Class analysis...

Just a quick bit of reading material for you Babel

Ad Hominem

There is a huge logical difference.

Can you explain why in your opinion we have women’s toilets?

And if they should be abolished? Bearing in mind that where there are no female facilities rapes and sexual assaults increase massively?

Thanks for proving my point.

That men are always right? Well you certainly think so don’t you. And you love to come on here and tell us as well.

Do you ever hang out on Male forums?

Quentin

If you look at it from the perspective of a woman who is concerned about being raped it is a reasonable response

This opinion is my entire point.

There is no logical difference between what you have just said there and someone saying that they should treat all black people in America as potential criminals.

That is intuitively wrong and unfair, so why is your example about men not also wrong and unfair?

in some situations it is reasonable to assume the worst.

That’s why we have women’s toilets and changing rooms.

The behaviour of the individual Male is irrelevant. As a class, they are a danger to women in that specific situation and thus as a class, they are excluded in that situation.

Please re-read your last post Babel

Thanks for proving my point.

The issue comes after that, where we have to decide what we are going to do about it. I have seen on these threads many comments along the lines of 'men are responsible for most violence, therefore its reasonable to treat all men as potential attackers/rapists'

If you look at the analysis from the perspective of a man who is not a rapist, i can see why that kind of sentiment is upsetting.

If you look at it from the perspective of a woman who is concerned about being raped it is a reasonable response. There is no way to identify a rapist from a non-rapist

kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger’s-rapist-or-a-guy’s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/

collective action offred??

Burned at the stake for less these days.

I was actually challenge you on some of your core ideas, and you didn't really provide me with a response other than 'this is my opinion'

Hello patriarchy, what a surprise to see you. Again. Telling women how they are doing it wrong.

Previously you asserted that women in the West were not oppressed. I said they were. You denied that, it went rather tediously from there. You challenged me to ask a Saudi colleague if she felt women in the West were oppressed. I did. She said they were. You then asserted that she was the wrong type of Saudi woman and from there... well I’m not sure really, I don’t believe you ever replied to that one. Do t really fancy getting in a plane to Jeddah in this heat to canvas opinion.

You believe women in the West as a class are not oppressed because Reasons including access to mobile phones and the web
I think they are oppressed, because they are women.

Short of The second coming with Jesus beaming down with a ‘yes! Women are oppressed’ banner in fairy lights I’m not sure what else I can say to make my point.

Do carry on derailing this thread with your manly wisdom on what it's like to be a woman though and all the issues we face, you obviously know an awful lot about it.

Racism is class analysis. Sexism is class analysis.
Sort of. I would say racism/sexism is class analysis + faulty inference/conclusion

So: class women on average have lower paid jobs that require less qualifications. Sexist infers this means women are stupider than men/less ambitious than men/more motivated by housekeeping than men.
The sexist jumps to conclusions from the class analysis.

The analyst would look for more patterns or evidence to understand what is driving the class difference before making the conclusion.

Surely that’s when class breaks down to the individual? And if you’re one very small part of that class, then what can you do to change anything?

Depends if you are libfem or radfem.

Libfem is all about trying to reduce everything to the individual. Radfem is all about working to change the structure.

Obviously if everyone always thinks ‘I can’t do anything’ ‘I don’t matter’ ‘I’m just one person’ then I question why they are so opposed to class analysis which provides a framework for collective action...

Constantly- it's not about individuals. You can make the classes smaller- but the analysis still applies. Men have more power than women- even within small groups. So an individual woman may have more power than an individual woman. But even within disadvantaged groups, men still hold more power than women in the same group. Does that make sense

It does make sense but I can see why people might get upset with sweeping statements that white men have more power - if you belong to a class of men that actually don’t have very much.

Actually within the education system the class of white males do worst of all. So most of the time men do better / have more power but that isn’t always the case.

I’m not arguing for looking at everything on an individual level but the larger the class of people you are looking at the greater the variance. And the higher the likely hood that the statement you have made will not hold true for many of the people in the class.

Bertrand

I find it very hard to understand why people find it difficult to accept or even get upset by a statement like "men as a class are more violent than women as a class". It seems to me just to be purely factual and based on statistics. And it seems to me that we should accept that and move on

I don't think anyone on these threads has argued with that point. I certainly haven't and I don't get upset by the statement that men as a group are more violent than women as a group. As you say, its just a statement of fact.

The issue comes after that, where we have to decide what we are going to do about it. I have seen on these threads many comments along the lines of 'men are responsible for most violence, therefore its reasonable to treat all men as potential attackers/rapists'

This is what I'm talking about earlier about taking a characteristic of a collective and applying it to an individual. Its fundamentally flawed.

As a good example lets look at another fact about a group.

Black people in the USA commit more crime than white people. That's another statement of fact. However if I extrapolate from that (as a lot of women do about men) that I should therefore treat all black people as potential criminals, it becomes obvious that that's wrong.

enjoying this...I have pondered the " treat everyone as a unique person" with the "{women} need support " without much resolution in my head .

it seems to me on average that people who are in the more favoured classes, or people who feel their class is not heard { white lads in Sunderland } are more likely to favour the former. they can take a position of "treat everyone purely on their merits" because it is ideal and works within their class but they often fail to see that they actually often treat {whatever} as less worthy and not on merit at all. Plenty of evidence to support this.

some of them fundamentally believe that some classes are just less worthy. This then supports their idealised position, because if you believe that the class average for women is below that of men then of course treating as an individual will show on average that effect. This makes it hard for them to accept that they class difference exists beyond what is natural.

Thinking about it as formal structural analysis is really useful. And let's us express the fact that people can belong to many classes. And accounts for outliers.

Identity politics is not individualistic, it's a way of gathering collective political power by taking class analysis and using it to define in-groups and out-groups based on birth traits. It is the deliberate pursuit of different social outcomes based on someone's sex or ethnicity.

Racism is class analysis. Sexism is class analysis. When expressed in political terms "Vote for this person! They'll promote the interests of group Y against group X! You're a member of group X, so you're betraying your group if you don't vote for this person!" they are identity politics.

It is a blunt tool. But i think we have to be able to look at generalities to allow us to identify specifics.
So white working class boys struggling with education. We know that's a particular issue because we can categorise that group and see they are disadvantaged compared to other groups. Then we can start to look at particular factors causing this. IIRC i heard a radio article saying if you use income as a measure of class rather than free school meals, actually black working class boys and white working class girls are struggling more in education.

So this suggests to me poverty has a bigger impact on attainment than either race or gender.

The white WC boys thing is irritating actually as people have looked for an outlier then used it to try to disprove the whole analysis. Outliers are always there, no patterns hold 100% of the time because humans are messy and complicated

Knowing that, how do we move on? What do we do?

Surely that’s when class breaks down to the individual? And if you’re one very small part of that class, then what can you do to change anything?

We all know the theory of why we should vote, but quite often when you trudge to the polling station you get that sinking feeling that your vote isn’t that important.

Hi Babel 👋if you want to talk about me, just name me, it's far less confusing.

I think your post illustrates the point being made here by a number of posters, including me. You perceived our last exchange that you refer to as me 'trying to derail a thread', presumably because you thought I didn't want to discuss the actual issues. I was actually challenge you on some of your core ideas, and you didn't really provide me with a response other than 'this is my opinion'. Which is great, but it's not actually evidence is it? Presumably you believe that because you're a woman and I'm a man, your opinion on objective facts about feminism is worth more than mine.

See my response to Dowager below for why that's not true.

Now I don't want to rehash that debate here again, (I'm genuinely not into derailing threads) but I do encourage anyone who is interested to have a look at Babel and my previous exchange on the topic of men in feminism. It's a pretty good object study in a lot of the points I described earlier in this thread.

And for what it's worth I only ever post under this username (I think I namechanged once when I first joined the site) please feel free to check with MNHQ if you don't believe me.

Dowager

I accept if a white man was talking about what racism feels like, then of course his opinion would carry less credibility. But that wasn't my position.

I'm saying that if someone makes an argument about the substance of a position i.e does racism still exist in the UK, is the gender pay gap a result of sexism/the Patriarchy etc then their personal identity/race/sex is irrelevant to the validity of their argument.

It stands or falls on its own merits and if the only way a person can rebut their argument is to draw their race/sex into the debate, then they simply don't have a rebuttal.

It's the equivalent of the physics thing of treating the earth as a globe. Whether that's going to help or hinder depends on what it is you're trying to look at.

Or like in stats - you don't analyse every individual result, you average it all out, have confidence intervals etc.

Class analysis is a blunt tool, for when you need a hammer not a scalpel, and that's just fine.

I find it hard to have patience with the constant ‘making it about me’ stuff TBH.

Quentin’s point may help me with that but I still think a significant amount of this misunderstanding is a direct result of the trend for individualistic identity politics. Not being able to do something yourself or not thinking in that way shouldn’t stop people from understanding what the thing is or isn’t IMO.

You generally don’t because it isn’t about individual people. It’s about understanding power.

Sometimes you might look at the intersections of the power dynamics but from a structural perspective.

It’s not about individuals

Surely people belong to multiple classes? And that’s why it gets complicated.

Obliviously white men have more power generally. But what if you are a white man who is also northern, from a deprived area, whose parents had little education and substance abuse issues.

White working class boys do particularly badly in the education system. They don’t really benefit from being a white man.

How do you factor in the multiple classes that apply to individuals?

To put it bluntly (let’s not go down the trans rabbit hole!) that’s approximately half the population that are only connected because of their sex. Is it statistically to large and to vague to be useful in the context it’s used here?

I think in the sex example it IS relevant. It just seems shocking to a reasonable person that simply being a woman is enough to make you seem as an inferior being. But it’s undeniably so.

When you’re a rational reasonable person who treats people as just people that’s not how you see the world. Because it seems to unfair. But it’s no less true. What links all women is being part of the class that have a specific reproductive biology. And that is what leads to repression, in all its forms.

So no, it’s not too broad. Not for looking back and seeing the why of it all.