To feel despondent about feminism

[2TheLighthouse]

I’m almost envious of those women who confidently state that they’re not feminists, because presumably they don’t see much wrong with the state of male/female equality. I, on the other hand, am furious about so many things affecting girls and women that it can get a bit overwhelming.

For example, I watched that Jimmy Savile documentary the other day. It’s absolutely clear as day to me that what happened is what always happens: powerful rich man gets what he wants. Other men shield him. All the wide-eyed disbelief after the event is just total bullshit. Why were people surprised? This is what powerful men and powerful institutions have done forever . Sometimes men are the victims, but more often than not, it’s girls and women who a) suffer and b) know with a deep certainty that they won’t be believed.

Don’t get me wrong- I know there are lots of good men. But girls and women are still at such a colossal disadvantage after centuries of oppression that I find it hard to believe that some women are ok with the way things are. The only way to combat this is to continue the feminist cause - but society has played an absolute blinder on the word ‘feminist’ so that many women believe it to be some sort of weird extremism.

It would be odd, surely, if hardly more than 100 years after getting the vote, following millennia of being officially second-class citizens, women had successfully climbed up to the same status as men in society. Of course they couldn’t undo all that bullshit in one century. Especially with all the pushback.

Off the top of my head, the things that make me furious on a regular basis, in no particular order:

• the leaking of sickening violent, misogynistic porn into mainstream society, so that classes of 15 year olds snigger at the word ‘choke’ (Yes, I’m a teacher)
• the constant unofficial policing of what women and girls can and can’t wear while men can walk around topless as soon as the sun shines because the baseline assumption is that women’s bodies are ‘sexual’ and men’s aren’t
• the way female characters always have to be attractive (real and cartoon) when their male counterparts can be as ugly as you like
• the horror show that is female healthcare, with particular reference to the ‘just get on with it’ school of thought in maternity care, when women have had major surgery etc
• the casual contempt shown by boys towards girls they find unattractive; the assumption that shared space is boys’ space to dominate, either vocally or physically, with the kicking of footballs.
• incels
• the persistence of the sex trade and the loud defence of it by otherwise sensible people
• the bending over backwards to accommodate male sexual kinks

As I said, it’s bonkers to expect millennia of sexism to be undone in a century or so. But what’s disheartening is not that there’s still a way to go, but that so many people literally cannot see that.

I suspect that "some patients" are predominantly male.

This study as well as real life conversations are why. You may have read it before, on previous threads where I linked it.

Louise Hide, In Plain Sight: Open Doors, Mixed-sex Wards and Sexual Abuse in English Psychiatric Hospitals, 1950s—Early 1990s, Social History of Medicine, Volume 31, Issue 4, November 2018, Pages 732–753, doi.org/10.1093/shm/hky091

extract from summary

This article investigates the consequences of unlocking psychiatric wards and allowing male and female patients and staff to mix freely in the post-war period. I argue that the sexes were allowed to socialise with each other primarily for the benefit of male patients, and that some superintendents were ‘blind’ to the dangers of sexual abuse to which female patients were exposed, especially given the growing number of male ‘sexual psychopaths’ who were being admitted to open wards. While male nurses did complain about mixed wards in the mid 1960s, it was not until the rise of feminism and patient activism that the extent of sexual abuse and violence in hospitals began to be revealed a decade later. By the 1980s, despite calls to return to segregated living, psychiatric hospitals were no longer able to fund single-sex wards, exposing many women to sexual danger and deterring them from seeking help as in-patients.

Women in prisons is a really good example of something that really needs to be addressed very urgently. But where do you start? well maybe those with relatives in prison would focus on conditions in prisons and transwomen, for example. While others would focus on policing, the judiciary, the reasons that particular groups are treated so harshly compared to others. I think a lot of shoplifters are jailed? Why are they shoplifting? if they can't afford the necessaries, who is putting pressure on the relevant places to make sure women have access to the help and support they need and/or entitled to. Suddenly the issue of women in prisons has expanded and is even bigger than it seems. It is right that we address this.

There was a meeting to do that last year. Here' a overview about it and the backlash.

womansplaceuk.org/2021/11/06/swp-wpuk-response-to-statement/

And this is why I do not comment on the feminism board. Disagreement is not tolerated

To be clear, I, like others I read here, are not actually disagreeing with you. We are commenting on your posts, the tactics you are using to try and what? Make us think twice about something you perceive to be a privileged position, a negative connotation?

All that whilst trying to defend the indefensible elsewhere.

We aren't disagreeing with you, we are recognising you!

Your problem there is what you have posted on another thread, which most of us have also read, posted on!

Did anyone else see how Raquel Rosario Sánchez got a piece into the Spectator about women in prison this week? I was really impressed.

extract

Amie Ichikawa, Executive Director of Woman II Woman, a non-profit organisation of formerly imprisoned women, reflects:
“‘Incarcerated women are the least cared about and least valuable sector of women in modern society. Incarcerated women are judged by a different standard. Free women still have limited rights in society, so incarcerated women have next to none and really don’t matter.

Many people have told me: “Well you wanted equality, didn’t you?” This is in no way creating equality. Men are not forced to be more accepting of equivalent demands. I think the more modern woke feminists have played a part in the situation we are in. The excessive desire for inclusivity has become dangerous when it comes to women’s prisons.’

Prison officials often claim they take every precaution to ensure everyone’s rights are balanced and protected but female prisoners are being forced into accommodating males found guilty of murder (including serial killers), physical assault and rape.

According to statistics from the Prison Reform Trust in 2019, women in England and Wales represent less than 5 per cent of the prison population and 82 per cent of women sentenced to prison had committed a non-violent crime. Meanwhile, a 30-year Swedish study suggests that male prisoners who identify as women retain the same pattern of criminality as other men. And further evidence from the University of California suggests 20 per cent of transgender prisoners in California prisons are registered sex offenders.

A large majority of women in prison are themselves victims of male violence. This raises questions about the treatment of women considered most disposable in society. A letter to prison officials in California written by Woman II Woman asked:

“‘What predator wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity to serve their sentence surrounded by potential new victims who are too scared to stand up for themselves?

These women are trying to learn how to heal, and now they’re making sleep schedules so that one woman is always on watch to make sure no one gets raped. The women ask us every day for help and for answers about why this is being done to them.’

The brutal answer may be that while women in prison stand convicted of committing crimes, they are moreover guilty of stepping outside the line of patriarchal expectations, which is infinitely worse. Before women even step foot inside a prison cell, societal stigma has them as fallen women deserving vilification.

Analysed this way, it feels like including significant numbers of violent males in close quarters with female victims with no way out is the final step of a dehumanising process. This has been enabled by the state and politicians, but also by social justice movements meant to advocate for women. Institutionalised feminism has played a big role in making incarcerated women invisible.

Mostly disenfranchised from political life, incarcerated women are of little interest to politicians obsessed about re-election cycles. Prisoners cannot engage in hashtag activism. Gone are the days when campaigners like Julie Bindel were celebrated for fighting for women in prison. Today, a social media obsessed feminist movement puts hashtag activism on a pedestal while denouncing victims of male violence like JK Rowling as bigots.

Seeing as US/UK issues and women in prison have been raised - a depressing thread/letter from Genevieve Gluck on women's prisons in the US.

Content warning: abuse, assault, generally horrible stories .

grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/how-to-erase-male-violence-lessons

Mostly disenfranchised from political life, incarcerated women are of little interest to politicians obsessed about re-election cycles.

I've read about the problems of women in prison before, but every time i read more i find it ever more shocking.
Are any political parties keen on addressing this?

An ex-prisoner has made a thread in FWR to publicise an upcoming feminist protest outside a prison near York .

Prison Protest

Lets ask the Labour Party...

Lets ask the Labour Party...

Lets not forget its the Tory party currently in government and have been for the past 12 years

None. It is just isolated MPs and individual members of the House of Lords. Labour has Rosie Duffield who has been made famous by the sheer scale of threats, intimidation and vitriolic condemnation she has received from her own party.

The Conservatives have Jackie Doyle-Price.

This is a quote from Jackie Doyle-Price MP's speech during the International Women's Day Debate in Parliament, as recorded by Hansard.

excerpt

We know also that many women do not belong in prison in the first place. One issue I have been taking up with the Ministry of Justice is the extent to which women are remanded in prison for their own protection. We have a mental health policy that has been removing police cells and prisons as places of safety—recognising that they are not good environments for people who are mentally unwell—but we are still remanding women in prison for their own safety. I thought it would be only a small number of women, probably no more than a dozen a year. Having raised the issue with the Government, I could not get any data on it. However, Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons visited three prisons last year and in total found 68 women who had been remanded in prison for their own protection. They were not people who had committed an offence, and it was not a punishment. It is totally inappropriate for a country such as this to be remanding women in prison for that purpose, and that was in just three prisons. Across the whole system, we know that women being remanded for their own protection are a significant proportion of the prison establishment, and frankly that is not good enough. I am ashamed of it, and I call on the Government to do better.

My criticism is not with the Ministry of Justice. One of the issues is that the Ministry of Justice is sweeping up the failings of other organisations within the public sector. It is sweeping up the ability of local authorities to offer safe spaces for women to be sent to when they are at risk. Mental health services are sweeping up that failure by the Department of Health and Social Care, and I encourage the Ministry of Justice to be rather more robust in its dealings with other Departments and say, “You know what? These are not our problems, they are yours.” We should not be dealing with vulnerable people within our estate.

[Bold mine]

Hansard records of the speeches made in Parliament on International Women's Day

I know the Tories are a shit show, but what are Labour, for the many, offering as an alternative?

Oh lots, Alison. The example of Rosie Duffield. They are persecuting her as an example to any other female Labour MPs who might feel the same.

And every time I see the abuse meted out to her, I get the intended message loud and clear; "this is what we do to our own. Imagine what we'll do to you".

I should like to add, OP, the shocking levels of rape and lack of action and convictions. A leading QC who works in this field wrote in a recent article that she believes rape is now virtually decriminalised in this country because of low numbers of complaints being sent by police to the prosecutors, and then the prosecutors choosing not to send cases to court, even when there is ovderwhelming evidence. Only a tiny fraction of those that do get to court result in a conviction. So it is literally a rapist's charter out there.
Then it turns out that all around the country, rape complaints are being dealt with by "community resolution", a scheme set up for minor crimes, which means that the perpetrator does not get a criminal record, they just have to apologise! This has been used in for example, in Rotherham, where a massive grooming scandal took place, and many other towns. This scheme should never be used for major crimes, but it is. This is not justice. It just shows that the structures of society are built for and operated by men. This is proof that women's concerns are just not important enough to take serriously. Our voices are constantly silenced and marginalised and our concerns minimised. That should make feminists of us all.

I think the #metoo and move for safe spaces for women is helping our cause. The tide has turned. Creepy men have realised they can't sneak a kiss, or pat a bum, or spout sexist comments. HR depts are now hot on this, and stamp out any Neanderthals. Obviously it is a work in progress, but we are galloping now. The transwomen (men) wanting to beat our female elite cyclists, swimmers, weightlifters etc have been shown up for what they are - women hating men who just want to win prizes they couldn't as a man. Funny that transmen (women) are just keeping their heads down & getting on with their transition with respect. It's the men who are screaming at us 'Terfs'. How bloody dare they call us that! Sadly more young people are accepting of shared cloakrooms, sports etc, not wanting to appear non inclusive. Just wait until you've got your 8 year old daughter getting changed for swimming and a full tackle transwoman lurches out of the shower with what 85% of them still have in their bikini bottoms. We need to continue fighting for women's rights to single sex hospital wards, prisons, refuges, cloakrooms etc.

I agree about the fiddling while Rome burns element. I bet so many companies were shitting it about publishing their pay gap statistics. Now that this is actually happening and people are ignoring the stark reality, companies will feel less pressured to aim for equal pay.

In a few years time, once we've realised that a tiny proportion of the population was never really going to make people forget the difference between the sexes, it will be too late to turn back the clock on equal pay and we may all suffer in a meaningful rather than theoretical twitter based manner.

Two big problems for modern feminism.

One is that intersectionalism has blown up into identity politics which is splitting feminists into warring factions. The idea behind intersectionalism is valuable, but it's grown into a monster.

The other, related, is males getting involved in feminism. Feminists end up supporting male interests (like the sex trade). I think that even when men have the best intentions, ultimately they have their own perspective and it often conflicts with what's best for women. I've also seen males who claim to support feminism using identity politics as a wedge issue. Like this person:

I think I've actually seen more women supporting sex work tbh. Men undoubtedly are the main clients but I don't think it's a large proportion - I think most don't really encounter it in their daily life or give it much thought. This is quite at odds to the not insignificant number of educated liberal feminists I've come across online who claim to support bodily 'choice'. I guess what I'm saying is that the main supporters seem to be laddish men and educated women, although the former probs don't support it so much as just abuse it for their own desires.

Liberal feminists support sex work, but I'm not convinced it's because they know much about the reality of it. They've bought into this 'female empowerment through selling your body' bullshit. If the sex trade is so liberating, why do people have to be forced into it?

I in no way agree with them. They usually come across as privileged hipsters who have little experience of what crack users will do to get money. But I'm not sure it's anything to do with supporting male interests either. It's just naive liberal feminists being naive IMO.

I'm a Liberal feminist. I support sex workers, am not privileged or naive or a hipster.

Feminists support sex workers, TooBig. That's not the same as supporting 'sex work'.

I agree. There is a huge difference in supporting sex workers and supporting sex work.

There is a clanging dissonance in supporting exploitation of women’s bodies and saying you are fighting against the patriarchy, or women’s oppression.