What made you a feminist?

In order to exploit another human being you need to first stop thinking of them as human so making women, black people, Jews etc less than human in order to justify the fact that it is ok to treat X people like that but not Y people. X people are naturally subservient/stupid/childlike/amoral etc so they need Y people to tell them what to do.

Absolutely! I remember thinking along very similar lines when trying to explain the history of segregation to DS (he'd come across it via the Horrible Histories Rosa Parks song, and was just horrified, but also couldn't understand why people would do this). I told him that what I thought had happened was this: in order to "justify" slavery to themselves, the slave owners had to invent a mythology (I think the phrase I used for DS who was then about 8 was "invent bad fairy stories") in which the black slaves they oppressed were less-than human. Then, even though slavery was abolished, the "bad fairy stories" lingered on, and people still believed them in the 1950s (in fact, a frightening number still do today ).

I think you're absolutely right that sexism follows the same pattern. "Biological determinism" is just another myth invented to attempt to justify oppression (as is penis envy, the myth of the sexually insatiable male who must be satisfied or he will turn to violence, the myth of the sexually frigid woman who only puts out to get material advantage, the myth of women as intellectually and morally inferior.)

Thanks fermats . I have to confess I had to look yours up! Damn arts degree!

Means, motive and opportunity is a great way of looking at it. It really helps to make sense of both the why and the how of our oppression, both of which are rooted in biology. You could extrapolate it to other axis of oppression too like the slave trade for example- motive was the need for cheap labour in harsh conditions, means was superior weaponry and opportunity was given by the exploitation of existing divisions in the societies targeted.

In both cases there is a process of othering that needs to happen as part of it though and that's where the biological determinism comes into its own. In order to exploit another human being you need to first stop thinking of them as human so making women, black people, Jews etc less than human in order to justify the fact that it is ok to treat X people like that but not Y people. X people are naturally subservient/stupid/childlike/amoral etc so they need Y people to tell them what to do.

As an aside I've always thought the idea of penis envy was hilarious and know I know what DARVO means I have to say I think this is the original example. Men desperately envy our reproductive capability-if they didn't why would they have spend all of recorded history trying to copy and control it.

These men who self-identify as good men, they never fucking stand up for us and challenge the locker room talk, they just correct us by saying ''not all men''.

Exactly Needagoodbook

One that stuck in my mind was an article about snuff and torture porn (that I wish I hadn't read, actually). The 1st comment was from a woman(!) "women enact violent porn too" followed by several men agreeing.

So basically, everything men do that is bad, can be absolutely cancelled out because women (apparently) do it too. Male violence is the biggest danger out there to both men and women, yet the denial around that and finding so many ways and instances to dismiss and say women are just as bad, is astonishing.

The post here are powerful and inspiring. Is this the sort of thread that @MNHQ would consider putting in 'Classics'?

My Mother ran a Nursery school which I attended and to me she was so dynamic, she did everything in the home and was funny and vivacious, yet my Father who paid no interest in her or his children seemed to be seen as some sort of Golden Boy. I remember thinking this was very unfair. I may have been 3 or 4. I also noticed friends dads were also very unimpressive compared to the women.
And my gran told amazing stories about her mum and her aunts and I just felt in my bones that we held everything together even though we didn't get the credit.

Ironically my little sister would not call herself a feminist and yet she grew up with the same stories. I have never understood how we can see the world so differently yet have the same childhood experience.

No disagreement from me, Triple - you sum up pretty nicely what I think too. Lots of supposedly "good guys" who are misogynists through and through, and porn and prostitution as inherently wrong because they treat women as sexual commodities (as well as excusing or even glorifying male sexual violence).

Always been a feminist but consider myself a radical feminist after years of being a woman and realising even the really nice men have deep rooted misogyny. It's not their fault, it is how society is constructed.

I am sure others will strongly disagree, but this is my experience.

High profile men who I use to respect and have shown themselves to be misogynists include Owen Jones, Brendan Cox, Louie CK and Jeremy Corbyn. These last 12 months had been an uncomfortable eye opener.

I used to be a lib-fem and pro sex work as a choice but thanks to Julie Bindel and others I realise that sex work merely sees women's bodies as saleable commodities, as does porn.

I'm learning lots, and it is incredibly uncomfortable, but I am truly grateful to all the awesome women who are tirelessly campaigning. Mumsnet has been a huge resource, and JR should be very proud.

I've been a feminist for as long as I can remember, for as long as I've known about the existence of the word feminism.

I can remember fundamentally feeling that girls and boys were treated differently in primary school, and thinking it was unfair on the girls. I've always had an affinity for women, for sisterhood, for female friendship.

In my teens, reading books by Marilyn French etc, and also Erica Jong, and reading up on women's liberation and sexual equality.

I'm very distressed by the regressive turn women's rights have recently taken.

OfSpartacus (love the name, btw), "I know it should be really fucking obvious but so much 3rd wave stuff is about denying biology and deriding "biological essentialism" that it had just never really clicked for me before."

Yes to this. It took me ages to disentangle this, having thoroughly swallowed the liberal feminist line back in my twenties that focusing on biology was biological essentialism.

Nope - biology provides the explanation of the contingent fact (i.e. the fact that could have been different in different circumstances) as to why we are oppressed. The way I think of it is like those old police mysteries on TV - biology is means, motive and opportunity. Being biologically less strong and being vulnerable due to pregnancy and child-rearing provides the means to oppress us, the fact that we can produce children and men can't is the motive for the oppression, the "patriarchal system" (aka sexism written into the fabric of society) provides the opportunity.

Biological determinism would be the claim that it has to be that way, that there's no other way it could be and that being that way is the state of nature. None of which are true.

The fact that something happens to be a particular way, even if you can identify an explanation for how it's come about, doesn't mean that it has to be that way. The latter would be biological determinism, the former is simply pointing out the role biology has played in shaping how things happen to be.

Oh and how awful maternity rights STILL are. I was treated awfully by my employer at the most vulnerable time of my life. It raised many eyebrows when I asked to increase my hours recently (from 3 to 4 days)- the HR manager actually commented on “poor DS”. Nobody’s guilt tripping DH about working full time!

I can’t remember ever not being a feminist really. I have very early memories of being told that I’d have a different surname ‘when’ I got married- and thinking it was unfair that I had to change names, and my brother didn’t.

I think since entering the world of work, it’s become even more present for me- the very common perception that assertive woman are aggressive, whilst assertive men are natural leaders, etc. And since having DS I’m very aware of how I’d like him to view women, and also of the impact that the status quo has on him too- people have raising eyebrows at him having a doll and pram, ffs. Like a boy learning to care and nurture is an abomination. He’s 17 months old!

Yes MistressCeeCee reading comments on line has been another fuel to my feminism. It's not just about how parenthood disadvantages women economically, it's how dismissive society is towards rape and sexism and abuse of power.

These men who self-identify as good men, they never fucking stand up for us and challenge the locker room talk, they just correct us by saying ''not all men''.

At school seeing unfairness and comments like “I need a nice strong boy to do go and get x”. And thinking that 12 year old boy is no stronger than me, why should he get to bunk off for ten minutes to go and get x from another classroom.

I started feeling the unfairness before I was a teenager, and it grew the more I witnessed it. The sexual harassment at my first job at 15, feeling uncomfortable with older colleagues/bosses ogling me, saying inappropriate things to me and then getting pissed off with me for making more sales them.

For being seen as a piece of meat, the constant sexual innuendos, touching, grabbing, not taking no for an answer, the shocking entitlement some men think they have over your body, so tiresome and degrading.

For being surrounded by lads and ‘lad culture’ as a teen, where young girls sit around whilst men play computer games where the characters have sex and beat and kill sex workers, watch football and sports that were all male dominated, and see music videos and magazines everywhere such as Nuts, Zoo and FHM which told women how to look to be considered sexually attractive.

It was all a bit shit, and I hope the world young women grow up in now is better, we need strong female role models, we need young women to be listened to not leered at, they need to feel confident to say no.

to request that we move from needlework and home ec to woodwork, metalwork and engineering drawing

Ha! I went to an all girls school and mine was the first year the school ran an O Level Technical Drawing course. They wrote home to tell our parents what a brave and feminist step forward it was. I did it because we had to do one non-academic subject and I was shit at art!

Having an engineer for a dad who delighted in teaching me the tricks of the trade. Having a mum who believed in dressing tidly but who thought the whole make-up thing was no competition for an extra 20 minutes in bed. A dad that cooked, a mum that wallpapered.

Being brought up to judge people on what they say and do, not what they look like. Being born in the 70's when gendered toys were less of a 'thing' thanks to Spare Rib et al.

All this was very important, but the real 'epiphany' was changing school and arriving for PE with my football studs. Was told 'girls play netball, not football'. Handed a bib and then got told off for doing a throw-in instead of something called a 'chest pass' that was piss easy to intercept at that level (12 yo) so seemed utterly pointless to me.

My previous school's county had done all PE mixed, including dance, rugby and so on. I had been lined up for the county team football trials before moving.

'Girls don't play football' consequently
1)Prompted me to get a book about Suffragettes out of the library.
2)Made me bunk PE for the rest of secondary school.
3) Made me the woman I am today.

When I was 7 in 1953 my uncle told me I had to be a nurse instead of a doctor because I was a girl. I got angry about that.
Every year there were things I was not allowed to do because I was a girl, so I stayed mad.
When I worked in the berry fields when I was 13 they treated me the same as they did the boys. That was a first.
The Equal Pay act of 1963 didn't mean I would be paid the same as the coworkers who were men though, because the men had a family to support and my children didn't count as a family, I guess, because I was separated from my husband. By then I wasn't just angry, I was ready to fight. So I did.

I was brought up to be a feminist. But there has been incidents of sexual harassment that cemented it.

Always been a feminist. I blame my best childhood friends mum, who was at greenham common
As a child I was quite obsessed with fairness and noticed early on boys and girls weren't treated equally and it really rankled.

I grew up in a misogynistic family. Most of the men are violent, most of the women were abused as children and again by their husbands. It was just the way things were.
One day I snapped and stood my ground, and I booted my brother in the nads. I realised I was going to be bullied by him anyway and no one was going to stick up for me, so I may as well go down fighting.

My mother. Born in 1927. Had to give up work when she married because she was in the civil service. I've never not been a feminist.

The Advent of Facebook brought about my lightbulb moment. The sheer numbers of misogynists who are on there, and the handmaidens who support them. Hateful, bile filled posts. All of them speaking as if they want a woman to inflict their hate on. Dismissive of rape, assault, harassment. I had to stop reading them.

Although I suppose I had an awareness of gender inequality from a young age. In my parents' marriage my mum was the smart one. But my dad thought he was. He'd no time for whatever women had to say. So my mum never had a voice.

The Self-ID thing peaked it. Entitled, privileged, instead of fighting for their own space they choose to oppress women. Misogyny personified.

Finding of about sex as a child through A. a man who liked to loiter near Brownies cookouts and make sure they saw him wanking and B. Through a conversation with my mum after viewing a police poster about a girl who had been abducted, raped and murdered. So essentially, I knew about male violence long before I even had a chance to explore what sexual pleasure might be for me. No girl should have that kind of initiation into the world of sex. Its so wrong.

in the 70s everything seemed stacked against girls. in 1980, having to fight to get onto the woodwork classes, we had until the end of the first week at a new comp to get our parents to write to request that we move from needlework and home ec to woodwork, metalwork and engineering drawing. The first week of a new school should have been about support not hostility. They hated me from there on in, but weirdly i went on to do civil engineering as a career.

that and every day since, i think i have had an experience that made me more of a feminist, even before i knew the word.

I didn't really realise that women hadn't achieved equality until Mumsnet

Of course I always thought that mostly men and women should be treated the same, but it never occurred to me that this wasn't actually the case. To me feminism was all done and dusted in the seventies and it wasn't really needed any more because of course men and women were treated equally.

MN really opened my eyes and made me view things critically. I'm not sure if I'm grateful or not - in some ways I think I was happier ignorant, but once you see what's going on you can't unsee it, and it's so bloody enraging

Death by a thousand cuts.

Starting with being pissed off I had a choice of itchy tights or cold knees at playschool but the boys had nice warm trousers (thanks mum)

And peaking with having a daughter, who went to that same preschool some 30 years later and spent her first session making necklaces for a princesses and pirate theme whilst the boys jumped about on a climbing frame. Ffs.

There has been many, many moments between and since. But yeah. I’m a feminist.