Why do I get so irrationally angry at all these "poor men" threads?

Not specifically chasing dittany on this toths.. I suppose I think it's concerning to read that the general language/tone of a feminist discussion is excluding. Everyone should strive for clarity, and recognise differences in communication style/background/level of familiarity with the subject that will lead to genuine misunderstanding. I read scaredoflove's post and thought to myself it would have been much better if I'd just come out with that point in as many words instead of blathering on for an age..

Well, I didn't say that, though, I tried to cover it up with the Magic Google. That was my fault.

You did make it clear, Mrsbean, I know, they're different circumstances. I just don't want this to become a derail entitled How We Think Dittany Should Communicate. I would hate for the method of argument to overcome the substance. I'm enjoying the substance.

Miggsie, I agree, that's why I loathe tone arguments.

"So I know you write clearly, but I didn't understand you."

Again, just to go back to the chain of communication here, if you are engaging in a conversation with a person where they tell you they don't understand you, they are asking you to repair a communication breakdown. If you choose not to repair, or do so in a way that is unlikely to prevent a further communication breakdown, you are effectively telling them that you are not interested in an equal communication.

Communication is two-way: if one partner doesn't understand, then the communication of the other partner is not clear. Nor is it equal.

It is important to remeber that all our cultural "norms" were once radical ideas which people who espoused them got into real trouble and hardship to debate and bring to attention of the incumbent power base. Abolition of Slavery and Votes for Woemn were both radical thoughts for their day and the advocates of them had really tough times to bring them into mainstream, and at the time, both were scary and threatening ideas. Now we consider both these things as a universal "given" in our society.

Sometimes people espousing a cause have to be tough and uncompromising and single-minded as they have to punch through years of predjudice, opposition and being denounced and derided.

The thing is, social change often is only achieved through conflict. And any social change that challenges the incumbent power base or overwhelming morality of the day has a particularly hard time.

Examples of attitudes that were ingrained in their time:
Black men are inferior to white men
Slavery is acceptable
Women are inferior to men as they die in childbirth which means God doesn't care about them as much as men
Kings are the ultimate power and imbued by God with power over their fellow men
If women read too much it will give them brain fever
Children should be beaten regularly

Scaredoflove, I think it's really important that feminism isn't seen as some sort of exclusive club that you can only gain entry to if you know the right people (have read the right authors) and 'speak proper', using the same words and phrases as the others in the club.

Takver, I didn't grow up on a farm myself and I would have thought it was, as you say, a very traditional lifestyle with limited options for women, a place where the men wer definitely 'on top'- but you're right, it isn't clear cut. Family and working life is something communal, where you all 'muck in' so to speak.

Thank you for replying

I am enjoying reading and learning and questioning my own beliefs/thoughts and I am suprising myself for being able to keep up and comprehend and follow what is being said. I am using my ability to google, to look help in my understanding and I really hope that through all this, I can personally grow. But I know I won't really participate whilst I am scared that I will be the one to be almost attacked due to not being able to articulate my thoughts very well (dyslexic/dyspraxic)

I think I will stay with reading for now and save my disussions with myself

Tortoise, I think there is an enormous difference between (a) "being nice", and (b) having a genuine respect for other people and treating them as equals who happen at the moment to disagree with you. It is, absolutely, possible to have a genuine, raw and heartfelt debate without putting people down.

Hey, frankfrankly, good to have you on board, pleeeeeease stay.

Dittany, I have a huge amount of respect for you, and not least for your willingness to continue engaging in these conversations - more than once I've read an AIBU and thought eh, I cannot summon the energy to engage yet again, hopefully Dittany will be by.

But as for why I was paraphrasing MacKinnon etc? Because I didn't understand what you were getting at, and I googled feminist analyses of gender, and I know you're a Mackinnon fan, and so I thought aha, maybe this is what dittany is trying to say.

So I know you write clearly, but I didn't understand you. And it does feel like saying 'don't known why you had to bring that into it, I was being clear' is pretty patronising. I am really, really fucking smart. And I am very well read and very highly educated, and I have been actively engaged in feminist thought and argument for a long time now. And I say that not because I just like to blow my own horn, but because if I'm still not understanding you it's because these are hard, highly nuanced concepts, most of us haven't been introduced to them in depth (or at all) and hey, sometimes we just don't agree.

I loathe tone arguments. I'm never going to say, try and be nicer about this subject that is so raw and so real and in relation to which, the whole exhortion to be nicer is proving the need for the movement.

But I do think you need to maybe stop assuming that people are deliberately misunderstanding or obfuscating the issues here.

Two things - scaredoflove, I know exactly where you're coming from - I'm being much more cautious about posting on many of these threads than I normally would be, and definitely considering my words more carefully in case I get jumped on . . . . and I am generally quite hardcore about this kind of stuff & very accustomed to standing up & saying unpopular things in front of large groups of people.

I don't know what the answer is, because I think that the discussion is really important and inspiring, but perhaps we all just need to be careful not to put people down, but to answer their questions & make our points in a considered way. (Nor indeed to make jokes that have the same effect, which I know is my besetting sin.)

Mrsbean, I found your post really interesting, and it is something I think about a lot as someone who lives in a very rural farming area, which on the surface might have quite a lot of traditional gender divisions, but in practice is not necessarily so clear cut.

scaredoflove - please hang in there with it. I think it is vital that contemporary feminist debate becomes a place which women just like yourself feel they can contribute. Which is why I've been so so pleased to see mn set up this topic.

Part of the problem has been that women feel distanced from the term/debate of feminism and the voices that need to make up the heart of it have been lost. I do think there is a place for academic discourse on it, for clarifying theories and developing the nuances in feminist thinking, but that is not the be all and end all of the discussion.

So, I am an uneducated woman (hated school, left at 15) bringing up young adult women and a man. I am hoping to learn lots from these threads and to challenge my ways of thinking

So thank you people for debating and discussing these issues and helping me...

BUT I have almost hidden all these threads and I think I may still go ahead and hide them all, dittany - you come across as so very aggressive and it's off putting and scary. I am seeing reasonable questions, ideas and theories which many people are putting across so very well but you are just arguing and putting people down - everything you destest from men

I may stay with learning more about feminism but right now, I think why bother, if I question and get it wrong - I might be the person she picks on next

"So to answer molesworth...

Gender is not a hierarchy we want to get rid of, patriarchy is.

Gender is the construct or expectation of masculinity and femininity which men and women are brought up in, influenced by, controlled by, enjoy, partake in etc. If we were going to be really correct we would say masculinities and femininities in the plural. Analyzing gender is not easy as it is something within each of us, expressed through each of us in different ways. It is not something 'out there' that we can point out and look at.

Sex is a biological category - there are 5 indicators:
-chromosomes
-hormones
-gonads (testes/ovaries)
-genitals
-reproductive organs (prostate/womb)
In 1/100 people one of the 5 is out of alignment. "

You see, I guess this is what I learned way back when.

Though I do see the point that women remain at the bottom of the heap in many respects. It's much more 'okay' now for a man to openly admit to enjoying aspects of childcare and to take an active role in that. I regularly see little boys with pushchairs and feeding dollies with bottles in nursery settings.. but I guess this has just expanded the options of what it is deemed okay for men to do/be without altering the options for women? Women are still 'mannish' (in a derided fashion) if they want to operate outside of their gender stereotypes whereas men are applauded for it?

When a man asks for something more radically challenging of the stereotype, like flexible working where he will provide the bulk of the childcare, then he is seen as less worthy in the workplace and lumped in with all the troublesome women who can be passed over for promotion as the Special Projects are 'not suitable' for part-time working?

And yet, all academic discussion aside, it is difficult to operationalise confrontations of gender-stereotypes in real life as social constructions of gender are so all-encompassing and pervasive. My dh and I were discussing this last night. He is possibly going to lose his job. He said that if he ends up providing 100% of our childcare because he had lost his job, he will feel devalued as a man. He said that if it were an active choice he would feel less devalued. I think that's interesting.. because I guess many women I know feel their identity is somehow devalued by society for either choice: going to work/staying home.. and the choice is never really a choice, it is mostly dictated by circumstance. So I see how men, even in this, have the 'upper hand' so to speak.

What I find interesting about my dh's position is that before we had a baby, we often talked about him giving up work and me returning full-time, as - in simple terms - he hates work and I love it. Yet since the baby has come, I can see now that he ties 'work' and 'fatherhood' together in his concept of being a man: he feels, and is aware he feels, a sudden urge to provide (even though we both earn the same). His father and mother both farmed the land and shared some aspects of both parent/working roles e.g. they both milked and they both spent time in the day caring for their kids, but his father did the physical work of maintaining the farm and his mother did the cooking/cleaning. We both feel pulled towards sharing work/childcare in our own domestic arrangement but it is less easy to do in our society than in the more traditional roles his parents undertook.. which I find fascinating.

From a domestic viewpoint, we can arrange it as we like and it is working well: dh has always done all the laundry in our house, but is doing the cooking too while I breastfeed.. we can negotiate our own equality.

Yet work is so different because it is more socially mediated, and so dh does find himself under attack from 'provider anxiety'. And I can see why it is like this for us. The farm was such a focus in his family.. but its success or failure benefited all of the family. My work and my dh's have no intersecting point of benefit to our whole family.. so it is hard to choose, given that we ARE constrained by a social system that will disadvantage a part-time worker regardless of their gender, who should 'give up' the most. Despite all our talk, we are finding it easier to consider 'woman at home, man at work' arrangements than we would have thought we would. In reaity, we will probably split it down the middle.. and both be disadvantaged..

That's my understanding too FF - I think for the feminists of the earlier waves these ideas are problematic because they feel that patriarchy becomes dispersed into lots of mini-categories. This can seem to let men off the hook for the fact that as Dittany says there are global patterns of real violence against women.

I guess some of the rest of us would feel there is more risk in thinking of patriarchy in fixed and essentialist ways because you are helping to establish and confirm its status as an absolute monolith.

Lots of my friends here haven't had any exposure to third-level education and would refuse the name of feminist. They repeatedly tell me that their boys are 'real boys' and their girls are 'so girly'. A local issue at the moment has meant that lots of people are trying to persuade me that a small boy very damaged by patriarchy will 'inevitably' turn out bad because he is predetermined to fuck up by his background.

The most productive feminist approach for me here, right now, outside the classroom is to encourage people to think about gender roles as non-binary and at least potentially disruptable.

I had a very interesting chat with DS yesterday afternoon after he went to a friend's party. A younger boy really admires DS (6) and was very upset last week when DS copied behaviour acted out on him and laughed at another boy who was crying. At the party, DS revised that behaviour: he stayed with a crying child and comforted him and the younger boy praised him for it.

Anyway, I pointed out to DS that he has the opportunity to break a cycle in however small a way. He can either show this younger boy that being calm, kind and empathetic is not a sustainable stance for boys, or he can show him that there are non-aggressive ways of being a boy out there.

The idea of masculinities helps me to parent my children in a way I'm happy with.

Waves at Ormrenewed - hang in there. All will become clear!

I think where I was stumbling last night was on the definition of gender as both a power relation and as a source of identity. I'm struggling to understand dittany's viewpoint that gender is only a power relation and wonder if the identity part of it is ascribed to sex instead, in which case she might find the idea of multiple sexes acceptable but multiple genders not. So the 'problem' is shifted onto sex instead. If that makes sense. Damn I wish I could express myself as clearly as you other posters.

'I guess I'd have to disagree that the people who tried to change and obfuscate the meaning of the feminist usage of gender are actually feminists.'

So people who disagree over the meaning of a single and ambiguous concept are showing themselves as not being feminists? Even if they agree about everything else?

frankfrankly, thank you for your eloquent and considered posts. In particular I think your point about patriarchy is well made.

Molesworth - aha I see. Sorry, have only skimmed through.

@FF, that is my understanding of gender/sex - I was trying to find out what dittany's understanding is.

Just going back to an earlier post that I didn't have time to reply to last night.

Dittany said: "Yes well my singular objection to the antifeminism of postmodernism, redlentil, hardly rates compared to the legions of students currently exiting education, fully armed with postmodern criticisms of feminism and an iron belief in their rightness, but no understanding and little knowledge of the actual feminism itself that they criticise. I don't think it compares to the academics promoting that anti-feminism either."

As a student myself, this description of 'legions of students' leaving university with an 'iron belief in their rightness' is not one I recognise at all.

consider me tackled.

(I'm not sure that's a good phrase for a thread about men/women/gender etc...)

So to answer molesworth...

Gender is not a hierarchy we want to get rid of, patriarchy is.

Gender is the construct or expectation of masculinity and femininity which men and women are brought up in, influenced by, controlled by, enjoy, partake in etc. If we were going to be really correct we would say masculinities and femininities in the plural. Analyzing gender is not easy as it is something within each of us, expressed through each of us in different ways. It is not something 'out there' that we can point out and look at.

Sex is a biological category - there are 5 indicators:
-chromosomes
-hormones
-gonads (testes/ovaries)
-genitals
-reproductive organs (prostate/womb)
In 1/100 people one of the 5 is out of alignment.

Hey ISNT.... glad it isn't just me. I am reading much of this, nodding sagely but thinking "? ?? ?"

I'm sorry but I'm going to throw a bit more petrol on the flames of the debate...

I also am an academic, researching and working in feminist theory. The term gender is commonly used in academia as referring to the construct of (usually social, although some would argue biological), masculinity and femininity. The hierarchy of men (by violence or whatever) and oppression of women is termed patriarchy.

The academy has firmly accepted this idea of gender, and courses and centers for Gender Studies abound. Including at some of the foremost universities for feminist debate/writing.

Dittany - I think at first for feminists, the pointing out of gender constructs was mainly about pointing out the oppression of women, but the actual term gender is about prescribed role of masculinity and femininity which goes beyond, but obviously includes, the oppression of women.