AIBU to think that Mumsnet is becoming increasingly less feminist and that this..

[BertrandRussell]

..is a bad thing?

YANBU. The "innkeepers wife" thread crushed my soul.

People seem very ready to hate on trans people and their alleged stereotype reinforcing--but there is no one out here fighting those stereotypes. Children are where gender is created, and I am yet to see any meaningful discussion on that here.

You spend enough time telling posters they aren't feminist they'll believe you and stay away from/hide the Feminist Board.🤷‍♀️

Pardon me for daring to join in whilst doing other shit

Because indeed google takes so much more time than posting a reply.

It happens often with people who profess not to understand.

See you on that other one later?

Fuck no!!! I’m out of the trans debate. 😂

I can't be a feminist by your definition BR. I have a son, who o expect to treat women with total respect and as equals. I expect him to stick up and support for the girls in his class. I can't put women in the 'front and centre' of everything though as I also believe there are serious issues around boys and men that are being ignored - academic performance, toxic masculinity.

I used to enjoy reading the feminism board when it was about women's rights at work, getting them into tech more etc. I had a look at it yesterday and found the preponderence with trans issues really offputting. It should be renamed the 'Trans issues' board and other feminist issues can be debated in another board.

It’s funny to watch posters complaining about the feminist threads being taking over by trans issues and not having discussions about other issues, yet not recognising that they’re the ones that automatically brought it up on this thread. Feel free to pop over to the feminist board and start a post on any issue you like, or do you expect other women to do it for you?

I agree with you, BertrandRussell, I think once you go onto the relationship threads you can now see loads of abuse apologists and misogyny. I think there are a lot of women still stuck in their female socialisation and they really can’t accept that women are as important as men and have the right to object to a man’s unwanted or violent behaviour. They seem desperate to excuse his behaviour and unintentionally encourage the woman into the passive reaction.

@LolaSmiles - thank you

That was genuinely helpful. I'm not sure I totally agree that the phrase is accurate for No.1, misogyny is hatred isn't it? But No.2 sounds more like why it gets my back up.

OP, did anything specific cause you to start this thread? Genuine question.

FWIW, I agree with you. But this is how I see it:

The general population, on average are not feminist. That much we know because if they were, then we wouldn’t have a patriarchal system!

More people join forums daily/weekly/monthly and I guess that, even when adjusting for mitigating factors (such as a person being interested in joining a forum on MN being more likely to be a feminist) on the whole, they will be representative of society and therefore are less likely to hold feminist views.

BUT - when I first joined MN (not that long ago, I think about 4/5 years) I wasn’t a feminist either. Not really. But what happened was that I found education on feminist issues on MN and then I became one. I listened to reasoned arguments on many different topics that affect women and woke up and changed my views.

So I guess what I am saying is that I am hopeful that some (or, dare I say, a majority) of new MN’ers might become more aware of these issues and in turn become feminists themselves?

Hope I’ve explained myself properly. I’m not the most articulate of people

@ChazsBrilliantAttitude
Excuse the @ i didnt want you to thhink i hadnt seem your post and my reply to be buried.
it seems to me a massive issue for women and children. I can see the good, but where does it leave DV victims whose evidence is considered below the level required to secure criminal conviction?

Because indeed google takes so much more time than posting a reply.

Anyone who thinks a question like that can be answered by a 2 second Google seriously overestimates the accuracy of the internet.

Interesting. I agree that there are issues that affect men and boys too- and I have a son. That does not mean I cannot also put women front and centre. The two things are not mutually exclusive.

Anyone who thinks a question like that can be answered by a 2 second Google seriously overestimates the accuracy of the internet

The phrase appears in dictionaries....I’m not suggesting one looks on Quora.

In answer to your second point, misogyny encompasses other definitions about from simply hatred - ingrained prejudice being one.

T0tallyFuckedUpFamily

Trans has come up not because its important but because its almightily outputting. This misassumption alone demonstrates the problem

Perhaps you might like to count the number of replies to FWR posts off trans topics. You're unlikely need more than the fingers of 2 hands... one had none

“ Because I can very clearly remember reading a thread about women taking men’s surnames after marriage.

You said on there that women are free to do that but it’s not “feminist”.”

Well, it’s not a feminist choice! That’s not to say that women can’t make it, of course. Feminists can decide to make non-feminist choices. And conversely, just because a woman makes a choice doesn’t make it a feminist one.

Being able to judge the impact of things like court changes upon women rests on being able to define the word woman.

No, it really doesn't. If we have to have a discussion about defining the term "woman" every time we talk about something that affects women, frankly we'll never get anywhere. It's entirely possible to talk about the proposed domestic violence court changes without tying yourself up in knots about trans issues.

ingrained prejudice being one.

Ah. That makes sense. I guess we all have internal ingrained prejudices about one thing or another.

See, that I can get on board with. But the phrase gets flung around MN as an insult and people clam up.

It’s all so boringly controlling. You shouldn’t post here if you think that, you aren’t a feminist if you think this, you should google not post, you should read this before you join in, you should, you should, you should..... . It’s fairly prevalent now on MN, this need to think as a group not have a range of thoughts and experience, but it does seem particularly aggressively expressed on the feminist boards. I find it depressing.

Why is it more feminist to keep your fathers name than use your partners? Does it become feminist is you are in a same sex relationship?

“See, that I can get on board with. But the phrase gets flung around MN as an insult and people clam up.“
I hope I don’t use it as an insult. I do use it as an explanation, though. I date from the days of “consciouslness raising” when women often felt as if they were waking up when the “power of patriarchal control” dawned on them.

Well, it’s not a feminist choice!

But then youve defined a feminist in accordance with your own feminist image.

Part of the problem seems to me so much of what is considered feminist is actually the product of the historical repression of women eg need/preservation of seperate sex spaces.

More male apologists. Less sisterhood.
Or worse, a misplaced belief that sisterhood means unquestioningly affirming whatever a woman says or does.

So OPs can be totally out of order, controlling, jealous, unreasonable etc and when people say "actually that's not on", the Hunbots and cheerleaders turn up with a waggy finger ready to tell anyone off saying "so much for sisterhood..." There's a creeping approach in some places where sisterhood is apparently synonymous with "validate me".

It's a vicious circle I think. The feminist boards (and lots of other threads about feminist issues) have been taken over by discussions of the trans issue. So most trans-inclusive feminists, like me, have no desire to engage with those kinds of opinions and therefore stay away. Which only exacerbates the issue.

Thing is, I go elsewhere for feminist discussion because I want to be somewhere that prioritises what are, to me, the important issues. I find it depressing to see self-proclaimed feminists praising misogynists like Piers Morgan, aligning with right-wing anti-abortion and deciding to vote for the Conservatives (despite their terrible record on women's rights) and honestly, I'm too exhausted by it to engage (caveat: Not All Gender Critical Feminists Are Like This etc etc and I really do appreciate the ones who point out the ridiculousness of priorotising the trans issue to the detriment of women in other areas).

Unfortunately these days Mumsnet attracts a particular kind of feminist and they're generally too busy talking about one issue to discuss much else.

Having said that, I do try and call out internalised misogyny (and misogynoir) when I see it on AIBU.

“ Why is it more feminist to keep your fathers name than use your partners?”

I honestly don’t want to get sidelined. But have you ever thought why a woman’s name is her father’s- but a man’s name is his own?

What feminist issues have you started threads on, VolcanionSteamArtillery? If you don’t like discussions about how the issues surrounding permitting people to identify as something they aren’t and how that impacts on women’s safety, rights and dignity, then feel free to ignore those threads and bump something you want to discuss.

At the end of the day, 51% of the population is being told that they don’t know what a woman is and they must accept the new definition. The high percentage of women’s rights regarding this enforced language and inclusion, will lead to a lot of posts. We have the right to discuss what is important to us and others don’t have the right to stop those discussions. We get told often enough that we’re wrong on the rest of the internet, we don’t accept that demand for good behaviour here.