Julie Bindel in the Critic - why women don't support feminism

'There is only ever one answer, and that is to avoid offending or upsetting men'

And WHY do so many women do that, eh?
Could there be a clue in... I dunno. The reams of feminist analysis on that very question?

Clue. It's not cos women are useless arseholes.

'For heterosexual women, looking across the breakfast table at the man they love, their personal nightmare might be suspecting that he enjoys pornography in which women are hurt'.

I assume she made the breakfast?
And is gazing at him adoringly while he stuffs down a full English.
Maybe he's telling her man things and she's enraptured by his vast intellect....

Why is she catastrophising over him turning out to be a bad un anyway? If she dotes on him?
Why biggest fear to do with husband? Why porn?
Why not him injured falling from work ladder, making good on his plan to buy a motorbike, taking mid life crisis too far and making a tit of himself in public?
Why biggest fear not eg getting attacked sexually by a man/men who break in/ grab her out walking? Her mum not recovering from illness?
Why not the environment, global increase in religious fundamentalism, the economy...

Is it because breakfast making women who love their husbands are capable only of thinking about him, including catastrophising over their relationship?

I mean Jesus Christ.

It's a comment pointing out that the underlying structure of what is purported to be a feminism might be something else entirely.

Oh bugger! JB is great on many things but she’s very much her own opinion and devil take the hindmost. As you can see for yourselves I didn’t even read the bloody article. Just a head line on Lang’s post and weighed in. Forgive a NYE drunk.

So far, not sure this approach will result in many extra women to welcome into the fold...

The dworkin quote gets up my nose. I don't know context but just that quote, does not support what JB is saying at all.

I mean I've heard a lot about dworkin and read a bit. And I can't see her expressing the view that xyz women are just shit, and here's why they're just the worst.

Question-

Isn't feminism of the old school/ 2nd wave/ radical etc types.

Something to do with women girls deserve better deal. Historical global religious etc attitudes structures norms laws etc created by men for men, have and continue to fuck women and girls over.
Patriarchy... Yeah that.

I thought it was to do with that whole P word.

I didn't know that grouping women into types and then slagging each type off in turn was the thing.

Has someone updated what feminism is about and I missed it?

CheeseMmmm

Did you read the articles in the links I posted? They are even worse.

Bindel is excellent on the evils of prostitution and pornography but she's got a bit of a problem with women who aren't exactly like Julie Bindel.

But that's what JB offers.

A list of the 'types', a very limited set of boxes, for women who are 'self harming'...

A terrible, deliberate? choice of word given self harming is much more prevalent in women, and particularly in girls and young women.

Self harm here simply being simply Not Thinking The Same Way As Julie.

Really really didn't like that piece at all. In fact, started this post and reread it. I think it's dreadful.

The job of feminism is to welcome these women into the fold. She finishes with.

And writing an article segmenting women into types, and all women not on board with feminism fit into one of Julie's categories..

Is exactly what women get all the time, with 'types' conceived by MEN.

Isn't a fairly major part of feminism, like all through and fundamental, about dismantling the categorisation? Being seen as whole people, not a limited set of categories? Freedom from confining sex roles?

????!!!!?????

It's nothing to do with women being cleaners per se. You've not understood the context of the comment and jumped to conclusions

The ridiculous comment I was responding to was Also, who cleans the offices of all those professional women and how much are they getting paid!

As someone else pointed out- the same people who are cleaning the offices of those professional men- who incidentally in a commercial situation may well be men. The rates of pay being offered is another issue but that is wholly irrelevant to the sex of the office workers.

And as predicted the tedious point about paying for domestic help rears its head. Taking your illogical argument to its natural conclusion would mean no woman should ever do paid work outside the home in case , how dare they, consider employing someone else to do cleaning or childcare. Funny how only women are castigated for using cleaners or childcare. It reeks of misogyny.

Much as I dislike Bindel, I acknowledge that she has done important work in support of women in the past. Feminism, like any other movement, has its divisions (though you don't, overall, get as much gleeful insistence that disagreement means a whole movement is 'broken' when it's a movement mainly led by men).
There is certainly a strand/sector/movement within feminism which consists of academically-inclined, mostly white, mostly comfortably-off women who are not just condescending and authoritarian but spectacularly ignorant about the lives of women who are not like them. Unfortunately that strand tends to get the most attention.

It's a criticism of some elements of feminism, particularly which put a lot of weight and emphasis on women going out into professional positions, and being free to do things like put their kids in daycare in order to do so. And all of this being a win for feminism and the liberation of women.

Of course the question comes up, who is now doing the childcare and cleaning work that allows these women to spend their time in professional pursuits, adding a second middle or upper middle level income to their families?

Of course it's typically other women, who are receiving relatively low wages, and whose families often aren't better off than before. In fact there is an increased income gap gap that's seen between social classes and also the prices on the market, especially for things like housing, go up in response to the larger incomes of some families. Working class families where the mothers worked before find it doesn't go as far, while those who didn't need to get a job to keep up, leaving their kids with neighbours or parents.

So what's often presented as a win for feminism, for women, is really more of a win for families who are now able to have two middle class incomes by contracting out domestic areas to other women for a low wage. So, not such a feminist win after all.

Sarah Ditum & Ruth Serwotka domesticated zombies exchange

i.imgur.com/fThmv2P.jpg

(Putting gender woo-wooists aside), unlike the word "woman," the word "feminist" is much more open to various interpretations. I've always thought of it as being a bit like the word "christian," where different people who call themselves that sometimes consider themselves to be the authority on who is or isn't a "real" one. Some women are convinced you can't be a real feminist unless you think "sex work is work."

If I tell someone I don't know well I'm a feminist, I usually have little idea what that actually means to them, which in communication must be at least as important as what it means to me. So, sometimes I say I have "feminist tendencies."

I think Kelly Jay is so cool to just blow off the label rather than getting distracted from her goals. If someone told me I'm not a feminist I'd just respond, "whatever..."

Not that discussion about everything can't be useful, but to me it seems so much more productive to work together where we do have consensus rather than trying to achieve an overly rarified consensus.

It's a very condescending article. She views "antifeminists" in much the same way as she thinks men view women.

The examples she uses to support her argument and cherry picked and strike me as bizarre. Just to pick one:

She says The feminist fix for anti-feminist women is to ask, repeatedly and unequivocally, why they are working against their own interests. There is only ever one answer, and that is to avoid offending or upsetting men.

There is no understanding of how women have tended to use soft power to influence men.

I found the whole thing insulting rather than persuasive.

Not irrelevant at all. It's an important question what it means to talk about women's liberation when in a lot of cases it really turns out to be a way for professional class women to harness the labour of working class women for the financial benefit of the former

What complete nonsense.

Offices, factories, hospitals are cleaned for the benefit of the people working in them. It's a job - same as any other job. It has damn all to do "with harnessing the labour of working class women"

Perhaps you think female surgeons, judges, solicitors, teachers etc should clean their own offices? Are their male counterparts allowed to have their workplaces cleaned by people who are paid to clean them?

No doubt the usual obligatory and tedious lecture will be trotted out about evil professional women employing domestic cleaners.

Cleaners provide a service. Same as many others.

I've read it a couple of times and I'm sure there are some great points but in the light of Ruth Serwotka, Sarah Ditum and 'Zombiegate',

I've somehow missed all of these and if they wouldn't add to my life right now, I'm not sure that I need to know.

I can't think whether it's Lucy Hunter Blackburn or Kathleen Stock (maybe someone else altogether) who has made the point that professional feminists (the likes of Fawcett Society) regularly dunk on grassroots feminists who achieve far more.

I agree that they have been useful and have helped change sexist traditions in politics. I just don't like the principle.

I don't want women only shortlists

and yet until we had women only shortlists, only 10% of UK MPs were women. they have brought us up to the giddy heights of 30%

I like Julie very much but I can’t take her seriously on this one. I’ve seen her calling Kellie -Jay stupid and complaining that KJ said that raising children is important to her. I just don’t believe her when she says real feminists don’t sneer at mothers. They do, we’ve seen it.

I think some women who do feminism professionally - or aspire to it - recoiled from KJ when she went to the US and challenged Charlotte Clymer because they want to do a kind of respectability politics where they explain themselves reasonably in newspaper articles and books. Which is fine, it’s a totally valid way to do it, but they missed out on a great campaigner and activist when they sidelined KJ.

I struggle with the box categorisation of feminism. For me feminism has always just been about not being discriminated against because you are female. I don't want women only shortlists or to be prioritised because I am a woman, I just don't want to have fewer promotion prospects because i am a woman and only women need time off to bear children and sexist men expect us to do the childcare when they are ill and I don't love housework and buying everyone's cards and presents and remembering all the dates. I just want men to pull their weight domestically so I can do as well in my career as a man. Not better, just as well.

Well I'll carry on doing my bit for women and girls.

I really Can't be doing with squabbling about who is a feminist.

What I think this article makes clear is that for JB, feminism isn't women talking together about politics, economics, family, and how those things function (or not) in society for the good of women. Or even about taking concrete action to help women.

It's about accepting a certain left wing marxist analysis of society that interprets male and female roles as a class relation, where women who side with men over other women are victims of false consciousness.

What's interesting is that it doesn't seem to occur to her that some women might take that understanding at face value and reject feminism because they reject that way of thinking about society and class overall, or think it's not relevant to male/female issues, or even only partly relevant. That is, they don't disagree because of false consciousness but on points of intellectual principle.

And then I wonder, would she recognize that men might disagree on points of reason, or is it only women?