Brilliant Margaret Atwood memoir review

Darls, If it's any comfortI, I follow the thread with great amusement at the wacky legal 'interpretations'. That I don't comment there is a function of my self awareness that I don't have the legal expertise required to speak with confidence. From my very limited knowledge as I have alluded to upthread, I can perceive compelling arguments but that's about it.

'No debate'? Seriously? How much 'debate' did the Suffragettes get? The facts of the matter are when an issue seriously affects women at scale, they will come out at scale. The Climate Change, Metoo & Palestine protests were spear headed by millions of women globally.

Hiding behind 'censorship' is a joke given the reach of the internet & major right wing media outlets with millions of followers that have been pushing this issue relentlessly. JK Rowling alone has 14 million followers on X not to mention Right wing Political parties have been weaponising this issue globally.

Not only is there no widespread public outrage, its now reaching its past use by date as a political cudgel being replaced by immigration…..which was always the plan. Gender ideology was merely used as a gate way to the right to funnel women so they could get more on board with white nationalism. Now they don't need it anymore you won't be hearing about from them who in essence were the engine behind its ascendance not a few useful idiots on X & MN.

I have noticed that @Howseitgoin is very keen to wade in on threads that are tangentially related to TiM rights but has no engagement with the threads where the rubber is actually hitting the road. The main one today is https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5350068-good-law-practice-launch-a-ehcrsupreme-court-challenge-over-toilets?page=28&reply=148560885 where are your posts?

Also laughing at him because of his whole "if an attempt to censor women fails, it doesn't count as censorship" 😂What a numpty! 😂

He's in New Zealand apparently, but he knows he's telling lies anyway. All this has been discussed with him before and he just ignores it all because it doesn't fit into his TRA agenda.

"For everyone given there was nary a whisper till the last few years when it became politically convenient."

It must be so difficult to hear when you've got your fingers plugged tight in your ears singing "Nyer nyer! Can't hear you! Ha ha!" like a 5 year old 🙄

Indeed. Men who've been able to decriminalise sex offences like voyeurism and indecent exposure are currently running amok with their seething fury at being told no. Being compelled by the law to respect that women and girls have rights.
That's why so many threads like this, where women are discussing fascinating insights into the writings of gifted women's writing are repeatedly derailed.
It's an example of emotional incontinence and and an inability to recognise women as sentient beings by men who only see women as support humans for their disordered sexual fantasies.

It won't stop. Many women are wise to this and try to get derailed threads back on track but sadly the inflammatory nonsense from creepy men is hard to ignore

We know; he keeps banging on his misogynist drum and gets embarrassed and cross when we point out the logical fallacies he so proudly displays but that only encourages him, so we ask Aunt Bunbury for help. She suggests prioritising your energies.

(Barracking and death threats from balaclava'd men when women did gather to protest, or just to meet, may have depressed turnout somewhat too).

Are you in the UK?

If so, I’d expect a fairly well-informed MNer to know:

Timelines don’t support you:
i) that MN has been all over this issue for way longer than ‘years’
ii) ‘years’ is about right for when this became a mainstream UK media issue

Politics not so simple:
iii) moves to legislate for self-ID begun and promoted under the May government (that’s our right-wing party)
iv) opposition primarily from grass-roots feminists (a typically left-leaning group)

Top-down suppression:
v) “no debate”, professional sanction, IPSO reporting rules, BBC nixing of stories, Stonewall employer strong-arming.

I think this issue deserved bigger public pushback than it got for many years, but your claim that it’s a nothing issue becuase we didn’t have street protests is silly. If it’s a nothing issue, why did it need v) to suppress?

This has been a grassroots movement...maybe not so much a mass movement for the reason that the whole business had been flown in under the radar of public consciousness and debate. It has taken for those who have a nose for the scent and a political instinct to ferret it out.

Before JK Rowling wrote her 'piece' and before The Times starting reporting on the issue ( mainly via Janice Turner), the Labour party was literally chanting " No Debate", and the Guardian and the BBC were silencing and blacklisting their own journalists.

I think she needs an editor with a lot of backbone. That's not a criticism at all, I think many (most) great writers probably need someone like this, it is too difficult to see, from inside the book, what needs to be pared away. (Although the ones who practice their craft as journalists first I think may have an advantage to some extent.)

But she's so big as a writer, I think it makes is harder for an editor to be firm.

But that's just it. It's complicity in oppression by men.

It does not seem to be part of the picture that women are actually oppressing others, including other women, entirely for their own ends, that they are the originators, the leaders, that it isn't some kind of function of "the patriarchy".

It's a massive oversight in terms of seeing women as fully human and it's never going to produce a really accurate understanding of society.

Exactly. Here's Tory Maria Miller in January 2016 complaining that feminists were the only people standing in the way of the new trans utopia. The right wingers in her party stayed silent.

Maria Miller says only hostility to transgender report came from women 'purporting to be feminists' | The Independent | The Independent

Germaine Greer, mentioned in that article, had already been vocal about this for some time.

Oh please. The Right & its litany of media outlets has been smashing everyone over the head with this irrelevance relentlessly for years. That there were a few instances of some outlets being supportive when the majority of the media class couldn't lionise JKR & her fellow travellers enough doesn't qualify as censorship. 'What is a woman' positively mainstream.

In any case, regardless of media, if women's private spaces were a major problem for women in general you would have heard about it via grass roots mass protests like all the other women's movements that had no media cheering them on.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_led_uprisings#20th_century

and really reductive behaviours, with only two parameters, performative masculinity or performative femininity.

Compare it with the political compass with four - liberalism/authoritarianism, left wing/right wing, or Myers-Briggs, sixteen personalities built around introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving, or Astrology with its twelve star signs and reference to the sun and the moon. All of them more subtle and variable.

I'm always interested in one where people are on a true spectrum, one where most people cluster in the middle (and some don't show up at all), long-sightedness versus short-sightedness. There's a reason I'm better at wild flowers than birds, like reading, can't play ball games. Corrective lenses or not, it shapes your whole life experience.

Two years is maybe about the time you have spent engaged with this issue; most here have spent far longer than that. If it wasn't an issue and was of no concern then we wouldn't have become se deeply engaged, would we?

It has never worked out " just fine" for the women utilised in the process though; all of those women whose husbands took their cross dressing proclivities that one step further and then expected the whole family to revolve around it.

What you are calling 'gendered behaviours' are just behaviours which any human being can exhibit regardless of sex.

@hholiday very interesting comparison between Rowling and Atwood. I wonder if the difference in their ages is also significant.

I read Atwood back in the late 70s/80s alongside Le Guin and Marge Piercy, as well as that blockbuster The Woman’s Room and Kate Millett and Erica Jong(didn’t really get along with those last two).

a book such as The Edible Woman (which is the one that’s stayed with me) was tough and ground breaking coming out of the civil rights and women’s lib movements of the 50s and 60s in North America.

That body of work gave subsequent writers, such as Rowling, a vocabulary and a foundation on which to build. As if Atwood et al enabled us to first of all to see women and children as othered in the way Rowling picks up on. She does it as Robert Galbraith as well.

Agree, MrsO. The sign of a sharp mind, indeed.

Isn't she a great writer? I've noticed that whenever she writes a piece in the Times (and they're usually excellent) the comments are full of readers asking for more pieces from her.

Just read DocStock's piece this morning. Thought-engaging as ever.

The idea that humans don't have self awareness of their personal disposition & make decisions independent of social pressure to align with their personality is ludicrous.

And that’s a risible misunderstanding of my post.

Nary a whisper where?

You’ve got this the wrong way round. It’s the media and political classes that are late to the party on this.

Sex-based rights have been a major issue amongst grass-roots women for a decade plus. Look at MN. The suppression of debate was deliberate, institutional, and top-down.