Feminism chat thread II

[ElephantsAndMiasmas]

Since it looks like the first chat thread is about to fill up, here's the next one all ready and waiting.

Think of it as the gated commune with babysitting on demand and gorgeous poolboys serving the drinks :o

Thank you sardinequeen for helping to articulate my thoughts. I am very interestested in what people's ideas about 'what feminists are/feminism is' are.

I suppose I was thinking of the title being: 'I'm a feminist but...' as a play on 'I'm not a feminist but...'

Thanks for the support also Prolesworth. Will sit down tomorrow, take my courage in both hands, and begin...

If you put "light hearted thread!" in the opener it might help deflect any bunfightyness for a while!

Will keep an eye out tomorrow

I think it's better than nothing.I'm very sure they will pick male-identified women for the most part, but I personally think that it's still better than a man.

I remember an Icelandic MP saying that when you get a 30% representation of women you reach critical mass and something shifts in the way things work, a sort of synergy of female energy and more decisions end up being made for women.

did you do it Socks?
I've been wanting for ages to start a thread entitled 'What is the least stereotypically feminist thing you do?'
(mine would be currently spending too much money in Cath Kidston....)

On 'collaboration'.

I went to a work conference on Saturday about leadership. The final speaker of the day was a woman. Halfway through her presentation she put up a slide entitled 'Women in Leadership' :) and then immediately started apologising for it ('I've been asked to talk about this', 'Sorry to all the men in the room') :(

So I thought about you lot and I said 'please don't apologise to the men, they get to rule the world every day; we get one slide' which was the best I could do off the top of my head.

But why do people do this? She then went on to talk about being a mother and a leader which kind of implies that there isn't any problem with sexism until you have children which is bollocks. And her central premise was 'you can have it all' which again I would say is bollocks. So, asked to talk about women she a) apologised for doing so and b) said 'it's all OK.' Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

sounds infuriating Unruly..

I am halfway through the second book in the Daly "trilogy". I've finished Beyond God the Father and am now on Gyn/Ecology.
Damn you Mary Daly, I'll never be able to look at the world in the same light!!
There's a shock-reveal in every. single. line.

For example, on the page I happen to be on:
" Under the tutelage of this sytem, doctors frequently bully women into believing they "need" a hysterectomy, failing to tell their patients "that the death rate for hysterectomy itself...is in fact, ^higher than the death rate for uterine/cervical cancer."

my MIL had a hysterectomy without even being asked.
she went in to have an ovary removed and they ripped the whole lot out
was in the 70s.

Unrulysun, I think your comment on her apology for the slide was top!

that is so awful Steth.. What I find most pernicious is that women belived they were the only one. Now that we've got the net I reckon we'll find that lots of incidences belong to a pattern where we otherwise thought they were random. A good example is the way the judicial system is designed to let rapists get away. In Japan there's a mother's movement against vaccining because it turns out that lots of babies have been getting polio (WTF) . Thirty years ago a woman would have had no recourse, she would have been told her case was rare.

Nice one, unrulysun.

I think that coverage of the Neary case in Ireland, was partly what made me want to know more about feminism. He did a huge number of unnecessary hysterectomys, and removed ovaries. There will always be the occasional twisted individual - but his maiming of women was covered up by his colleagues for decades. When it all came out, much sympathy was expressed - for Neary.

I missed the bit where you actually said that Unruly. Well done

That's disgusting, UNwind. If you read Daly's books you see that this type of thing is scarily common in patriarchies

I've noticed that sympathy tends to go to the mighty who have fallen, rather than the truly hard done by or disadvantaged.

I've been thinking about your last post Unwind, but I don't think it's a case of: the mighty who have fallen V the truly hard done by

I think it's a clear cut case of males against females, men trying to eliminate women and being exonerated for it, yet again
OTherwise you are imagining a world where a woman with power would get away with doing that to a lot of men and that her fall from grace would be passed off as a footnote. It just wouldn't happen. She would go down in history as a monster.

Sakura, I wanted to argue against your last post - but realised that I had no basis for doing so, beyond wishful thinking. Agreeing with you makes me feel powerless.

Look at the Charlie Sheen thread, and the media coverage - the man abused a long list of women, and barely an eyebrow was raised. But when he insults his boss and behaves in a self-destructive fashion, there is loads of publicity around this awful behaviour and people feel sorry for him.

I do remember that Engelbert. I do think some of that was about the perception of the sort of people who are child abusers though. That the only people who are abusers are living in poverty in chaotic lives.

But that is of course related to patriarchy - there are a number of women who have posted here about abusive relationships who live in 'gilded cages' (in particular a woman in the US and one in S Africa that I remember quite recently).

I'm sure there is a lot more middle class abuse that goes on that just gets ignored and brushed under the carpet because I suspect women living an affluent life are believed much less than they would be if they were poor.