"ask what you think are silly Qs here and forkful will try to answer them in a polite helpful way by directing you to the resources she found useful and try to use persuasive arguments and

[forkful]

if anyone feels scared just shout" THREAD

Sparked from the 700+ post thread. Honestly where is that thread going now . The people who hate women will be loving that thread.

Lots of posters don't want to explain Feminist thinking all the time (fair enough - I don't always - but I try to provide useful links and book recommendations and write wordy posts trying to explain my point of view when I have the time/inclination).

So to all those who are scared/lurking - come and ask some questions!

LRD Thanks for the book recommendation. I do find it fascinating and sometimes think I "ought* to make an effort to educate myself more whilst on the other hand being quite happy to have a door held open for me, or not being totally affronted if a wolf whistle comes my way

Book recommendations:

As already mentioned The Equality Illusion

Reclaiming the F Word - amazing source of info and fab activism ideas

Feminism A Beginner's Guide

toddlerwrangler - I think the words "pro-choice" are normally taken to mean pro the choice for a woman be able to choose an abortion.

I think you were talking about Choice Feminism.

My take on this (stolen from Finn Mackay is:

"We are told that practically every woman who wakes up in the morning and makes a decision is a feminist, or those who have jobs, or money. While indeed it is true that any woman can be a feminist, feminism has to mean something, otherwise it risks meaning nothing."

The issues I have with choice as a concept are - we are influenced by our upbringing/culture and for me as a feminist I want to consider the impact of my choices on others.

MsCellophane Why do women have such a hang up about their vagina? - um I guess because society is not very positing about them? Boys I think in general grow up to be proud of their penis but there is often the suggestion that the vagina is "dirty" "not to be mentioned"?

positive

toddler - for a different perspective on the choice to work in the sex industry - have a look at a report commissioned by Glasgow City Council into lapdancing - Stripping the Illusion.

Personally I wouldn't criticise someone working in the sex industry but I would feel sorry for them and would see if I could help them in some way.

I would rather criticse men who create the demand for lapdancing and prostituition etc.

toddler - re the trans issue - I don't know much about it. In the past I would just have thought " how sad to be trapped in the wrong body". I still feel empathy for someone in that situation but I am more aware of gender/sex/social constructs etc.

This area is hugely divisive for women. I guess I have some sympathy for the view that women only spaces should be reserved for people who are born women. I think that the rights of women as a group to retain safe spaces trumps the right of 1 individual trans woman to go into that space.

If this opens a can of worms and we get a board invasion then it NEEDS to be on a new thread.

Re patriarchies - personally I want to see people in power being feminists - this will be due to a combination of more women in Parliament - but not just that - policies need to feminist also! This will benefit women and men.

Need to give that one some more thought.

Victor - love your explanation of privilidge re make up for white and black skins. Really powerful.

For me this is why it is so so key to improve the diversity of boards, public bodies, Parliament etc.

For example I am involved with my professional body and they have lower membership fees for those on £ or low income (vast majority of whom are women on career breaks). This structure IMO should be mirrored for the CPD courses my professional body puts on but you get lots of rich, white men who can't conceive of the difference a 50& and 75% discound would mean on a CPD course to a woman on maternity leave.

I think it's entirely feasible that a father would give a son advice on consent. I'd go as far as to suggest that it would be advisable to advise! There is a difference, of course, between worrying that your DD might get attacked and worrying that your DS might be an attacker!!! There is also a clear difference between misreading situations (as an inexperienced teenager) and being a violent attacker. Incidentally, I'm sure that 'restrictions' are placed on boys just as much as girls when it comes to dealing with 'strangers'. Restricting children is our way of trying to keep them safe given our superior knowledge. In this instance, I think your feminist slant might be a little unfair to the weary-eyed policeforce Father.

shakey - there's no evidence that early humans divided their roles by gender. The Victorian anthropologists and archaeologists who developed the theory assumed it was so, because to them it was the natural order of things. Chimpanzees hunt and share in mixed-sex groups, as do lions and many other intelligent creatures.

Male chimps and lions have been observed using food to buy sex, so I'm afraid I have little hope of the sex trade ever being eradicated in humans!

You can see 25 vulvas on Channel 4's Embarrassing Bodies website :)
www.channel4embarrassingillnesses.com/galleries/vulva-gallery/

Shakey, the problem with falling in line with biological urges etc is that it's very hard to tell what they are, because we don't live in a state of nature any more. Hence the harking back to what we imagine cavewomen did, and as you see we don't have a clue about that.
But even if we did, why should that dictate what people do now?
The 70s feminists used to say "Biology is not destiny."
As for not getting feminist angles and finding threads hard to follow, I think that's just because a lot of the regulars here have studied feminist theory, formally or informally, and have followed ideas further and deeper than some of us, and are accustomed to discussing them in a particular kind of language. I find it a bit intimidating too so I just lurk.

Oh, others got to the caveman fallacy before I did. But, yeah, short version: we don't know anything of the sort, but there's a tendency to analyse pre-history through the lens of current gender norms.

The classic ridiculous example of this was that study from a few years ago which "proved" that women like pink and men like blue because men associated blue with a good sky for hunting game, and women searched out berries - thus, red.

And a) as recent as 100 years ago, pink was associated with boy babies and blue with girl babies; b) there is no proof that there is any 'genetic' inclination towards certain colours; that study was done with university students, who of course had a lifetime of conditioning already; c) One could just have easily speculated "blue is the colour of newborn babies' eyes* which were nurtured by women, and red is the colour of blood during a game kill".

One can justify any scrap of archeological evidence any way one wants, really. Evo psych fisking is one of my favourite things to do, actually, so apologies for length of post.

*because evo psych is also notoriously racist, of course.

I shouldn't have said chimps have been observed using food to buy sex.
The observers themselves interpreted the transactions as prostitution. The animals could have had different motives and/or an unknown backstory.

I've unthinkingly provided an example of tamely accepting behavioural 'facts', which may be nothing of the sort

I think that I am with you, mushy, on the equalist slant. I think that a woman should be able to do anything that a man can, but that it works both ways and I get very annoyed with posts saying that a male nursery worker can't do all of his job,i.e. take a 3 yr old girl to the toilet or -to quote recently-'why would a man even want to be a gynaecologist'-why not? Is it fair that a woman can be a front line soldier but a man isn't allowed to have traditional female jobs or help women medically? It isn't to me.

I take it that the answer to my question was that it is very difficult for a separatist feminist to have DSs -and that no one on here is quite that extreme?

Exotic, while I can't speak for all feminists, obviously, my general view is that feminists are far less likely to make generalisations about what men can and can't do. That's not universal, of course, no group is a monolith, but the attitudes around well men are just hardwired to be more visual and therefore watch porn, or it's not their fault, poor dears, they just don't see the dirt (despite being 'more visual', but I digress) or etc., and I definitely see the attitude that a male nursery worker isn't to be trusted as akin to the 'natural urges' argument - well, they're antifeminist attitudes. I agree with you, those attitudes aren't fair. Liberal feminists would generally agree with all of that, I think.

And Sakura's not a separatist! I don't think we have any of those here. She's a radical feminist, which is different.

Having googled 'radical feminist' that makes more sense-I was just going by what I was told. Thanks. I expect I am a liberal feminist.

I can't be sure, and there may be some thriving separatist communities that I'm ignorant of, but separatist feminism (separatist lesbianism is different) seems to be mostly theoretical. Which is testament, perhaps, to how pervasive the patriarchy is.

I don't think that separatism is that 'extreme' as position, exotic. It's a logical extension of the radical feminist desire to fundamentally bring down the patriarchy, and the fact that men-as-a-group are harmful to women-as-a-group. So separatism advocates women withdrawing from relationships with men and living in women-only groups. This allows women to devote their energies to supporting only women; to stay safer than they would if they lived with men; to refuse heterosexuality, which in turn is seen as the key to making men see that the patriarchy has to go.

I don't think it's worth focusing on sons so much - I'm sure if they had them, they'd love them and care for them. Separatists don't want separation because they hate men, or fear them - it is a logical response to the real, verifiable facts that men and heterosexuality are not good for women. There was a thread recently about the nuclear family in which a lot of posters (including me) spoke about communal-living, or women-only living, or not wanting to live with men. These are all ideas utilised in seperatism. Nobody on that thread hated men.

I don't know if you've read that Bindel article yet but it does sum up pro- and anti-positions on this issue very well.

i define myself as rad fem but i guess i do have some leanings towards separatist!

You would have to fell a bit sorry for the DSs though-they might be loved and cared for but they must pick up the negative vibes and think they were second best. I haven't read the article yet-will do later-off out for the day.

dds have been picking up negative vibes and feeling second best for centrys!

To grow up in an environment that recognises that men and hetrosexuality is bad for women can't be easy if you are a member of the shunned sex can it?
I wonder if they get the feeling that they've consistently disappointed their mothers by being the wrong sex, and how that impacts on their future attitudes to women?
Are there any accounts or studies out there about boys and men raised in such an environment?

'dds have been picking up negative vibes and feeling second best for centrys!'

Aren't we trying to redress that? Do we not think that is a very bad attitude for any girl to grow up with? I have worked with immigrant communities that definitely were bewildered by the idea that this was unacceptable.
How can we then justify having such an appalling attitude to a son rather than a daughter?

to be in a enviroment that reconises that women and lesbianism is bad for you isnt exactly good[ie-society]
of course-some parts of lesbianism is seen ok-when it suits men!