to think the 'F' word is one we should be proud of......

[PosieComeHereMyPreciousParker]

Thanks to MN, especially dittany, Lenin, BoF and Anyfucker, I have been made aware of my casual attitude to misogyny. This short journey in my reclaiming my old values recently lead me to the London Feminist Network Conference on Saturday. And Oh my God it is one of the most inspirational things I've ever done.

Having money and being relatively attractive in my younger days I was mislead into thinking that being a feminist was irrelevant, after all we had a female PM and then 'girl power' where we were fooled into thinking with the right body shape and a little wit the world was our oyster (farm).

My husband's and friends' response to my recent activities have ranged from being mystified to mockery, from resentment to full on stereotypical prejudice. I am alarmed that barely any of my friends think feminism is relevant.

Am I being unreasonable to reclaim the word feminist to mean a person that wants to rid the world of gender prejudiced?

claim it by all means,but be aware many different interpretations/ideologies and orthodoxies exist.and if anyone rocks up claiming they have the way,they are probably deluded and grandiose

beliefs and ideologies are real lived experiences.not some socialsciencetastic frame of reference.and experienced by all of us differently.we all have out nuances and experiential and social learning to draw from.throw class, race and education in the mix and a myriad of what ifs pop up

thats why the human condition is do interesting

however on mn certainly feminism has been argued as a certain type of orthodoxy.deviations or objections are lambasted or dismissed.or accussed of antfeminist

reclaim any words,define any word but dont expect a homogeneity or uniformity of response

i do think getting intellectually stimulated and active about something one is passionate about is a good thing

No, I don't think being a feminist would restrict me, I think that calling myself a feminist implies that I restrict myself to the cause of addressing the oppression of women. I think that is restricting. I see things wider than that. There are many wrongs committed against many people for many reasons. To focus on one - women - and to identify myself that way is not enough, imo.

But you're assuming that the person listening thinks that way.

I disabuse people of that notion when they express nonsense like that to me.

I've always described myself as a feminist and am proud to do so. I don't see it as being incompatible with being in a relationship with a man / wearing make up / having a sense of humour. Living a comfortable, relatively free existence in the 21st century UK, I don't think feminism is irrevelent or out-of-date. It encourages women to think of other women across all social & cultural groups, and it can be empowering for all women to find the commonalities they have with each other.

YANBU, it's just a shame that our media encourages people to believe that women are 'liberated' and that the concept of feminism is therefore outdated. It's the same media that glosses over the issues around equal pay, flexible working, crap childcare, domestic violence, etc.

I also think that the marginalisation of feminism has allowed the proliferation of the porn culture, the lack of inroads into rape figures and the continuing sex discrimination in the workplace. The denial that women as a gender, are specifically disadvantaged by an ism like racism or anti-semitism or whatever, has enabled sexism to flourish and has kept women being more disadvantaged in society than they should be by now. We should have made greater inroads since the sixties and we haven't because of the backlash. We really need to come out fighting, because no fucker is going to hand us equality on a plate. They keep telling us it's a matter of time: well me and my daughter and future granddaughter(s) don't have 400 years.

women have commonalities with both men and women.the range and depth of commonalities will naturally differ from person to person. i have more commonalities with a male from same scheme background than female from different background

really interesting neuropsychiatric research at mo that previously ascribed differences in men and women have been overstated. we are not so different as once thought

liberated. ha. liberated like thrusting themselves, half naked, in porn music videos while the men in the videos are wearing large jumpers and baggy jeans and running credit cards down the woman's bum crack

liberated like pole dancing and stripping because it's 'empowering' . yes. because performing for men is all about female power, isn't it.

what is most disturbing / depressing / amusing in a dark humour sort of way is the number of women who have been convinced that acting like porn stars and gyrating and showing everything and making their whole worth about their looks, tits and fanny is actually them being powerful, liberated and free.

hmmm, not the fully clothed men who are judged by their intellectual worth then?

HerB - I do think people are very quick to put you in a little box and label you and I don't want that.

oh, that really ought to be label you, make assumptions about you and judge you..

because then they dismiss you and all you have to say. roll their eyes and dismiss you.

have to say I'm kind of with HEcate here

I'm afraid of the threads I've read on MN - particularly around the subject of things such as domestic violence is that is a women only issue, that the (admittedly much smaller group of) men that experience it are irrelevant, or don't matter somehow because usually they're the evil ones.

It doesn't sit comfortably at all with me when particular issues are made into a "female only" problem.

I can't read the stories of males being raped in Prison such as in Iran and pretend that it's only women that suffer such a dreadful fate, even (as is fact) if the numbers of men suffering are much smaller than those of the numbers of women.

Scottishmummy - I don't think the whole debate on whether men and women are neurologically that different is that relevant here. The fact is that - regardless of whether the difference between men and women are mostly biological or cultural - women are treated differently by society (including women) as a whole.

And yes, Hecate, the way that the 'sexploitation' of women has been so solidly embraced by both men and women today is totally depressing. When you work with young people and hear that many young women have to be "pretty" and "have a boyfriend" as life ambitions, it makes you want to bang your head against the wall.

YANBU - Having attended the conference I am now proud to call myself a feminist. :)

actually i can and will introduce any concept i believe interesting.as can you lagrandissima - except i am not so limiting as to tell other posters what is relevant. are you unfamiliar with the research perhaps.shall i elucidate

those who think that feminism is too "limiting" - do you have the same problem with (historically) the civil rights movement? Or anti-racism campaigns?

Acknowledging that issues such as domestic violence, rape etc., are largely gendered issues, is NOT the same as saying that men who suffer them don't matter. But feminism is about examining the systematic way in which women are subjected to these crimes and trying to recognise the instutitional nature if you like (crap word, but more recognisable than systemic in the context of the usage it had in the Stephen Lawrence issue).

Ginger haired kids are beaten up and teased at school, solely because they are ginger-haired. Black kids are beaten up and teased at school, solely because they are black. For both children, the suffering they undergo simply because of the way they look, is dreadful and the nature of the suffering is teh same. But to pretend that there is no systemic racism in the treatment of the black child, is profoundly dishonest IMO. And for me, pretending that there is no gender issue in DV, rape etc., can most charitably be described as wildly misguided. Quite often though, it's not misguided at all, it's deliberately disingenuous. And feminism fights that, just as anti-racism fights disingenuous colour blindness.

LOL at what's wrong with humanism. What's wrong is a) that humanism means something different, it's a way of looking at the world which supposes that religion shouldn't have special privileges and b) are women not humans then?

And I'd take issue with the notion that it only benefits women. If women are treated as full human beings, then that means men can be too. That's good for the whole of humanity.

Also the oversexualisation point - that's precisely why feminism is relevant, it's because women aren't respected as full human beings, that it's so acceptable to portray them as mere sex objects in music videos.

Sorry, Scottishmummy, didn't mean to censure your contributions to the discussion. Just IMHO the debate over how our brains are/are not configured differently to those of men doesn't really impact on how women are treated in society. I fear that even if the neurological and psychiatric differences between the sexes were proved to be minimal or nonexistent, it would suit many people in power to leave things the way they are.

However, definitely interesting in terms of a debate on how far we as women are born rather than socially constructed.

No offence intended.

Feminism is one of the only bloody movements that is promoting the idea that the neurological differences between men and women are overstated.

you see to me it's the downplaying of the situations that also affect men that doesn't sit comfortably with me.

"yes we know that 1 in 6 men suffer some form of DV, males have been systematically raped in Iranian prisons, young boy slaves have been raped in sudan, men are regularly raped in US prisons..................but what we're concerned is the larger number of women that are affected by these issues" is how it often reads to me, at least here on MN.

I don't want to read stories of women or men being treated in such appalling ways.

Maybe when I meet/read some people that call them selves feminists who don't basically go "oooo that's terrible isn't it.........but LOOK what is happening to women" then maybe I'll be more comfortable with being proud of the "F word"

For now I'm afraid I'm sticking with the humanist label

actually I'm not a humanist - I'm a Christian, oh you know what I mean (I hope)

Forgive the newbie question, but what (if any) is the difference between feminism and anti-sexism?

I think that many women have been socialised to not think women's suffering is that important Mamottat.

Feminism is about saying look we know that this is happening to boys in Sudan etc., but the difference with it happening to women, is that it has been happening to women since the dawn of the patriarchy, in every culture, in every time, wherease it's happening to boys in Sudan at the moment because of a specific political situation that is going on there. And if we don't analyse that properly and address it properly, not only will it keep happening to women on the systemic basis it is happening at the moment, but every now and then, becuase of a specific political situation somewhere in the world, it will happen to boys/ men too.

We are saying, look, for once, just once, can we please focus on the ongoing nature of women's oppression.

Do you think that black people who complain about racist bullying, should be told to stop focusing on black children and to focus on all bullying, including that done to children with glasses, Chinese children, fat children, etc.? Is it not valid for them to analyse the systemic nature of racist bullying?

Also I think the reason you find it all "me me me" on MN, is because in the whole of the rest of the world, in newspapers, the rest of the internet, the radio, all the meejah, woman are constantly being told that things which affect them in particular aren't that important and we should be thinking about something else. And because on the whole, we are socialised to put everyone else's needs above our own, that is exactly what happens in the rest of the world. And that is why we are still not equal with men, becasue we haven't been fighting our corner, we fight everyone else's first and apologise for putting our interests first for a change.

And putting our interests first, isn't hurting anyone else. We are half of humanity, we live with men, we love them and they love us, us being perceived as fully human and treated as such, is not damaging to men's interests.