TO WONDER WHY WOMEN DONT MIND BEING 2ND CLASS CITIZENS

[MrsClown]

I am a feminist. I am 52 years old with 4 grown up children. I shave my legs, paint my nails and wear make up. I am heterosexual and married. I just wondered, why do people assume that I have hairy legs and am a lesbian! Yes, some feminists are lesbians but we are a mixed bunch. Also, can anyone tell me why most women do not mind the fact that they cant walk around where they want to at night, and if they do and something happens they get part of the blame. Why dont women mind that the list of BBC Sports Personality is all male. Why dont women mind that other women are being bought and sold for sex and some are trafficked. If women do mind, why do they not at least attempt to do something about it. Why do most women ridicule me when I say I am a feminist, after all I am in good company (Annie Lennox, Helena Kennedy, Josie Long, Diane Abbott etc). Why do most women think it is ok for men of all ages (including elderly men) have the right to leer at a woman's body (who is probably young enough to be their grand daughter) every day in a 'newspaper'. I could go on. Is there no end to what women will put up with.

I am not being callous with my questions. I have been a feminist for about 40 years and things dont seem to be that much better for women, infact the objectification is much worse. I wondered if anyone would answer me to satisfy my curiosity. I have been ridiculed by so many women during discussions. Everyone is entitled to their opinion but it is usually the non fem who gets annoyed and starts getting upset. Infact, on many occasions men have agreed with me! I cant understand why a mother would not want her daughter to have the same rights as her son.

Sorry to go on but I hope someone will satisfy my curiosity.

Hully, I completely agree that there is a lot of discrimination between different groups of immigrants, but not towards natives.

YANBU. But, I can't read this thread and I don't go on Feminism that much because it is horribly depressing. I am raising a girl and I have to teach her, at some point, about domestic violence because so many women die. I have to teach her about defending herself against attack and try to help her to defend herslef and be sensible without blaming herself if something happens to her. All surrounded by women who say, "I'm not a feminist" with a sour look on their face.

Feminism opposes gender stereotyping. Be a feminist, get rid of gender stereotyping, the world is vastly improved for all.

You describe all the ways in which men are discriminated against, but then say that discrimination is less of a problem for women nowadays. Do you think there's MORE discrimination against men, or it's WORSE when it happens to them ? Or neither? After all you say men are discriminated against in certain workplaces, but then that women are 'allowed' do whatever job they like, surely that applies in the male example also?
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aswellasyou DP works with small children. he ran an Early Years Unit. now the runs a Primary School.

he is the boss. doesnt sound very discriminated against to me....

sorry I don't mean to be rattling off machine gun questions there!

Natives.

That word makes me snort

One person's experience doesn't make the rule. I looked at 6 nurseries for my daughter and not a single one of them had a male member of staff. Perhaps most men don't care about working with small children. I don't think that's the case though.

Perhaps I'm extrapolating from my own and my peers' experiences and assuming other women don't experience the same equality we do.

Sinical, I think on the whole people are treated equally in most situations, I was asked for some examples though. I don't think there's much more discrimination of women than men, but the most significant area is in relation to childrearing in women. It's hard to equate one lot of gender discrimination with the other becasue they're completely different issues. But I don't think it's better or worse on either side.

Sorry I'm not explaining myself but I've got to run now.

aswellasyou of course one person's experience doesn't make the rule, but you are mistaken if you think primary schools/nursries dont want to recruitmen men.

i dont experience equality.

Perhaps most men don't care about working with small children. I don't think that's the case though.

Might be more a perceived "Paedo-risk" thing these days?. A lot of men I know are very nervous of being with other peoples kids, especially girls.

whatmeworry - so you are blaming feminists for their own bad press because they have opinions and aren't afraid to voice them? How odd. What should they do?

There is also no doubt the antis pillory feminism, but I do think a smal cadre of extreme feminists have been responsible for the bad press of feminism overall, yes

What they should do is embrace moderation so that more women would identify with the movement, and they would be less easy to pillory and lampoon.

In that there would be real power IMO.

Lookat Mumsnet - it has demonstrable political power, but it wouldn't have that without appealing to a broad range of women and if it were dogmatic and strident.

I was a barrister. Many of my female peers were lawyers, drs, other professionals. Very few of us still are. Not because we feel we have been discriminated against but because when it came to the crunch we preferred to SAH with our DC's - no big conspiracy. I worked hard, passed my exams, was the best of the best and still feel fairly confident that I could go back to being pretty good. If I wanted to. Which I don't.

I know it irritates people but I just can't buy into the big "women are second class citizens" bullshit. I have never been a second class citizen, if a man tried to treat me as such he'd be given extrodinarily short shrift.

This. It's very true that there are fewer women in 'top jobs' than men, and this is a significant part of the reason why. But it doesn't get talked about, because it would be very hard to do so without suggesting that there is a 'right' and 'wrong' choice to be made, eg that choosing to SAH with children might be 'letting the side down' or some such nonsense. But the omission can sometimes make it seem as though there's a big, mean male conspiracy to keep the best jobs for men, when in fact - while discrimination does exist - a not inconsiderable amount of the time it's simply that many women who are eminently capable of excelling in those 'top jobs' do not choose to make the sacrifice of time, autonomy and relationships necessary to get there as they have different priorities.

Every movement has it's extremes though, you can't - well, you shouldn't - write off the whole thing by taking the extreme end as the representative.

Not at a conspiracy theorist at all OTHM. It's not a cabal of sinister old men cackling.
Just the culmination of lots of little things telling boys and girls that men are like this and women are like that. So therefore its more natural that certain things are set up in certain ways to suit what's natural. It doesn't explain everything of course, and doesn't apply to everyone/ But it's like a series of ever decreasing filters which just happens to catch much more women than men

Every movement has it's extremes though, you can't - well, you shouldn't - write off the whole thing by taking the extreme end as the representative.

When the extremists seem to speak for the whole movement, the mainstream tend to leave and it loses credibillity. I think that is what is happening - look at all the people on this thread alone who testify to this, and the very small number who go to the MN Feminist section - on a women's network!

A similar thing happened to Labour/ Socialism in the 70's/80's and it took a root and branch recapture and expunging by the moderates to make it electable again.

WMW what do you think is extremist about feminism?

I wrote off the Labour party when they went all 'New Labour' and became a party of humourless spineless drips - for humourless spineless drips. They no longer represented me. I left.
It happens.

'When the extremists seem to speak for the whole movement....' I think that's the telling point. Unless you engage directly with the movement you are only going to get the view of them that Other People want you to have.

And this is directed at you, wmw, and I am not being hostile or wishing to cause a ruck, just wanting to illustrate a point - but if all MNers knew of the FWR topic was you saying on various threads how the feminists are all hostile and rude and wanting to jump down your throat, they would be totally turned off and would never come on themselves to see what it's really like. That same dynamic plays out in the real world too.

Sometimes I get the impression that 'feminism' just means 'equal pay and more women CEOs'. But personally, I'd value a feminism that challenged the way we all fetishise money and power and spent more time talking about the value of the nurturing type work that has been labelled 'women's work' for so long.

To me, that would also include actively campaigning to break down prejudices against men being SAHPs, and encouraging high-achieving women to consider marrying more home-oriented men who could support them in the way traditional wives were expected to support husbands. As things stand, it's enough of a struggle for women to feel valued and visible as SAHMs, but the sexist stereotyping that values men above all for their power and earning potential means that men who SAH are likely to feel that they're perceived as freaks, losers or in any case somehow failing as men.

In that situation, it's no wonder that many women feel stretched to breaking point: it's gradually becoming more normal for men to take a more active role in childcare, but there's still a lot of prejudice against it and in that situation there must be plenty of women that feel they are in the impossible situation of either compromising care for their children or else losing out career-wise. And I'm willing to bet there's a fair few men who would love to work part-time and be there for their children more but feel they'd be laughed out of town for even suggesting it - perhaps even by their own wives.

The saddest thing about this, for me, is that the marvellous energy that goes into encouraging women to find satisfying careers can risk devaluing a huge range of massively important stuff (formerly thought of as 'women's activities') because everyone's pursuing achievement in the formerly male-only sphere. In other words, encouraging women to find careers can end up being a subtle form of misogyny itself, because it suggests that the way to be valued as a person is to have a high-achieving career. You can see this played out in the regular SAHM/WOHM bunfights here on MN.

And what I want to know is: why can't we turn the whole thing on its head, and encourage more men to consider alternatives to being ambitious and careerist? Why aren't we putting as much energy into encouraging more men to branch out into the formerly female-only sphere? Certainly it seems to me that far more women have broken out of 'traditional' sex roles than men; it seems to me that women might need to make fewer tough choices between family and career if the stereotypical role expectations we have for men were to become more flexible as well, as they have done for women.

Deck - I think the same thing. I have an "innane" thread in Feminism at the moment at me seeking to stretch my career, and made the point that in these days of technology, most office people don't physically NEED to be in the office for 14 hours a day be they male or female. Workplaces should become more flexible for ALL workers.

The problem with that is women don't find men who work in traditional female jobs 'sexy' -. Woman want strong ambitious men who are good providers - a man earning £5 an hour as a nursery nurse wouldn't be seen as good husband material. That's the reality.

The interview I had for the job was fantastic. Exactly the same questions to all applicants and no touchy feely stuff. All situational. And they are highly flexible in terms of time spent in the office. This is a HUGE company too. I hope they liked me

It's a bit odd to talk about "extremists" taking over feminism when in fact what has happened to feminism, or at least this wave of it, is that has become extremely watered down. The quietists, the liberals, and the misogynists took over feminism in the 1990s, to early 2000s although the pendulum is slowly swinging back again.

The feminists of the sixties had in-depth critiques of marriage, housework, childcare, prostitution, religion, capitalism - all male-dominated institutions in fact. A whole lot of feminists at that time packed in their marriages and became lesbians because they didn't want to give their energy to men. That would be unthinkable now.

Kate Millet's "Woman-hating" was a best-seller, now you can't even say that women are unequal in this society, let alone hated as a sex, without a whole lot of people jumping down your throat (see what happened to the OP on this thread).

So I think the idea that feminism has somehow "changed" is misleading. What's happened is that there has been a massive backlash against it, and now even the merest hint of the idea that women could see ourselves as a political interest group is come down very hard upon.

And of course if you paint women as opinionated, shouty, hairly-legged man-haters, rather than simply thoughtful women interested in women's rights and people believe you, then your propaganda effort has succeeded.

Why though? - it is a demanding job looking after small chidren. I had a bf once working as a carer in a home for seriously disabled young adults. He was VERY sexy He loved his job. A lot of this comes down cold hard cash. We want it and we are only equal if we are ALL earning lots of it. I get all cross when I read another "encourage your daughter to become a doctor" instead of extolling the value that nurses and other HCPs provide to society. We can't all be "doctors".

Oh and the so-called "extremist" hairy-legged man-haters - responsible for little things like Rape Crisis and Women's Aid, services that are available to all women, whether or not they are feminsits. Services that have literally meant the difference between life an death for some women.

If I was going to start a thread about this it would be why some women are so bloody ungrateful about what feminists have achieved for women. I think life for women in this country and in other parts of the world would be a whole lot worse for women if they hadn't stood up for our rights.