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.

It shouldn't be but clearly is.

Why shouldn't it be difficult?

Why shouldn't it be difficult to include a male in a female only rape crisis group?

When decades of feminist work has been invested in creating this spaces for traumatised women, females, in the first place. Why should it be easy for a male to enter a space meant to be for females to be able to heal from male violation and violence?

Why shouldn't it be difficult for males to take female roles/awards etc ?

Roles, awards, positions etc set up to progress females to overcome a millennia of negative sexist discrimination due to our sexed bodies? Roles specifically to ensure that female's needs are fully considered in policy making decisions. Roles specifically set up to ensure that females have someone of the same sex to carry out procedures or to give support when they need it.

Why shouldn't it be difficult for males to take female sporting places?

When some of these places have been only available to females at the same elite level for males for less than two decades? When even now, girls experience negative sexist discrimination from the early years in sport.... it has not gone away, I can attest to that fact. Not equal level of opportunities, not equal level of coaching. And this is current. Not past. And that does NOT even touch on the advantages that male puberty brings.

Why shouldn't it be difficult for males to access areas where females have an expectation of privacy?

When mothers are still having to have overflowing prams and strollers in front of them because there is no one else to look after that baby while that mother has to deal with a flooding period, meaning the toilet door its wide open. When daughters are having to still take their elderly mothers into toilets in wheelchairs because there is inadequate accessible toilets and the doors again will not shut. When pools have no space for cubicle only changing areas and there are a number of children's lessons flooding through at a the same time.

Why shouldn't it be difficult?

I sometimes feel that those who think it shouldn't be difficult have very little knowledge of the realities of living life as a female, one with children or with additional caring roles, and how facilities and roles have been worked for to be set up.

Oh. Sorry. Am I battering people with questions?

Those women who value designer goods and lifestyles. They are the women who let the race down. They objectify their bodies for a Chanel handbag. Very sad.

I did have to laugh at the thug, who had a go at me over parking, recently. It was the fault of another bloke blocking the way, but I waste soft target. He shouted "..and you lot want equal rights". Oafs like this make me sick. Bullies, insecure of assertive women.

Ponder the reasons so many women think that any and all males need to respect female decisions about female spaces and services.

Yes. Why do men insist on having any input into decisions regarding the above? Why the fuck should they decide? Oh yes, patriarchy.

Ask yourself this Lunar27 why do you think you should have a say in whether or not females are allowed to have single sex spaces, services and sports, why do you think your opinion on it should carry any weight or be the deciding opinion?

If they are exactly what they identify as then why would there be any practical difficulties?

Well at least he was openly and honestly against equal rights I suppose. Not one of the liars who claim we have all of them already and are just wanting more. I’ve been sworn at a few times for being a “fucking feminist cunt” for pointing out that men are aggressive towards females just lately. It is getting worse, and we have always had to fight these bastard ungrateful male apes, who would not exist if we did not give them life.

No man planned Patriarchy?

FML!

Of course no man planned it. If you exclude people, sorry, men, as recent as Napoleon Bonaparte. No man, in antiquity or any modern era, passed any laws that banned any woman from taking part in education, various workplaces, all workplaces outside the home, politics,.etc etc

Oh! Except poor women of course. They could work. From sex work to domestic slavery, poor women could definitely work.

But they all must have chosen to do this. As, just like you said, no man eve actually constructed a patriarchal society.

No... wait... history is calling with a multitude of examples of when such a thing actually did happen

Pshaw!

But those rules/laws/policies/whatever weren't planned to favour men, they were used to favour and protect the ruling class (who more often than not were men). A 14th century male peasant had no more access to education, work choices, or politics than a 14th century female peasant.

Outside of the ruling class women were seen as birth givers and carers, to be used up and thrown away. Men were tools to work the land and fight, to be used up and thrown away too. The life of a 1st, 8th, 12th, 14th, or 18th century male farmer wasn't any better than that of a his wife's. For most of human history life was, to quote Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and short for most people.

It's only really been the last 70 years or so that the average person has seen much of an increase in living standards but we still hold dear to the classical structure of being ruled by a small group of elites (I mean britian still cling to a royal family for Christ's sake). So there's no real reason to assume we'd see any wholesale change to societal structures, especially as we don't force them.

Going even further back you have to remember that humans as a species evolved around 300,000 years ago and for 290,000 of those years we followed a similar social structure to other primates i.e., a single dominant male, who acts as leader and protector, lesser males who occasionally challeng for power but in general are subservient to the alpha and dominant to the females, and a group of females and offspring (how familiar does that sound?).

It was only when we moved from small indivudal tribes of hunter-gathers to larger agricultural communities, around 12,000 years ago, that things started to change and the role of the sexes became more defined by the work they could do on the land, which either etenched or broke the previous social structures depending on what happened. (There's a really interesting piece by Oded Galor about how the prevailing crop of a region such as wheat or rice influenced societal structures during that time period).

But for 97% of our history as a species we have followed a natural instinct when it comes to how we structure our societies which are still present today. The ruling class are the alpha males, lesser males haven't changed and are content to be subservient to the elites and dominant of women, and women and children bring up the rear so to speak.

That basic structure is ingrained into our very psyche, when ever society resets the same structures appear time and time again from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt to the Roman and British Empires. If women want real parity with men they will have to force it through rebellion and sacrifice, but I'm not sure we are anywhere near ready or willing to do that yet.

I don’t think that’s entirely true. Many hunter gatherer communities are more egalitarian. It is true that womens status slipped more in general with each new economic revolution. However there were always nuances through time and space, more freedoms for women in this regard, less so in others.

Women were specifically written out of land rights when legal private ownership started to take over from custom in England. Nor did the shift to having to go out to work rather than work in the home, or the shift to coal, do us many favours. But we clawed back some rights, slowly, showed that we could do the work of men in the War, got kicked out to the home and had to fight for rights again… The biggest, most consistent single issue that might be making a difference in time is when male aggression starts becoming valued.

Yeah you got me. Not every man....

I have no intention of turning this into a transgender debate, but it we lose the ability to define ourselves by sex we lose everything. Most women posting on the Sex and Gender board have long (in my case very long) histories of fighting for women's rights — abortion in the 70s and 80s, equal pay, maternity rights, protesting against page 3/ porn, working/volunteering for DV shelters, protesting against violence against women... Those are just some of the causes I've campaigned and volunteered for over 45 years of feminism, starting at the age of 16. Please, don't think that those of us who post regularly on the Sex and Gender board are just one-trick ponies, we're not.

Transgender/ identity politics is part of a Men's Rights Activist pushback for the gains women have made, thanks to feminism, over the years. If they win — if 'woman' is no more than an outfit — we will lose everything. Because if everyone can be a woman if they say they feel like it, there will be no such thing as a woman and no such thing as feminism. We already see oppressive men self-identifying as feminists and lesbians. They've infiltrated the Women's Equality Party. They've effectively taken over the Labour Party. What, as a feminist, are you doing about that?

I have no intention of turning this into a transgender debate, but it we lose the ability to define ourselves by sex we lose everything.**

This! Well said @Pluvia

Language is power - George Orwell knew this.

PS. WHYYYYY? is this whole thread now in italics (or is it just me?)

I ask again that you read this.

Published this weekend and it doesn't have anything to do with CEO pay.

Zactly, Pluvia.

Well I am keen to see if we get any answers to the questions we have all put out there today.

Perhaps we will. If it goes the way it normally does, then we won’t. Posters will either tell us it is not up to them to question what trans people say, but it is ok apparently for trans people to tell women that their needs are not to exclude males, and for trans people to force a redefinition of the words woman, even female.

Or they will use the ‘only a few’ and the ‘marginalised’ argument to appeal to be kind.

Or maybe the science is complicated or has moved on.

Or maybe someone will expand on ‘it’s too complicated’ point and add in the ‘only a few’ and ‘marginalised’ bit to support it.

Or maybe it will be something new. I hope so. I look forward to seeing something new.

That is tough reading Pots. I mean, are these three women any of those who have spoken before? Probably not.

n+1. That is the number of women speaking out about males have access to them, and the female prison, before those setting laws and policy to protect these vulnerable women.

But perhaps, as we have been told, it is complicated and it shouldn’t be complicated. Because males should just be allowed access to female prisons if they declare they need it. I am just waiting to see if we can get clarification on what is the ‘difficulty’ and what posters think should happen - knowing that separate accommodations have been offered in the past and rejected by the trans lobby groups.

'I feel emotionally protective/pity towards males who say they are frightened, but disbelieve women who say they are frightened' is an incongruent belief that we see quite often.

That seems to be the basis of your argument, Lunar. You believe males who feel that they don't wish to be around other males should be respected, but you don't feel females who feel that they don't wish to be around males should be afforded equivalent respect.

It boils down to prioritising males over females. There's no way round it.

extract

Cathy, the third woman to speak out, says that women are already in a very vulnerable position while in prison. She was incarcerated for 13 years and spent time in several facilities, where she was sexually abused by two male officers in one of them.

Cathy says that “there should be no males at all in a women’s prison and this includes officers as they are also predators.” She was housed in multiple different prisons, and says that women across many facilities tried to avoid interacting with these men because they show clear “male pattern behavior.” However, the female inmates often face retaliation for this.

In one instance, Cathy says a male prisoner reported her to prison staff for “abusing” him, and they both ended up in mediation. After confirming with the male prisoner that his allegations were false, he told her that he reported her because she didn’t want “anything to do with him” and because “he could.”

I want incarcerated women in prison to be safe from male violence.

The only answers anyone ever has for me are

1. "you're transphobic". So I'm supposed to be more scared of some randomer calling me a bad person, than I am of supporting policies that facilitate women like my own mother being raped, i.e. being a bad person.

2. "women do it too", which initially makes no sense as an argument either. Because there is some violence in a facility, we should intensify the problem? Do people do this with debt? "Oh, dammit, I wrnt over budget and now I'm in debt on the credit card by a tenner. Might as well go into debt by £990 and make it a round thousand"? If you don't do that with your own money, you shouldn't be doing it with other people's bodies.

The only way "women do it too" can make sense is if it actually means, "I've heard some women might be hurting other women, and I don't actually care about preventing that. I just don't think it's fair that males don't get a chance to join in".

But that doesn't convince me as an argument either, guys, because I still think women in prison are people, not objects that should be equal access.

Pretty pointless if you've heard it all before @Helleofabore . All I'm going to say on the matter before signing off is that I will continue to give my respect and dignity to those (men and women) who identify as they have. I will neither challenge trans men to share my space any more than I will challenge trans women to share your space.

For the record my daughters are feminists and I would say that my views align more with theirs than theirs with mine. That might not go down well with you but is really not worthwhile going on about it given you're GC.

That's fine @Lunar27 you and yours are welcome to any set if beliefs you choose.

That doesn't change material reality, science or statistics around male violence though.

Bye bye!

What about us unicorns? Do you not validate us? Will you tell me to hoof it out of your human toilets if I need to pee?

While we are talking about beliefs.

Many women have beliefs that mean they cannot undress or wash in the presence of strangers of the opposite sex. Still more simply do not want to, to the point that they will self-exclude from public provision like swimming, NHS care rather than do so. Some of those self-excluding will be doing so because of PTSD from previous sexual abuse, which means they will be experiencing indirect discrimination on the grounds of disability, from state institutions.

I understand there are women who do not care about who undresses with them and that's fine.

But do they actually believe they need to be in proximity with strangers of the opposite sex while changing for swimming? Or need to be housed with a male cellmate in the event they are sentenced to prison? Because it seems to me that it's simply that they don't mind whether male strangers are there or not. So there isn't any conflict of rights at all.

We can have female-only facilities, and these will serve the needs of all women.

i guess that is all we needed to know then Lunar. You cannot provide anything further than one of the arguments I posed as ones that we have heard, it tells us you are a man who is happy for women to have the words they need to use to describe themselves and activate for their needs redefined by others as a start.

yeah. You know, we also constantly here about the ‘younger generation’.

A) if you continue to listen, the ‘younger generation’ will start to tell you and your daughters that they are not happy with going along with this. Despite having best friends who are trans. Because they have started to see the impacts. Do you honestly think that Lia Thomas and Emily Bridges have not sped up the knowledge of what is at stake?

and B) so many of those type of feminists you disagree with were exactly like your daughters. Until we started to be aware of life’s realities. Like missing out on that promotion you were online for but that went to someone who couldn’t ever be pregnant. Like being terminated under loopholes when you are pregnant. Like finding out that conditions haven’t improved as much as you thought, that now females are now having to ‘budge’ over for males who, you are told, are more marginalised than you. That feeling of being ‘kind’ doesn’t actually last long when the reality starts to hit. Particularly when you have a girl guide and discover that GG now have adopted inclusive policies that ignores proper safeguarding and that women writing letters about it, suddenly get police visits or taken to court.

I am going to be very interested if your daughters all have the same attitudes in the next 10- 20 years.

But thanks for your honesty. What a pity though you didn’t try to answer any of the questions though. It would have been enlightening to see how you dealt with the dissonance of your own position.

promotion you were ‘in line’ for not online… autocorrect.