Alison Phipps

I wish academics would write in accessible language

Good academics do. The only reason to obscure what you are trying to say using inaccessible language is either a lack of confidence in what you are writing (see undergrad dissertations etc which are often dressed up with uneccessarily flowery language), or that you are trying to disguise the face that you argument is very poor.

[quote ForenameSurname]Don't forget to drop a little line to Phipps' bosses at University of Sussex to let them know how their professor's article made you feel as a survivor of sexual assault and how you think you might feel as a young white female survivor of sexual assault being taught by Phipps... I think it's important that they know.

www.sussex.ac.uk/lps/internal/people

And whilst you're at it, maybe the journal editors would like to know how its peer-reviewed paper is being received?

www.city.ac.uk/people/academics/jo-littler

www.uva.nl/en/profile/h/e/j.c.hermes/j.c.hermes.html?cb[/quote]
I actually don’t think this is a good idea. It will play into her narrative that she is the victim rather than an academic with offensive views.

I think that she deserves to be criticised for her views but these are the tactics that bullies use and I don’t think we should do that.

Also why only white victims of sexual assault?

Don't forget to drop a little line to Phipps' bosses at University of Sussex to let them know how their professor's article made you feel as a survivor of sexual assault and how you think you might feel as a young white female survivor of sexual assault being taught by Phipps... I think it's important that they know.

www.sussex.ac.uk/lps/internal/people

And whilst you're at it, maybe the journal editors would like to know how its peer-reviewed paper is being received?

www.city.ac.uk/people/academics/jo-littler

www.uva.nl/en/profile/h/e/j.c.hermes/j.c.hermes.html?cb

She's lovely.

Catia Freitas is fab.

NecessaryScene1 Sally is cringeworthy, my toes literally curl up when I see her flailing about trying to justify her absolute tosspottery (like when she was on Woman's Hour with Kathleen Stock). You almost feel sorry for her. Not Phipps though, her writings are absolutely despicable

Sally Hines has weighed in on the debate with predictable results

For those who can manage to read/view Hines in debate with, well, anyone, without wanting to die of vicarious embarrassment, here she faces Cátia Freitas:

twitter.com/Mocha_Soul/status/1359129121343877123

Sally Hines has weighed in on the debate with predictable results:

1. Despite being an academic in receipt of quantities of public funds, cannot argue self out of paper bag.
2. Resort to patronising insults & "ok Karen" condescension.
3. Say "I've had enough of this" and run away.
4. Have mutual complain session with Phipps about nasty bullying feministy women.

In the actual legal battles, I'd say black women are over-represented.

And yes. It's funny that Phipps would probably consider this in the same way as "carceral feminism" as it was about using the legal system.

Whereas I can't actually think of any notable black women on the other side.

Jameela Jamil? Not sure she is black, but BAME.

Not to mention all those brave women of colour who are leading the fight against attacks on single-sex spaces, such as Allison Bailey, Lucy Masoud, Linda Bellos and Raquel Rosario Sanchez.

• Keira Bell, Sonia Appleby.

In the actual legal battles, I'd say black women are over-represented.

Whereas I can't actually think of any notable black women on the other side. (Assuming we're limiting to the UK). I've been trying for a few minutes and Munroe Bergdorf is as far as I can get, but I'm sure there must be some. Help me out?

She ought to write her sententious crap on Lipstick Alley.

Snort.

She ought to write her sententious crap on Lipstick Alley.

Her whole argument combines maximum nastiness with maximum stupidity. The idea that somehow white women are unreasonably making a fuss about sexual violence and then using it for dubious political ends is simultaneously nonsensical and offensive. Then equating women protesting about sexual violence with supposedly anti-sex worker and anti-trans political movements is massively insulting to all the black women who are victims of sexual violence or have been trafficked into prostitution. Not to mention all those brave women of colour who are leading the fight against attacks on single-sex spaces, such as Allison Bailey, Lucy Masoud, Linda Bellos and Raquel Rosario Sanchez.

She really is a deeply unpleasant and dimwitted woman.

The community justice thing also makes me think of my ex who said I can only love you when you are suffering. He was only happy when I was unhappy what can you do with someone like that.

I don’t want punishment or revenge or for him to be harmed in any way I just want him not to be able to harm me or my child, or any other women and children.

With Harvey Weinstein the only thing you could do is put him in prison because he has so much power he would continue to hurt more women.

She argues against using your institutional power but she is the first to use her own when she is in trouble. I didn’t say anything offensive you just didn’t understand what I had written because you are not a professor like me. She should acknowledge that what she has written is offensive to many people but she has the right to say it because of academic freedom.

God, yes, absolutely.

I think talking about the KKK is a bit of a read herring as they clearly did not care about women being raped and were just using it to justify their own violence. It is like that friend of Tommy Robison who was a pedophile when he was talking all that nonsense about grooming gangs. Everyone knows he does really care about abuse and that actual abuse victims don’t have any power but violent and abusive men do have all the power.

White men have also used rape as a way of enforcing power against black women and she does not fully understand this or she would not be spouting all the guff about community justice. If most communities were given community justice there would be more lynchings.

It is also massively offensive to compare genuine (black) victims of abuse to women who make false allegations of abuse to justify lyniching black people as she did in that article about Southhall Black Sisters.

She argues against using your institutional power but she is the first to use her own when she is in trouble. I didn’t say anything offensive you just didn’t understand what I had written because you are not a professor like me.

She should acknowledge that what she has written is offensive to many people but she has the right to say it because of academic freedom. If only she had colleagues at her university who believed in standing up for people with controversial views.

Detached from reality, deliberately obscure, lost in theory ...

too much of this type of thing in academia.

mintkoala

She seems to makes a habit of making her work hard to follow like Butler does from the little I have read. And yes, to start with those steps were unsurprising nor controversial.

You have got it though, her arguments are detached and any point she might make that is relevant, if there was one, is lost.

Re the 'punishment' thing - I'm not in the slightest interested in punishment. I just want violent, predatory, dangerous men off the streets and somewhere they can't continue to rape, assault and murder women.

*There is also a difference between punishment and accountability. Punishment is a passive and impersonal process – the person who has been harmed hands over their power and is kept in the dark (although nevertheless it requires a huge amount of courage and work). Accountability, in contrast, is both personal and active. For Mia Mingus, accountability requires four steps from someone who has caused harm: self-reflection, apology, repair, and changed behaviour. It centres the person who has been harmed, their understanding of why the behaviour was harmful and their definition of what constitutes repair. It makes space for that repair, acknowledging that none of us is above causing harm and we may all need that space someday. It is the job of the perpetrator and not the survivor, and requires significant community input and support.

I'm also not that stirred about their recovery and healing process and not inclined to spend much of my emotional energy on offering offenders 'input and support'. I'd rather fight for the safety of victims and put energy into their healing - because god fucking knows they need 'community input and support'.

Maybe elsewhere in the text Phipps is centring victims/survivors? Hope so.

The whole community justice thing where you sit in a room with your rapist and tell them how much it upset you would really work on John Warboys wouldn’t it.. I am sure that they would find it very arousing of their sensibilities... or something.

mintkoala - don't do yourself down, you're exactly right. Phipps takes a historical situation in another country and turns it into a universal law. It's highly irresponsible.

This has really upset me. It is just victim blaming and racism which she gets away with by pretending that it is feminism. In reality she is just an MRA.

The whole as I white women I think you should read more black feminist (but as most of them disagree with me I am going to cite Robin DiAngelo instead) is not convincing. No one outside her tiny privileged little bubble is falling for it at all so it is lucky that she knows how to weaponise her wounded whiteness to tell all the black victims of domestic abuse how much they have upset them.

The whole community justice thing where you sit in a room with your rapist and tell them how much it upset you would really work on John Warboys wouldn’t it. Rapist know that it upsets women that’s why they do it.

There are some things that you do need to call the manager for or the police. She is in such a privileged position that she doesn’t need to think about what she would do if someone threatened her with a gun or a knife but guess what the nasty woman who do are much more likely to be black.

No one in my freedom program is white. Most of us reported our abusers to the police. They didn’t do anything for the most part but because we did we get to keep our children. If that makes us horrible Karen’s so be it.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367549420985852

Abstract: Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller, 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people. Such feminisms exemplify what I call ‘political whiteness’, which centres assertions of victimhood: through these, womanhood (and personhood) is claimed to the exclusion of the enemy. Through legitimating criminal punishment and border policing and dehumanising marginalised Others, claims to victimhood in mainstream feminism often end up strengthening the intersecting violence of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.