Women's rights general conversations

Thank you @ArabellaScott I feel very welcome.

Fuck that for a laugh.

Welcome home.

only if I have a female username. It's not made if I have a unisex username.

For quite some time on the old Guardian boards people thought I was male! And I think I was supposed to take this as compliment! (Reader - I didn't!)

Yes @SqueakyDinosaur that is a very good summation of what it was like. I'm still working my anger through about all this.

I find this determination is made about my posts too, all over the internet outside MN, but only if I have a female username. It's not made if I have a unisex username.

I don't believe my style of posting changes that much between fora.

And before I go and make the old man's tea I just want to say how much I am loving having my lifelong feminism affirmed!

Oh yes - "people might be willing to engage with you (which we always said we wanted) if you weren't so strident, so aggressive, so blinkered, so.... transphobic"

In truth, with a couple of honourable exceptions of non-GC women who really did stick around and try to make their case (unsupported by the brave keyboard warriors who have been scolding us since we left, they felt outnumbered and piled on and didn't want to continue - and I don't blame them), the engagement by the other side was largely in the form of:

1. the site owner coming on and telling us we were a "shitstain on the site" a couple of times before he threw the final hand grenade;
2. a few people who would just pop in occasionally for a spot of pearl-clutching and tell us we were awful and they had trans friends and it was our fault they were unhappy and felt unsafe;
3. about 4 weapons-grade nutters who would join in for a few days, post links to absolute unsciencey bollocks which was generally dismantled pretty efficiently, largely by @Kucingsparkles and @BinturongsSmellOfPopcorn , resort to shouting, get into slanging matches with the rest of us, and then flounce until the next time they got pissed and fancied throwing a self-righteous temper tantrum.

Shrill is this century's version of hysterical. Or calling women mad for having opinions and expressing them. It's just one of a million ways some men use to devalue what we say and who we are. And to feel superior to us.

Shrill - anything that doesn't centre them?

I remember being accused of being shrill by at least one male poster, before they were permanently banned .

How do they get 'shrill' from a typed Internet post?

Oh yes. Misogynist prejudice.

I'm beginning to come out out in hives when I see shrill.

Just come out and say, "My rebuttal to your otherwise excellent points is that you are physically female, and your voice sits within the typical female vocal range. Your obvious femaleness renders your argument invalid".

Bloody hell. You're well out of it.

Yes we are @ErrolTheDragon And I'll take the hugs thanks!

good grief Errol ! Don't go over board !

(😢)

One of the very few advantages of genderism is that it has revealed the extent of misogyny to some men

I don't agree with Murray about many things but I do love his straightforward writing and always find him very readable. Thanks for that @ArabellaScott

Bloody hell. You're well out of it.
I'm almost on the verge of offering (((unmumsnetty hugs)))

Oh. thanks.

We do sometimes get posters who try that. But they are often identified as the trolls they are or if they are regular posters who go overboard, they are deleted.

"that might have been an interesting discussion if you hadn't been so bigoted".

yeah... that is a regular occurence here. Some of us feel like that zombie rollercoaster cartoon.

grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/15th-september-2020

We seem to have collectively forgotten what horrible, insular, clique-driven, boys’ clubs they were. Women were welcome, of course, so long as they were gamer chicks, or biker chicks, or nerd chicks, or cool chicks, who’d laugh off (or oblige) the ubiquitous ‘TOGTFO’ comments, and be the kind of chick who wouldn’t complain she’d just been called ‘chick’ five times in quick succession. And so many of those forums were convinced they were “nice” places, because they were run on ‘Just be nice’ rules, where the people enforcing the rules decided what was nice.

So true!

What treatment would that be?

There are lots of tells, but one common one, is to complain about the way we expressed ourselves rather than what we were saying, and comments about being "shrill" etc. Recently it was words to the effect of "that might have been an interesting discussion if you hadn't been so bigoted".

What treatment would that be?

Being patronised, tolerated, feeling you're in someone else's house and must behave.

Agree, Lawls, it's exhilarating.

It's like coming home!

This has the shameful quotes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeterSutcliffe#Attitudeetowardsprostitutes

I agree with you MissLawls about Greer. I'm very slightly younger that you and read the Female Eunuch first in the mid seventies, but a lot of it resonates so much now. I probably ought to get it down and do a proper re-read.

Thank you for that @DeanVolecapeAKAelderberry I still have my copy bought in 1972 for - wait for it wait for it! - 50p! It's falling apart from being lent and relent and read, re-read and re-read. It's great how you can just dip into it and find some real firecrackers. I don't think it's ever been bettered. And those who saw Greer's interview with Kirsty Wark on Newsnight and Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 News will see she hasn't tempered her views at all.

Agree, Lawls, it's exhilarating.

What treatment would that be?

It must be a big shock for men who come here expecting the usual treatment who then find that, actually, women run this place and we don't do that here.

And it's lovely for me to discover women don't get the usual treatment here!