"Who Lost the Sex Wars?"

[MsAmerica]

Thought this article might interest some of you.

Who Lost the Sex Wars?
Fissures in the feminist movement should not be buried as signs of failure but worked through as opportunities for insight.
By Amia Srinivasan

Ruskin College, in Oxford, England, was founded in 1899 to serve working-class men who were otherwise excluded from higher education, and went coed in 1919. In 1970, it was the site of the inaugural National Women’s Liberation Movement Conference. Women’s-liberation groups had already been meeting across Britain, inspired variously by the high-profile women’s movement in the U.S.; anticolonial and pro-democracy struggles in Europe, Asia, and Latin America; and working-class women’s strikes closer to home, in Dagenham and Hull. But the Ruskin conference was, for the women who gathered there, a heady moment of consolidation. One participant, the playwright Michelene Wandor, described Ruskin as an “exhilarating and confusing revelation . . . six hundred women . . . hell-bent on changing the world and our image as women.”

The conference produced several demands: equality in pay, education, and job opportunities; free contraception; abortion on demand; and free twenty-four-hour nurseries. Yet these demands (though still largely unmet) undersell the radicalism of what the women at Ruskin were trying to achieve.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/who-lost-the-sex-wars

[NiceGerbil]

Not read the whole thing.

My answer to the headline question.

There have never been sex wars.

That suggests an equal fight, the winner gets all the things they wanted. The losers have to concede.

Never happened.

Women all over the world and forever have been desperately trying to improve their lives by challenging the laws norms that oppressed them.

And any wins are generally turned to the advantage of men. And are small and not very frequent. And at risk of being rolled back.

That's not a war.

Women have been doing everything we can to make our lives, and the lives of all women and girls. Less shit. More fair. To be treated as full people.

That's my view.

[NiceGerbil]

Oh and who won?

Men obv.

Always have and always do.

And each small gain we make is seen as really massive and awful and unfair on men.

Depressing.