Stop silencing other women's voices !!

[HattiesBackpack]

I his isn't even an aibu, and its a thread about loads of other threads and I'm not bothered about mumsnet etiquette tonight because honestly this is really starting to hack me off!

The past few days have seen a real increase in posters trying to shout down other posters and belittle them and their lifestyle choices because they don't agree with them, and this really hacks me off.

(And I've been guilty of it too so this is to me as well)

Surely Feminism is about supporting other women's choices- even if you don't agree with those choices it doesn't make them any less valid.

So stop trying silence other women and listen to what they've got to say! It might be different to how you think but it will still be interesting and just as valid.

That's it really. I feel a bit better now I've written that!

Re. choice feminism - yes, having the same range of choices as men, and the same judgements (or lack of judgements) made about those choices is a necessary endpoint if we're to be able to judge feminism to have been successful as a political movement.

(By judgement/lack of judgement I'm thinking of the classic type of situation like when Brenda gets a chance to get promoted to middle management in an engineering firm. If she screws up and the reaction is "we shouldn't have promoted Brenda" rather than "we shouldn't have promoted a woman" - that would be the sort of level playing field regarding judgement.)

But women having the same choices available to them as men should not be confused with the idea that a woman's choice becomes a feminist one just in virtue of it being made by a woman.

Some choices - such as a US republican woman choosing to campaign against the availability of birth control for other women, or a woman choosing to practice FGM on her daughter - are anti-feminist choices.

Nor does the fact that a woman has made a choice mean it is exempt from analysis from a feminist point of view. For example, a so-called sex-positive feminist may defend legalising prostitution along the lines of Germany with its mega-brothels. It is reasonable to ask what is feminist, given the world as it actually is (where women's job prospects and earning potential is lower than men's, and sexual violence is ubiquitous and gendered), about throwing the majority of women under the bus (the women who will be directly affected by being financially coerced into prostitution, the women who have to suffer the knock-on effects of a society which treats women as sex objects instead of people) in order to satisfy a minority of women who are "cool" about the sex industry.