Maya’s response to Radical Notion’s GC divisions

The argument of the second wave was not to do it, because it was not valued. Well we need to value it.

A PP said something along the lines of not wanting to outsource childcare to other poorly paid women. We are no longer able to imagine a society where carers are well paid and domestic labour valued.

Find it really strange that mumsnetters are happy to respond to a "name" posting about an issue, but dont feel it worth their while contributing to a thread about the same issue when it is based on FWRers being able to talk about issues themselves without being led by a "name".

So yet again duplicate discussions are going on.

What a waste of time and repition.

We really have dumbed down to fanzine feminism.

Why couldn't this just have been a post on the existing thread?

Reading that much Queer theory would probably make the best of us go bonkers.

Plus too much twitter (see also: Sam Harris)

It's really hard though to discuss some anthropological stuff within the more modern context of feminism.

He has gone a bit strange, tbf.

Fascinating conversation, I gotta get some kids into bed.

If anyone can possibly remember the name of the anthropologist who observed different cultures and tribes and how they brought their children up, I'd be v grateful as there are some more points I'd really like to make!

I remember an awful story of a group that deliberately maltreated their children to make them more aggressive for example, and the group were therefore more aggressive as a whole.

I read your post as being about the ideal rather than shitting on single parents. There are so many variables, but ultimately having an arrangement where the children are supported by both their parents is an ideal. How often it happens, well that is a whole other discussion. And a single parent family has to be better with family support if another parent is not in the picture. There has to be some kind of support for a single parent for balance.

And yes the question always should be how to support single parent families better. At all levels to make sure that family thrives.

To add to bin's posts, though it's not my profession, and this is v broadband loose: key movements in human history triggered major changes. Eg the agricultural revolution (which could have been all over the place in different times, and probably started with animals more than crops), the Industrial Revolution and various other major changes in society, linked to science, engineering, communication. Undoubtedly the age of the internet too.

Matriarchal societies were more likely to exist when resources were abundant for example. As soon as things were tight, the stronger males needed to defend, fight etc. tribalism. Women undoubtedly did too but women also have the very necessary biological equipment to create the next generation of fighters. Which may in turn over millennia have affected our evolution to make males stronger and larger.

Attachment theory is basically rooted in our evolution; larger heads for our bigger brains and better communication led to earlier births and longer infancy / dependency. Which is where the mother baby dyad comes in, but would have also included extensive family units to support and even breastfeed etc.

Haven't read the rad notion piece Maya responds to but from her own quotes around patriarchy from the rad notion piece, I feel they're saying the same thing in different ways depending on which era of history and human evolution you're looking at.

Culturally humans have had some v silly fashions in the past so I have no beef with men wearing clothes currently stereotypically made for women (capitalism, consumerism, culture or patriarchy?) as long as they don't claim to be one.

I do have an issue with the the way that men dressing up in stereotypically fetishistic ways currently feeds into the ideological stance of TRAs and a whole host of child and woman harming shite. Furries included.

@WarriorN Not an expert so happy to be corrected. My understanding is that radical feminism (“radical” meaning “root”) aims to dismantle patriarchy – the social power structure of men as the dominant class over women – and essentially reorder society without a ruling sex class. However the word “radical” is also understood by many to mean “extreme” so people naturally recoil at that. Radical feminism knows that we are oppressed on the basis of sex but concerns itself with nurture rather than nature and says that the reason for our oppression is a socially constructed hierarchy; this is how our biology is used against us.

Maya is talking about biological essentialism, which is often talked about in a very negative way, because it can be twisted to justify the worst elements of human nature. But that’s not the point she’s making in the article – what she’s saying is that there is an element of nature and not just nurture that plays a part in our oppression. I.e. we don’t condone a “boys will be boys” attitude but we believe that some men will always want to rape women.

Interesting posts everyone. For me the aims of second wave feminism were largely achieved in recognising the potential of women in the workforce. Being of an age to have witnessed the cultural shift in attitudes between the 70s and the 00s the second wave was successful.

I would argue that an important strand now would be to stand behind women such as Kellie Jay who will not be cowed with the idea that the work of motherhood is less valuable than work outside this sphere. The argument of the second wave was not to do it, because it was not valued. Well we need to value it.

The other thing that mothers note is that we raise sons. Such has been the cultural insult of "toxic" masculinity, that there are those arguing this is encouraging sensitive males out of identifying as male at all. Huge problem.

One of the issues of talking about patriarchy all the time is that it alienates men. For success for both sexes there needs to be equal respect. I think many of us thought we were getting close. And then the internet happened!

this has turned into just the kind of philosophical debate I bloody love FWR for but am not smart enough to contribute to (I'm mainly good at squabbling). which is just to say do carry on, it's v interesting and helping me frame (or reframe) my views

Surrogacy is one topic that I've found does not have a political dividing line (sshhh...don't tell the political parties!). Religious and conservative men and women are just as likely to hire a surrogate mother to give them a baby as a leftist or irreligious woman or man. In my country, Gloria Steinem has pushed against commercial surrogacy as had Jennifer Dahl. I don't believe either share the same political beliefs, but in this they are on the same page. Personally, I know deeply anti-abortion women who agree wholeheartedly with me on surrogacy (I'm very pro-choice). Interestingly, Steinem is not a mother, but this hasn't stopped her from recognizing the harms to women on an issue she has no personal experience with.

write it in another app and copy and paste!

Mumsnet has a bad habit of reloading while you are writing and all your words can vanish into thin air! It’s very, very frustrating!

I'm also catching up on everyone's contributions because I'm a slow writer so bear with!

Need to catch up on a lot of the thread and all the assertions, but my own understanding of evolution, anthropology and history is aligned with what I've seen of BinturongsSmellOfPopcorn's posts

That said, the rest of Maya's article I broadly agree with.

A nuclear family is often very beneficial for women and children but I disagree it's best.

Obvs It’s always better to raise a child alone than with an abusive partner and step fathers are a statistical risk to the child.

Let's focus on what we agree on and mobilize!

I agree that there is no great distinction between radical feminism’s position on the material reality of the female body and Mumsnet feminisms position.

Yes to both points! I think that’s an interesting point about having children and families. As women as a sex class gain greater sexual and economic freedom they have fewer children, which is a very good thing for women. And the fact that more divorces are initiated by women could also reflect a relative power and freedom in being able to leave poor relationships or abusive men. There will always be a need for this.

However I agree the functional nuclear family is better for children and parents and I don’t mean that as a slight on single mothers. I think the declining birth rate and increasing divorce rate is compounded today by poor relations between the sexes, with the rise of incels, anti-feminism, Andrew Tate, rife sexual harassment in schools, porn addiction, male entitlement etc. (The affordability of children during fertile years is also a huge point but not going to address that here).

Good relations between the sexes would ensure that people continue to reproduce out of the desire and crucially, ability, to create healthy loving families. I think this is a potential strategy to appeal to conservatives that still benefits women. And this is what I mean about widening the net of appeal for radical feminist positions so that we actually get listened to and these policies enacted.

Broken link fix:

www.bbc.com/news/education-47057787.amp

For many women, leaving a 2-parent household is making their children's lives healthier, but to your point @ShireWifeofNigelFarage rarely financially better. Feminism, especially 2nd wave, gave women more choices to divorce, which meant they could raise their children in healthier, safer homes.

A nuclear family is often very beneficial for women and children but I disagree it's best.

To the anthropologists: Does nuclear family structure benefit women more because they have access to moveable funds vs pastoralists society where resources are kept in a patriarchal collective?

BinturongsSmellOfPopcorn

Link above and yes, I suppose that could mean 2plus, but not something I had considered.

And frankly, having been in a relationship with an identical twin for three years the very thought of a relationship with two brothers at once fills me with horror 🙊😂

How does that work out on a societal level when babies are usually born more or less 50/50 m/f?

@BinturongsSmellOfPopcorn Are there other societies that used the kibbutz concept?

children are happiest and healthiest when raised by two parents.

[Citation needed]

More than 1 parent/parent equivalent is preferable (from the parental point of view at least as much as the child's), to spread the load and provide backup if something happens to the first one. But many combinations can work, and a lot of factors are more important than a specific number.

I’ve been a single mother for the majority of my kid’s lives.

I’m sure the factors are myriad and income and stable housing is a massive part of it but interpreting my assertion as ‘shifting on single mothers’ rather than thinking ‘ok, how do we have to improve women’s lives in order to mitigate that so?’ doesn’t help.

www.bbc.com/news/education-47057787.

I am not an evolutionary biologist, or an anthropologist, so I don’t know much about the history of our patriarchal and matriarchal societies

You rang?

Complete side note the main discussion, but if anyone is interested in the anthropological roots of my (minor) objections to Maya's claim that biology inevitably results in systems based on the nuclear family and men controlling women in order to control the children they father, the exceptions fall broadly into 3 groups.

1. Burn it all down revolutions. These sometimes scrap the nuclear family ideal as part of the destruction of all former systems - and to better control future generations raised to see the state as their parent and their actual parents as subservient to the state.

These generally do not go well, or last long, and are a poor counter example.

1. Polyandrous societies, where the various men in the household don't know which of them is the father of any child. These can be stable systems - some are still going in various parts of the Himalayas. And while certainly not without problems for both men and women, not necessarily more problematic than monogamy (and for women rather less so than polygyny). The ones that work tend to be 1 woman marrying a set of brothers - so the men know that if they are not the father of a child then they are at least an uncle.

1. Genuinely polygamous societies. Unlike 2, I think these have all been missionaried out of existence, but they used to exist successfully (from memory mostly Pacific islands). In these cases inheritance of any goods or status was matrilineal, and men raised their sisters children. Either with brothers and sisters forming the 'household', and lovers just dropping in for the night; or with women and children forming a household and all men living elsewhere. Genetic relationship of men to the children they are responsible for is 1 step removed, but it is absolutely guaranteed - unlike systems where men raise their 'own' children.

So biology doesn't necessarily enforce the specific patriarchal family set up that most of the world currently considers 'normal'. But realistically it would be impossible to create the social change necessary to switch to systems 2 or 3, or to system 1 for anything more than a short and unhappy period.

Also, though I am not a radical feminist (can't find a single school of feminism I agree with on everything, though I do believe radical feminism is correct that the oppression of women is sex-based), my impression is that they were more likely to address the question of child-care than liberal feminists, and somewhat more likely to propose solutions such as wages for mothers (or those who care for their own children at home).

I have subscribed to the Radical Notion and found it interesting. Not necessarily in "I agree with this all" sense, but as one interpretation of what might be happening. It's fairly academic in style and even within academia tilted towards philosophy, but I did learn something interesting from each issue, even if it was a point I disagreed with enough to think about it more.