To what extent are we allowed to discuss parallels between cults and gender ideology?

Yes. I think I know what Engels was getting at with the idea, but as often happens with Engels, his philosophical dabbling turned out to be a bit of a liability in the long term.

False consciousness today means "You may say X, but I know you really believe Y and are arguing in bad faith. I have telepathic powers which I was awarded along with my degree in Cultural Studies."

Predatory men who transgress women's boundaries should be charged with harassment etc. Thats nothing to do with the EA's aim or intent?

In this situation, we haven't much of a choice.
We've been forced into it.

'False consciousness' was mentioned upthread. That concept has struck me for years as doing an absolute number on sensible discourse. You are either an Oppressor, and therefore Bad, or Oppressed and recognise it, and therefore Good, or Oppressed but arguing the toss about it, saying you were never oppressed, you had a decent crack at life, you got on with the powers-that-be and found them fair-minded and reasonable etc etc - and this makes you a victim of 'false consciousness'. Which is to say, you are being pushed firmly into the appropriate box, while being told that you had no idea what was going on. Which is really fucking patronising, when you stop and think about it.

That is not to say that people can't be duped, but when you have some academic dictating how things should have looked to a highly intelligent individual who happens to have left clear-eyed writing saying how things did look, to him or her, at the time and on reflection 30/40/50 years later, and saying s/he was a victim of false consciousness, it just feels wrong

I learned that I didn't fully appreciate the film 'Brazil' until I moved to the UK.

But what else are we supposed to do?

Predatory men who want access to women's spaces have no interest whatsoever in respecting women's needs. No amount of encouragement to consider others would make a difference.

What ideology?

Litigating anti discrimination means people end up necessarily more concerned with the letter of the law than human interaction and society and the larger ideas that underpin it, like morality, fairness, etc.

It becomes another tool to beat people with, rather than an encouragement to consider others, and our responsibilities.

Look at single sex spaces. Rather than considering the needs of a CSA survivor or a woman having a flooding period and in need of privacy, and making a practical, compassionate solution, we've had an interminable court case that has retraumatised the women involved and is still unresolved. Litigation is an absolutely shit way to resolve societal issues. Imo.

MissGendering
I personally think it worsens attitudes on the whole, because nobody likes to be sanctimoniously preached at. Plus it assumes bad faith as a basis, which is demeaning and antagonistic. Much of the effect ends up damaging social cohesion.

I was for a long time part of a large and semi-structured group of between a hundred and fifteen hundred people at any given event, who got along quite nicely on the whole and behaved what I would tend to classify as "decently"; for instance, if someone with a pushchair or a wheelchair wanted to use a lift, people who didn't have pushchairs or wheelchairs would tend to let them into the lift first. There may have been pushy, unpleasant exceptions to this decency, but I never personally encountered one.

Then along came a (thoroughly nasty in all sorts of contexts) individual who had someone in a wheelchair in tow. On the second day of the gathering, she had printed out a lot of notices and stuck them at the door of every lift, on every floor. They said "give way to wheelchair users".

And whereas until that day, none of us would have failed to let someone in a wheelchair into the lift first, and thought nothing of it, now a fairly large cohort felt inclined not to give way to this individual and her wheelchair-bound appendage but instead to barge in front of them at every opportunity. Being hectored made us resentful in a way that was quite startling when we examined it in her absence.

It didn't actually help that this happened to be the only person in a wheelchair at the gathering that weekend....

@FlirtsWithRhinos There is a definite argument that ever since Thatcher - and with another peak during the Blair years - there has been far too much legislation, often responding in a slightly unthinking way to media/public-led concerns, and in parallel with governments trying to control the judiciary.

Yes. It's a hard one. Given where we are I think we do need the EA or some sort of protection for people who don't fit society's stereotypes of who is suited to what roles, who makes the best decisions or the best leaders, who is most to be trusted and so on, and ways to create opportunities for people who wouldn't get them because they don't start from the right place. But I also see the limitations and collateral damage.

Well, that's exactly what the Equality Act did or tried to do. Formalised and legalised 'correct' behaviour, attitudes, beliefs, etc.

I personally think it worsens attitudes on the whole, because nobody likes to be sanctimoniously preached at. Plus it assumes bad faith as a basis, which is demeaning and antagonistic. Much of the effect ends up damaging social cohesion.

How ironic to use the word “appropriated” whist standing up for an ideology that has unashamedly appropriated anyone and anything that it can.

Disclaimer, I haven't read the article so this is a more general musing....

What I've noticed in my lifetime is a move from socially enforced good behaviour to an expectation that good behaviour will be legally or structurally enforced, and a corresponding overreach by law and police to settle what should be personal or political arguments, and by schools, institutions, media and so forth to define what society should find acceptable r not.

Perhaps it is an unavoidable consequence of moving from a relatively monolithic culture where people felt confident in bullying anyone whose thinking, taste or lifestyle was outside the norm to a pluralistic one where there is no consensus on norm in the first place. When the behaviour of other encrouches on us, or crosses what we believe is a moral line, we don't feel able to confront it in person so we appeal to authority to enforce for us.

The "Angry Young Women" cover story in this week's New Statesman is a quite a thing. There's a definite story worth telling about women in their 20s, who are a real outlier in polling terms and are driving a lot of the surge in Green support. But I can't quite decide whether the NS article is a clever spoof, because a lot of the "new feminism" they're touting seems to be young women who have intuited that the dating market is fucked and, because they're chronically online, are looking to politics to sort this out.

It makes me wish this cohort of young women had a kind of female Jordan Peterson (before he went off the rails) who could give them actionable life advice like, stop doomscrolling, stop being angry that Sydney Sweeney exists, and stop blaming the terrible state of the dating market on Israel and landlords.

I don't think Angela Nagle's model of online subcultures is completely correct, but she was definitely onto something.

Yes. They were discussing girls and single sex sports. The evil bastards.

Brill, CRT now in the house, all we need is a Jew hating, terrorist lover and we'll have the Omnicause Trifecta.

I love MN 😍, it's the oyster the whole world is in.

Why all the white t shirts? That whole thing looked weird. And was their humming to disrupt speakers?

That whole argument is like an internal dialogue within Intersectionality itself. The base line of which is that 'White Feminism' is a thing, and that it oppresses 'women of colour', and whatever anyone says to the contrary, or whatever other perspective is put forward is all a false flag or evidence of false consciousness.

The article of faith is that women of colour are oppressed by white women and everything will be bent towards confirming that. This is itself all very racist in my view. Make everything about race and positioning 'white women' as oppressors.

Certainly when I think they 'nuked the fridge'.

@GlovedhandsCecilia And you make massive sweeping statements about white feminist racists being a thing.

The second wave of feminism fell to bits as did spare rib, over the whole hierarchy of oppression and intersectionality arguments, and about Zionism.

As I recall.

There was a point where strong, different, gender-non-conforming or 'wise' women were 'witches', 'scolds', 'unnatural'. Now we're 'racists', 'bigots', 'right-wing-adjacent'. Plus ca change.

Ok. Sounds like white people appropriated Intersectionality in a way that led to it being easier to dismiss the concept of White Feninism and the issue with racism in Feminism generally. That is why we still have the issue of mainstream feminism being unattractive, irrelevant and even harmful to non-white women and often lead by racist white women

And the next important thing to consider is how to guard against cultist behaviour and totalitarianism gaining too much influence.

I think elected officials, political parties, public intuitions, such as the NHS etc, governments of any level, talking heads, influencers, people in general should be challenged when they express an opinion that seems counterfactual, the onus is on them to prove what they say is valid not on others to prove what they say is invalid.
No more free passes, no more 'agree to disagree', no more letting them hide behind insult's and made up words ending in' phobia'. They need to justify what the say and if they can't they need to be told, ever so diplomatically, they're talking through there rear ends.

Operation Let Them Speak, should now morph into Operations Now They Listen. They had they're say now it's our turn.

Good luck with the contraceptive effect of "biological sex is a belief" and "I feel like a male"