Men of the far right and the women's movement

No one's telling you to shut up. Just saying that it's not true that women = victims. That society is more complex than oppressor/victim.

But it is the truth - "It would be great to recognise and acknowledge the truth that women have been oppressed in all cultures, the whole world over, all down through all of time, by men."

Because that is truth. Women and girls have been oppressed by men, and still are oppressed, in all cultures, the whole world over, down through all of time."

"Oppressed by men, and men's greater propensity and capability for violence against women." Yes. And remains so.

You don't get to castigate me for being a victim of male violence, because I'm a victim of male violence, and me pointing out that I'm a victim of male violence. You don't get to tell me to shut up about that.

Women have a long, long, long history of having to live with male violence. Id's prefer to tell girls and women the truth about male violence, rather than tell us to shut up. We are at the mercy of male violence. Historical and contemporary fact.

mforstater.medium.com/what-being-worthy-of-respect-in-a-democratic-society-means-b611a07cd925

Just adding Maya’s article here.

‘There are tensions here that need to be talked about, and there are also areas where it is clear that there are common concerns between strange bedfellows:’

’If we want to speak out on the issue of Drag Queen Story Hour, we will find ourselves sharing concerns with traditionalists and reactionaries.’

’If we want to speak out on the conversion-therapy ban, or on gender ideology in sex education classes we will find ourselves sharing concerns with religious conservatives.’

’If we want to speak out on freedom of expression, we will find ourselves sharing concerns with racists, anti-abortionists and pornographers.’

‘Those who want to silence us would like us to be vulnerable to shame and guilt-by-association, and to tread on eggshells around these topics, avoid them all together or become tied up in purity spirals.’

Now imagine if Maya’s case never happened because women who deem her just as ‘problematic’ as KJK because Maya is willing to speak at an event where a group deemed ‘beyond the pale’ was also involved didn’t support her.

Also, imagine if women were so pressured to choose to stay ‘pure’ chose not to accept funds from the wider group willing to help.

Maybe it is just as well this divisiveness has been shown up now rather than 2-3 years ago. But the divisiveness is there for all to see now. Maya even included a tweet from one of those Brighton (please do correct me if I am wrong) feminists pressuring her to effectively tell KJK that she, KJK, was ‘sinning’ again. ‘I hope you will insist on some effort being made to exclude these ppl from future events before agreeing to speak’….

Politely worded, but a demand none the less.

In addition I personally believe that teaching this to teenage girls is adding to the current mental health crisis in that group and driving some of the motivation to transition.

if we keep telling girls that life is shit for women and then a TRA swoops in at school or online and says ‘don’t worry about all that oppression stuff, becoming a woman is optional, you can just be a boy instead, or non-binary, your mum is stupid to accept oppression, you can be clever and opt out’ we a) can’t really blame our daughters for wanting what looks like a functional solution (transition to male) for an unsolvable problem (the never ending oppression of women and girls) and b) we really do have to have a good hard look at our own contribution to their desperation for a solution.

Yes, women and men are different because we are mammals, no, that doesn’t mean women are lesser, but yes it means women need some additional protections such a refuges, and maternity protections in the workplace and access to a fair welfare safety net, because we can’t identify out of being (on average) smaller and less strong, nor being the half of the species that births babies, or gets left holding said babies. We are also more likely to become disabled as we get older (although boys are more likely to be born with disabilities) and to live long enough to become vulnerable due to infirmity.

Much of this reduces our earning power whilst also increasing our lifetime bare necessity costs for health and social care, housing etc.

Making a rational case for the inequalities to be understood and mitigated by families, communities, workplaces and society as a whole does not need to involve scaring girls until they cannot face being women.

My life would’ve been very different if I were male, but I really don’t think it would’ve been better. So many men of similar age (mid 40s to mid 50s) are suffering from depression and alcoholism, many are workaholics stuck on an earnings treadmill to pay the bills with not much quality of life and not great relationships with their children. If they are divorced then loneliness is a massive factor that middle aged and up women are far better at solving than their male counterparts. One of my neighbours recently took his own life, he fits the statistics perfectly.

I’m not saying this to start a ‘what about the menz’ conversation, this is FWR and it’s not our responsibility to fix broken men, nor mother adults, I just want to point out that the ‘all women are oppressed and all men are oppressors’ narrative may actually be harming the girls we say we want to help.

Our girls need to know that being a woman has it’s difficulties, but actually, on the whole, it’s pretty fucking great, and being a man is often a miserable experience.

The grass isn’t greener on the oppressor side of the fence.

and that no, sex work isn’t work, it’s rape and human trafficking, and that nude photos aren’t empowering, and to make a sharp exit from any man who pings your nonce radar, and tell at least one other woman about him.

I actually came on here to say I wonder if the Real Feminists are going to cancel JKR for wearing a KJK t-shirt for the Scottish rally...

Why would that be great? I'm not into victimhood. I don't think women are always universally oppressed in all of history and the present. I don't think woman = victim.

It would be great to recognise and acknowledge the truth that women have been oppressed in all cultures, the whole world over, all down through all of time, by men.

Oppressed by men, and men's greater propensity and capability for violence against women.

But that's being mean and a bitch, apparently, currently.

It would be great if the UK didn't have a career structure for "shock jocks" who would hijack legitimate movements to get a chance to say something controversial to try get a GB News segment...that idiot Corcoran comes to mind.

What I don't understand is why no one seems to really want to engage with those kinds of questions about environmental policy? Because surely if you think it's important you'd want to? Need, to, in fact?

I think you are possibly right about the switchiroo. I will be interested to see how this goes in the UK. One of the elements of the last federal election here in Canada is that the Tories included bringing in worker rights legislation in their manifesto. The kind of stuff you might have expected from a workers party. I've wondered if there will not be similar moves elsewhere.

Though I saw an film a year or so ago that touched on the Repblicans and Democrats and the idea that they changed positions. It argued that in fact no such switch had taken place, and the Democrats were still very much the party of Jim Crow, just in a different form. It was very interesting.

But yes, the political left parties now espouses so many positions that are basically neoliberal, which are obviously not going to appeal most to workers.

I‘ll believe that ‚left‘ politicians make left politics on global warming, when they seriously try to push through an absolute ban of private jets.

Before that, spare me the crocodile tears and all the demands to heat less, get rid of all nonelectric cars and whatnot.
Billionaires are flying to space and generally have carbon footprints like whole communities but our car-rides are the problem… yeah, right.

Yes ^

And this is one of the many reasons why people in the NE and Red Wall seats have been voting Conservative - Labour has been squatted by people who identify as Left while espousing policy that hurts the working classes/people living in the former mining towns.

I bet Saph’s Real Feminists are Open Borders enthusiasts too, despite that being the most obviously Neoliberal position known to human kind.

I really do think we are in the midst of one of those massive political party switcharoos akin to the historical swap over between Democrats and Republicans.

Tarquin and his Brighton Trustafarians have colonised Labour and anywhere north of Watford Gap services is looking on in horror (and holding their noses and voting Tory/spoiling their ballots/not bothering to vote at all)

it’s infuriating that a bunch of southerners who have never had an industrial past to lose are making stupid party policy decisions and expecting the people who Labour was founded for to just go along with it, even though we can see via our own lived experience that it’s fucking us over.

And THEN they have the gall to call US stupid and accuse us of voting against our own best interests 🤦‍♀️

Conservatives who comment on climate stuff most interestingly usually talk about it in this way.

Not that they don't see that it's a problem, but they ask for the economic effects of the policies will be to be laid out openly and with rigour, and mostly, they don't get a straight answer.

That includes the effects on the poor but also the real effects in terms of things like costs of manufactured goods, or whether we could still even have a lot of the consumer goods we use.

It’s very hard to balance the right to a reasonable standard of living for the poor and the lower paid working class (and people in developing countries) with climate change activism.

It’s a luxury belief, imo. The people who are expected to sacrifice the most are the people who currently have the least.

I don’t consider it to be left wing at all, it’s fake left-wing, like the subsection of the Green Party who are really just NIMBY Tories with a new coloured rosette.

I'm not sure that Venn diagram is actually very accurate.

I realize I am missing the point, but inaccurate Venn diagrams really bother me.

I've followed I don't know how many threads about this without commenting, trying to make sense of some of your scattergun posts Sappho. But that one explained everything, especially this part:
There is a lot of sensitive stuff happening here. Women's services are under attack and there is a lot of progress being made behind closed doors.

I'm a bit surprised you said it out loud but thank you for the illumination. So, sensitive, private stuff? And I guess some of the people concerned will only agree to progress if certain conditions are met?

I'm not unsympathetic. I'm sceptical, and I do wonder what other terms you and your friends will have to accept 'behind closed doors' in the name of 'progress' - because I cannot believe it will end with denouncing KJK. But then I don't have to live in Brighton and maybe you'll succeed in carving out some kind of buffer zone for you and your loved ones. Good luck with it.

However I am finding it very hard to draw a distinction between your accusation that KJK is getting dangerously close to people who are no friends to women, and your own behaviour. I'm not going to say out loud what I think about that as I have no intention of getting a deletion on your account so let's leave it there.

Nice diagram. And the strategy of The Real Feminists is obviously, to prevent White Nationalists from voicing or even having an opinion on the overlapping part and from filming and publishing anything on the issue, so they don‘t get confused with feminists or something. And only once this is achieved pure feminist action can take place.

This is a very viable strategy and not at all a distraction to prevent women from efficient organizing. As someone who considers global warming as greatest threat to humanity (which I fervently do), let me also propose that women desist from any action and organizing that is not carbon neutral…🙄

Just found this. Was looking for somewhere to keep it and this thread seemed apt! (From Gia Milinovich substack)

@deepwatersolo Well I guess pregnant adult human females are ten a penny. Nobody's making documentaries about your special struggles or giving you column inches in an International newspaper for merely being a pregnant woman. Slap on a bit of man face, though, and well - This Morning here we come!

Bitossi if I took everything at face value that someone wrote on Twitter in some heated argument, I‘d have a 20 volume sin registry by now - half of it filled with TRAs.

That said, I have difficulty wrapping my head around a condition, where your body dysphoria makes you suffer so much you wear binders and eventually go for surgery and life-Long injections with T, being reminded of your biology by wrong pronouns unsettles you (and I am not mocking this, I do believe that gender dysphoria can be very, very hard to endure), and then you opt for growing a pregnancy-swollen belly and a condition that reminds you every f*ing Moment of your biology?

(I didn’t particularly enjoy these changes and I‘m not gender dysphoric.)

I read Posie's post to be suggestive, rather than prescriptive and an expression of exasperation, not advocating violence. I.e., if you despise your female body so much and want to be a man, and force society to see you and treat you as a man, perhaps you should go the whole hog and get sterilised, rather than doing the most female thing it's possible to do (conceive, grow and birth a baby); and go on to give that child an utterly confusing childhood, and possibly one beset by illness due to T passing through the placenta. Twitter's not a great vehicle for nuance, but I've been watching PP long enough to know that she is not advocating for forced sterilisation. She is actively campaigning for women who think they identify as men to be helped and counselled before they do these sorts of harms to their bodies.

Anyone who may be in anyway confused as to how supporting other women and their free speech is done regardless of whether you agree 20%, 50% or 99% with their view, pop over to the Caroline Farrow thread.

Not sure I have read that many people there agree with her about, well much beyond some basic things, but many posters are there defending her right not to be persecuted by a vexatious litigator. And to not be hauled into the police station yet again.

Some posters question this phenomenon when they see it here on MN. But to me it shows that many MNers will stand up against other women when things go too far.

And I still don‘t know if the drama erupted because they have issues with Posie or because they have issues with some dudes in the audience who filmed Posie.

The goalpost seems so keep moving there.

Not comparing any movements, nor the strategies, but this is almost more drama than when this ultra-libertarian anti-police Bundy-guy threw his support behind Black Lives Matter (they want to defund the police, after all) and all his buddies went berserk, because BLM were ‚the wrong allies‘. Hard to envision, though, that BLM would have been ostracized, because some libertarian, white, nutter like Bundy found his way to their protests, supporting their cause.

I was fairly indifferent to Posie before, I thought she was an effective campaigner but that her videos got a bit repetitive. I haven’t been to any of her events because Sundays are the only day I see all my children in one room.

Having spent the last 14 fact checking the bizarre accusations against Posie, ngl, I’ve become a bit of a fan. Yes, she sometimes lets her mouth run away with her in a way that can be uncharitably interpreted by her detractors but when you really look into what the opinions are (no tolerance for male kink, outright rejection of surrogacy and serious doubts about donor conception, anti porn/anti prostitution and all associated sanitised forms of sex work, insistence that the safety of babies and children is prioritised over the wants of adults.

when you look into her supposed terrible transgressions she actually seems to be in front of the feminist masses - eg criticising the symbolism of the hijab and fears for the health, safety and well being of children whose mothers used banned substances in pregnancy/prior to pregnancy and those children who are being told they have to call their male parent their mother or their female their father (something we should’ve all learned from listening to trans widows).

There really is very little between the opinions of Posie and those of respected radical feminists like Julia Long, Sheila Jeffreys and yes, Julie Bindel.

The major difference between those three and Posie is that Posie is a heterosexual married mother of 4 who bleaches her hair and wears lipstick?

on Brighton feminist = one Brighton feminist