Handmaidens

We definitely lost the porn battle. Porn is giving momentum to this campaign.

Women have always colluded with patriarchal systems of control. Footbinding, FGM, honour killing, female infanticide, Magdalene laundries - all these abuses and more were carried out by/aided by women. The revolution of feminism was that it encouraged women to see themselves as a class and to realise that their oppression was based on membership of that class. Transactivism has driven a huge wedge into all of that with its reclassification of what a woman even is. It could never have happened without the internet and a pomo-soaked, poorly educated generation of young people. I had to step away from social media for a while as I found it so distressing, those young women's contempt for older women, and the crawling up to misogynistic shitty men.

And just as a passing commenr- it's interesting how whenever people want to criticise women's language, they are shouting or screaming or shrieking- never just saying or discussing.

Catholics use "handmaid" as a positive description women on a regular basis. Proper biblical and all.

Now. Back to the videos.

Interesting. There were the stirrings of a discussion on the videos which were the topic of the thread.
And now, instead of discussing that, we are back to a back-and-forth about the acceptability of certain words.
So it doesn't actually look like the people who are ok with the use of handmaiden are the ones trying to shut down other women...

Nothing to do with ignorance-although that response rather proves my point.

Terfulike I have the right to an opinion as well- and mine is I don't give much credence to women who shout out "handmaiden".

Ignorance is no excuse.

I don't know what point you are making or what I am supposed to look up.

As far as I am concerned both words are a lazy, bullying, way to try to shut down an argument.

But are you seriously saying men and women use it to praise submissive women? I am perfectly aware of what ecce ancilla domini means. Beyond its narrow religious and artistic use it's hardly an every day term is it?

I've never come across "handmaiden" being used in real life except on here by some posters on here to belittle and shut up other women. Just like the word you hate .

Yes, the T word is the facetious reference I was making.
Men and women us it to praise submissive women as I said in my comment that you quoted part of.
You can look it up. Google is your friend. I am not.

As we have often been told, it isn't an insult, it's a short hand description

Bit like the banned t word then? Just descriptive- nothing pejorative.

And other than in the context I quoted who , other than feminists, uses it ?

As we have often been told, it isn't an insult, it's a short hand description.
It has been around for thousands of years.
It seems to me it is another word that women can use to describe themselves, and men can use to describe women, but Feminists should never use because in our mouths it becomes a pejorative. Cool, huh?

makes sign of the cross

Even further back than the Holy Mother, though, surely. It's a term used in the Hebrew scriptures too, I believe. And in many slightly dodgy pagan inspired novels I've read.

Ecce ancilla domini.

But that's not what "handmaiden" refers to, is it. It's certainly not those that it refers to in the book.

The Bible predates "The Handmaid's Tale" by two thousand years.

Alaaya

The things we do not all agree on are the most interesting to discuss.

alaaya

You haven't offended me. Handmaiden is every bit as bad as the word we can't use beginning with t as far as I'm concerned.

I would never use any of Uncle Tom, handmaiden or scab.

I have a preference for gelato over other types of ice cream. My sexual orientation is another category of thing entirely.

genital preferences

How these pomo-addled fools - see what I did there?! - can say this and not understand it to be raging homophobia is utterly beyond me. This is where social constructionism gets you.

ultimately you can't make the world bend to politics

The game here is "you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time" and there's no need to worry about the rest of the quote.

Yes, AAK, like you I think a lot of what Foucault had to say was brilliant. As a working scientist I watch the sociology of science - both at the micro scale of who's in, who's out in the group and at the macro scale with its inevitable politicisation - play out on an almost daily basis. But it also remains true that the external, objective world ultimately places huge constraints on you - ultimately you can't make the world bend to politics (though scientists, as human beings, shaped by their societies, can be hugely selective as to which bits they choose to look at).

Like you, I see the problem as lying in the bastardisation of these views by people who don't really understand them properly.

Alaaya, please, you made a comment about something you find difficult, which is fair enough. It became a language tangent because that's the climate of this section of MN right now, but that's not your fault, and no one wants to chase you off.

Now, back to the videos...

Foucault (20th century philosopher) says possessing political power enables you to control what counts as scientific knowledge

Sadly he wasn't wrong about this, but what the current pomo movement has done with this idea is downright unethical.

Oh and bertrand said it much better

alaaya

I really dont think youve offended anyone

And i had to go all the way back to page 1 to find out what you said

Stay