extremely dangerous males kill their partner each year. Over an adult lifetime, that is around 6,000 men you could meet. But it is out of an adult male population of over 25 million (and over a lifetime we would encounter double that number, so 50 million males in total). The chances of any of us meeting one of them is very very small.

85,000 women and 12,000 men are raped each year. Let's assume that none of the perpetrators commit more than one rape. That makes roughly 100,000 male perpetrators each year. Using the same logic of an adult lifetime, that would be 6 million men we could encounter. Now we are talking big numbers; using the same logic above, that is over 10% of the adult male population we encounter in our lifetime.

If we broaden the statistics to include all victims of domestic violence (where perpetrators can be both male and female, though obviously still more male than female) the proportion of victims in the UK are 27% of women and 13% of men (data from ONS).

So statistically, most of us will meet a perpetrator of some form of domestic violence before they commit their crime. But how do we know who they are and what could we do about it? No one boasts about physically assaulting their partner, or at least I have never come across this. In my experience no one even minimises such behaviour in conversation; it just doesn't come up. I agree everyone should tackle any form of minimisation when it arises in conversation. I just don't think it happens that often. As a man, the tone of conversations I have with males does not change when a woman joins the group. So I struggle to believe there is a solution to the problems of domestic violence through changing conversation. And I think that is why some of the challenging posters coming on this thread are struggling to understand what individual (non-perpetrating) men are supposed to do. It isn't a question of 'what's in it for us?', it's that the men engaging in this debate feel no more empowered to reduce domestic violence than the women posting here.

Cruella

Yes I understand what you're saying. But you're still operating from within a patriarchy. The patriarchy determines that men are violent as a means oppress. Curtailing their freedom is simply reacting to the patriarchy. It wouldn't be included under a matriarchy, as by definition there would be no need to react to oppression.

I haven't heard of this, let's call it 'extraction gains' premise before either. But it was powerfully persuasive.

I'll see if I can find the comment and cut and paste it.

It's an interesting thing to think about Datun. I guess I don't really agree with that Facebook poster that power is only ever used as a means to extract something. Rather I think that extracting something is one of the ways for which power is exercised.

In terms of a matriarchy we may not want to extract labour from men but what if say we agreed that because of the danger of male violence then male freedom of movement should be drastically curtailed. Say men weren't allowed out after dark. We're not extracting anything from them.

I think the example Princess has given of her dp' s workplace is an interesting one. It highlights the fact that there really is nothing in it for men to be true feminist allies, except the satisfaction of having done the right thing. Which is not really an attractive trade off for having ceded some of your power and control. I think that's one of th reasons non feminist women get so angry with feminist women-we are asking them to give up the comfort of accepting the status quo that thy feel they are doing nicely in, and and do and think difficult things. The fury that the use of the "handmaiden" description evokes really highlights this.

I suppose I'm thinking of say a women only commune. You wouldn't need men for anything, except to reproduce. Since you don't need power over men in order to get them to reproduce with you you wouldn't need to enslave or oppress them.

Whereas I can't imagine a male only commune thinking along those lines at all. Because they need women. For sex and feeding children.