AIBU to wonder why any woman would identify herself as [2]

[garlicnutter]

... not a feminist?

Since I killed the old one.

You can't blame feminists for being a bit snippy and irritable. They have to explain over and over and OVER that no they don't hate men, that no they don't think all men are rapists, and that they don't all want to dominate the world, as well as put up with stupid remarks telling them that all they need is a good shag.

It's enough to turn anyone slightly insane.

And yes I'm sure there are a few extremists, but Malcolm X said some over the top things, yet no one thought it discredited the civil rights movement. Osama Bin Laden killed ostensibly in the name of Islam, but only dumb people think that the majority of Muslims are terrorists. The fact that people are so eager to believe the stereotypes about feminism shows how sorely it is still needed.

Yes, GC, that is true. When I first came on MN, one of the first (if not the first) questions I asked was on an SN board - does DS have ASD (as his teacher was claiming at the time. And people on the SN board answered my question which was lovely of them.

But this was because they had a huge amount of knowledge about SN because they were parents of SN children. Me regularly posting on the feminist section doesn't mean that I actually know more about the situation of women that the person asking the question; it simply means that I want to be in a place where people think that women being treated unequally matters.

Exoticfruits, read the heirarchy thread, you'll find your track record there.

Hully sometimes you can be bothered to answer people's queries, look things up for them, post links for them, recommend books and sometimes you can't.

Just like everywhere else on MN.

Because you love me and my seductive drum beat.

Oh look, me too.

Maybe because it's frustrating because we are all saying sort of the same thing but with different other bits thrown in.

I don't mind being named - it gives me an opportunity to respond and explain myself. I'm not going to respond to a lot of un-named criticisms which are probably not aimed at me at all.

Misty may I ask who told your 7 year old son that he was a potential rapist?

2 things spring to mind

1. my son wouldn't have known what a rapist was at 7

1. my son would probably not have known what "potential" meant.

Who on earth is he hanging out with?

I am interested in the point where sweet little boys who need to be protected to the point where they can't go into the gents toilet alone suddenly become the enemy. Teenage boys can look intimidating but very often they are not. When my DCs were toddlers they had no fear of teenagers, having an older brother and they would go over to a slide being monoplised by a group or teenagers and they always moved and let them on. I remember even having a conversation about childcare with one particularly threatening looking one!

HerBeX - I don't really mean all that stuff (which I agree is terribly wearing and dull), I just mean not making them feel like shit.

I probably don't go there enough to see all the trolling etc that goes on and pisses people off. When I do have a little ol looksee, I often find it's all a bit serious for one of my bent so I wander off again. For me, I did all the fervent hardline radical stuff twenty years ago and am all battle weary and kind of in a "all humans are fucked up there's no hope but love" place where i try to think about first principles and an overall reorganisation of the human adventure - which ain't never going to happen.

Fair enough HG I can see where you're coming from... Am feelign fairly battle weary myself at the mo and still haven't got my laundry done...

It isn't about wanting to be educated and questions answered

I class myself as a feminist but I also hate transphobia

I don't believe a mother is automatically better than a father just by their sex

I don't think that underage sex is automatically a bad thing and that both sexes can be the leader in those situations (not just the boys)

I believe my son can be a feminist and am doing my best to raise him that way (alongside my daughters)

I don't believe BDSM is a man only led choice

I don't believe that boy/girl differences are made by society and do have a lot to do with gender

If I were to mention those things on some of the feminism threads, I would be rounded on as anti feminist/rape apologist/MRA

That is why I read and don't post

MillyR, the people on the SN boards are exactly like the feminist boards; some just beginning the journey , some a long way down the road, some with a lot of knowledge about a specific disability as it relates to their child, some with a vague enquiry about a child they know.
I'm a parent of a teenage Aspie who is also a teacher. There are huge areas of sn that I know nothing about.
We have posters who believe in MMR damage, others who give their children special diets or specific treatments, some fighting for statements, some who resist the labels, others who won't listen to advice they dislike.
The usual ambience is one of listening and reasoned debate and support.
It isn't a board full of wise women with a vast store of knowledge about sn.
It's just a group of people who share information and concerns and experience to benefit the whole and challenge discrimination.

I have reread the heirarchy thread and I can't see that I am guilty of anything that I am accused of.
I'm not going to go all over it again as the thread isn't about it, but as far as I can see I was having a debate. Where people politely pointed something out in a balanced and reasonable way and treated me as an intelligent woman, I was able to agree with much of it. The difficulty came when after having agreed -I was told that in that case I should agree with someone else who was saying the same-I couldn't see any similarity at all.

Yes, I understand that, but I don't think that people turn up at SN boards and start asking you to justify that children with SN face issues, when they don't think that they do, or complain that people are trying to get stuff sorted for SN children at the expense of everyone else (which isn't to say that people on AIBU don't keep make such outrageous statements all the time).

If you were using the SN boards as a form of support and people coming on there trying to undermine the idea that SN even mattered, you'd find it a whole lot less supportive and you'd be much more wary of answering a question if anything you said was then possibly going to be interrogated.

I have to say that they do, Milly. That's why SN was taken off the active do dah.

Are you talking about trolls, or just ordinary posters like me and other infrequent visitors?
There's a difference between an intentional, disruptive attack and a poster with a different view asking a question from an alternative viewpoint, surely?
That's why the responses are different from different posters, StewieGriffinsMom, LeninGrad, LRD and others manage to debate and not feel threatened and attacked by the second variety of poster.
Thicker skins? Less defensive? Keener on educating? Who can say?

Well, yes Hully. I did suggest to the feminist board that if they wanted to not be seen as an educational resource for passing wanderers, that they should be opt-in, but the consensus was no.

Well that's just horrible then. And perhaps if I had been on MN for a long time before the feminism section started, I would have known what it was like and not been as astonished that people would come on to a section deliberately to challenge the very thing the section was supposed to be about.

To be honest, I'm not sure feminism discussion is very suited to web forums because it is not really a space where you can discuss personal experiences, because of the hostile questioning and trolling. It can't be all things to all people so it ends up not meeting anybody's needs very well, but I am thankful every day that it has been there for me. It is better than nothing.

GC, sorry, but I really don't remember one poster from another mostly. I remember posts, not posters. I wouldn't know if you had even been on the feminist section.

"Anyone with an open and honest question who engages gets lots of helpful responses."

Yes, but only if they are willing to accept the premise of feminism in the first place. As soon as they say they disagree with some of the responses, the insults and belittling starts (in my experience of lurking on there, prior to hiding it).

You only have to look at the Equalism thread from the feminist board that I linked to earlier - it hit 3 pages, mostly full of 'the usual suspects' saying how it was all bullshit spouted by people who accepted the patriarchy and didn't understand how women were oppressed before it died.

Compare that to this thread(s) which have been, for the most part, a useful, informative and generally non-confrontational discussion of the differences and similarities between feminism and egalitarianism and the issues that people have with feminism that mean they don't want to self-identify as a feminist. There is no way, the same conversation would have got anywhere near 1000 posts on feminism, even if you take the anti-feminist bigotry from the start of the discussion out of the equation.

It was on a thread like this one, but on the feminist section that I got (indirectly) accused of being anti-feminist simply because I was not in total agreement with feminism. There was no recognition of possible middle ground, it was all or nothing. At the start of that, I didn't think I was a feminist, but was willing to be persuaded if the arguments were strong enough - I'd only just started my thinking on the subject having previously been more interested in the psychology of identity.

By the end of it, I was fairly certain that I didn't want to be a feminist by the MN Feminism boards collective definition. It encouraged me to go and do a lot more reading around both feminism and egalitarianism, which only convinced me further that despite wanting gender equality and recognising that there was still some way to go to achieving it, that actually, no, I wasn't a feminist and never would be - despite sharing some feminist ideals.

'GC, sorry, but I really don't remember one poster from another mostly. I remember posts, not posters. I wouldn't know if you had even been on the feminist section.'

Oh no, my feelings aren't hurt. Not one little bit.
I don't say much worthy of note, so I do understand really.

318 posts in feminism in the last year. Nothing memorable.
Ho hum.