Are things better or worse now than in recent decades?

[Leafstamp]

Not sure if this has been discussed before…

I feel things are worse for women now than at any other point in my adult life (I’ve been an adult for nearly 30 years).

But I don’t know if it’s me having rose tinted spectacles and just being ignorant in my younger years.

Reasons I think it’s worse: general misogyny, porn, police issues, infiltration of women’s spaces and services by males.

Am I missing all that has improved? What is better for women now than 10, 20, 30 years ago?

Well i was a teen/yoing woman in the nineties and from my perception it's been downhill ever since. However j didn't have children then.
Better - parental rights
Worse - porn and something i can't quite articulate about performing femininity. The expectation now for young women seems to be hair extensions, fake lashes and thick make up. Else they're doing femininity wrong.

Yes, agree about what some women feel they have to look like/do to their bodies in order to….I don’t know, be attractive to men? Feel confident in themselves? Be accepted in certain jobs??

Worse than the 80s. Much worse.

I remember the 90s as a rapid downhill slide, it's shockingly apparent if you watch 80s and 90s tv in terms of both visual appearance expectations and social expectations. I'm still often shocked at how ballsy the female characters are in some 50s and 60s tv programmes vs what would be considered "acceptable" of female characters today.

Sure, marital rape used to be legal. But now all rape's not only basically legal but he gets a free murder if he rapes her first. A legal two-fer. What an age to be alive.

We've lost more than many women realise, boiled frogs etc.

In many ways it’s worse. A bit more legal protection of work rights but rape effectively decriminalised and feels like murder of women is going the same way. And no right to any single sex spaces not even the toilet is doing my head in.

And yes the enforced femininity is terrible

Way better nowadays. I think most women would get a shock if they were transported back 30-40 years ago. Dealing with things everyday which would absolutely not fly with HR nowadays.

Consent was understood by all the men I had 'relations' with. I would often just spend the night without sex just fooling around and it was understood that I meant no when I said it.

It seemed pretty well understood among all my peer group too.

Either I was in a bubble or something has gone very wrong.

I'm not saying there was never coersion or assault, of course there was just that the general understanding seemed different somehow ?

Maybe it's just that I'm looking from the outside now, I don't know...

So much worse. Just absolutely so much worse.
Absolutely boiled frog as pp suggested.
HR is captured and sex work is ok and everyone should be kind. So much worse. Breaks my heart.

Much better. We were just talking with some colleagues about behaviour from male colleagues that was tolerated, if not expected, 20 years ago. You know, boys will be boys. Oh be careful with the boss, try not to stay alone with him late at night. Yeah, everybody knows about him, tends to grope a bit, he means no harm really.

None of my young female colleagues would accept this shit.

I think it's worse, much worse.

The availability of online pornography has been catastrophic for women I feel.

I think it's better in work.

I work in a male dominated area. I am the best at what we do. Regardless of whether I am male or female. I'm judged according to figures.

I think it's getting better in how we are viewed as female.

Ie single mothers. The judgement is now slowly swinging to say it's not a fault of the mother of your on your own. Slowly it's being passed to men to explain why they are not with the childrens mum where as before it's just "I'm a single parent"

Slowly it's being passed to men to explain why they are not with the childrens mum

None of anyone else's business IMO.

None of my young female colleagues would accept this shit.

Sure they do, all the time. Sexual harassment is still widespread, only now they've taken it online where there are fewer witnesses.

@StealthPolarBear

Well i was a teen/yoing woman in the nineties and from my perception it's been downhill ever since. However j didn't have children then. Better - parental rights Worse - porn and something i can't quite articulate about performing femininity. The expectation now for young women seems to be hair extensions, fake lashes and thick make up. Else they're doing femininity wrong.

I agree with every word.

Very few women were bothered with eyelash extensions, thick make up etc on a daily basis 20 years ago.

Also porn. It was there but harder to access and not so pervasive.

There was a nice few weeks in the late 90s when porn wasn’t everywhere, most women dressed and acted as they wanted and men all had training about how not to sexually harass women.

There was a nice few weeks in the late 90s when porn wasn’t everywhere, most women dressed and acted as they wanted and men all had training about how not to sexually harass women.

It was nice wasn't it?

I’ve been working in male dominated areas for 40 years.

Things gradually got a bit better for quite a while but now the men declaring themselves women are speaking for us and being cheered on by the men who can now listen to another male instead and both can pretend to be feminists. With a bonus of both being able to abuse the women who dare to say to them ‘You don’t speak for me’

And I’ve had enough of it and finally quit.

I always had a voice even if they took no notice but I’d rather walk away than have a male insist that they speak for women because they are a special woman and better at it than us.

And I weep for the women I’ve left behind who can’t afford to walk away.

Much much better nowadays.

Way way better nowadays and no one is having femininity enforced? You might have subsets of young girls from places like Essex with false eyelashes and nails but no one I know wears things like this and we are all successful professionals. Way better maternity rules and amazing support for return to work if you are a professional, companies really taking diversity seriously and having to report on pay gaps etc, the me too movement…

@Allsorts1

Way way better nowadays and no one is having femininity enforced? You might have subsets of young girls from places like Essex with false eyelashes and nails but no one I know wears things like this and we are all successful professionals. Way better maternity rules and amazing support for return to work if you are a professional, companies really taking diversity seriously and having to report on pay gaps etc, the me too movement…

Indeed. It was almost unheard of for women to be senior business people a few decades back. Now it's commonplace.

Am I’m a bit of a “terf” with the best of them and do find this area concerning and believe safeguards need to be put in place, but I don’t conflate it with generally a worse time for woman overall, or to have a practical impact on most women’s day to day experience or professional lives.

I think it’s a mixed bag compared to 30 to 40 years ago
On paper legally there are more rights - e.g. recognition of other forms of abuse as criminal charges offences, maternity rights, and along with that employment rights and policies in most companies such as zero tolerance for even low level sexual discrimination and harassment . t

However that is on paper…we all know that having protections is one thing , getting that protection is another
Rape cases is an interesting one. Rape was reported far less and people were treated appallingly by the police. Again it seems that has improved and certainly there are more reports (even if we know lots of women still don’t come forwards) but now these cases just get dropped and prosecution rate is terrible.

But some stuff is actually appallingly worse: the pornification of society - violent sexual behaviour being treated as the norm, child abuse through internet seems to be actually common, exposure of younger children and teens to graphic porn , pressure on young women to look a certain way and objectified. Even TV content on main stream is much more graphic in its objectification of women’s bodies with programs like love island etc. My mum died in 2000, she was a 70’s feminist and I often think she’d be horrified with TV consent now, so it shows just how quickly it has changed.

The whole gender identification piece is walking us firmly back to gender stereotyping- it’s in its very definition. When I had young children the early learning centre had been pushing for years to remove gendered toy branding…where did all that go ..it seems a pink and princess proliferation now. I just don’t get why men who want to sores themselves in a feminine way don’t get that their problem is actually gender in itself- without gender stereotyping no one would bat an eyelid how they expressed themselves…

Love Island was (is?) women's favourite tv show in the UK, though. Loads of women love it.

That's the crux of it all - why do young women love Love Island? Their 80s sisters can't get their heads around it. In the 80s things weren't great and there weren't many female role models but things were improving and we had hope of being taken seriously and achieving because we were smart and talented and strong.
Now we can hope to be successful by looking good in a bikini and judged for our social media presence. As long as men approve.
So much worse

The world isn't objectively worse just because you don't agree with what the youth enjoy.

@EightWheelGirl

Love Island was (is?) women's favourite tv show in the UK, though. Loads of women love it.

Yes, and that’s part of the problem isn’t it….it is the norm, women see it as “empowering” etc… Back in 70’s my experience was that women thought their brains were the route to empowerment

Now we can hope to be successful by looking good in a bikini

Meanwhile, 56 years ago....