the paddling pool

[Alameda]

get your flotation aids here (don't look at me though, I genuinely can't swim)

Yes they will juggling

Victor Frankl for example said that our last great freedom was that in any situation we had the choice of how we responded to it. And he said this after living through the holocaust in a concentration camp. I find that a very profound life philosophy.
And I see it as relating to how we, as individual women, make our own ways - sometimes alongside others - through patriarchal society.

Frak you sound a lot like me in many respects. I don't shave my legs, or do anything with my bikini line. But I do shave my armpits, purely because I wear sleeveless tops quite a bit and when I write on the board at school all the kids would see all the hair and it would make my job harder to resettle them after all the comments they would make.

I have a job I like but haven't applied for promotions I wanted because I don't want to take the time away from the dcs. He doesn't feel the same restrictions though and will happily go to the gym 3 times a week straight from work because I am always there to collect the dcs from childcare (I drive and he doesn't so that's always the reason given why I collect them).

I just think the philosophy I've been talking about has made me more of a pragmatist - and an opportunist even. And I see that as relating to my thoughts on choices as a feminist.

For example - You sound admirably pragmatic to me Jodidi about your hairy/ non-hairy armpits. And can totally understand where you're coming from having worked with children too

Sorry, I use "the deals with patriarchy" short hand quite a lot, not because I think individual women are conspiring to make deals but because we live within patriarchy, under it's influence, we have to find a way through it as individuals and collectively. Hence the need for rape crisis centres, these services work within and apart from the wider social framework. Set up by feminists but still taking referrals from other institutions and still relying on a money economy to fund the service. This is absolutely a crucial deal to be made, there are no alternatives.

What I have more difficulty with on a personal level is (no surprises) my own situation. I like many women feel that we provide too much care and domestic labour that is largely hidden, unacknowledged, under valued and unremunerated. I have too like Frak, questioned how I can challenge this whilst also still doing what I feel is right for my family. For me it boils down to the fact that under patriarchy and advanced capitalism a persons value is their economic value and little more, the society is wrong Frak.

"we have to find a way through it" - just find that speaks to me more. Thanks for your example of rape crisis centres though Mini That makes a lot of sense.

Re Eats' list:

1. That patriarchy oppresses women and that the solution is to overthrow patriarchy - YES
2. That Het relationships are an important part of day-to-day oppression of Het women - NO, NOT ALWAYS OR NOT EVEN IN MOST RELATIONSHIPS (IME)
3. Being anti porn and anti prostitution as a result of recognising that these are basically society sanctioned abuse of women. NO, BECAUSE I AM FOR FREEDOM OF CHOICE.
4. That sex is a biological fact that can not be changed. YES.
5. That gender is socially constructed - at a simplest level - girls are brought up to like pink and want to be princesses and boys to be noisy and fight. And that gender controls and sets limits on what we all do and thus is not a good thing. RadFems thus want to get rid of gender. NO. YOU ARE ACTUALLY MOSTLY WRONG WITH THIS. NUMEROUS EXPERIMENTS HAVE SHOWN GIRLS AND BOYS ARE FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT (I CAN ELABORATE IF ANYONE IS INTERESTED).
6. That you analyse overall behaviour e.g. women being involved in prostitution, but you don't criticise individual women for this. YES.
7. That PIV sex places women at harm through greater risk of STD's and unwanted pregnancy and that PIV is a male centric form of sex. NO. IN FACT NOT JUST NO BUT QUITE WEIRDLY WRONG. PIV SEX IS... SEX. IT IS HOW OUR SPECIES PROPAGATES. WE HAVE EVOLVED OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS SUCH THAT PIV SEX FEELS GOOD. WE LIKE IT. IT IS NOWHERE NEAR ALL ABOUT THE MAN.
8. That you are pro women. Yes men have negative things happen to them, but rafeminism is about women. YES.
9. That you don't just talk about radfeminism but that you do things in your real life to help girls and women - campaigning, volunteering, etc. YES.

So, it's no surprise that I'm not RadFem.

I did that test and got the label Liberal Feminist (100%). Also Libertarian (74%) and Radical Feminist (50%), surprisingly.

Thats fine Cote. We all think different things here. Just wanted to say that there is some dispute amongst RadFems about whether there are innate differences between men and women - apart from the obvious reproductive differences. Some think there are, some think they are not. But stuff like pink is for girls is different from this, as the "rules" about what is girls stuff and boys stuff changes over time.

It wasn't that long ago in the UK that pink was seen as a boys colour. So RadFems can think gender is largely socially constructed, but that there are innate differences.

Personally, I don't know if there are innate differences or not and I think it is almost impossible to be sure under patriarchial society. Lots of experiments show that people treat the same baby very differently depending on whether they are told the baby is a girl or boy. So this stuff goes very deep. But without patriarchy we would know more about whether there are innate differences.

yy Eats, if we lived in a gender neutral society we would see clearly difference based on biology alone without any bias.

Why do you think the patriarchy is relevant to investigating whether there are innate differences to boys and girls? There are quite a few experiments on this subject.

I remember one, where boys given just dolls to play with were crashing them into each other, and girls given just cars & trucks were naming them and putting them to bed.

I agree with you with the pink/blue colours and frankly the whole princess thing makes me want to scream, but it is not a realistic or even rational position to claim that gender is a social construct, and without these social influences, girls and boys would be exact the same.

Were these boys and girls who had been flown in from another planet or were they boys and girls who had been exposed to patriarchal socialisation, gender roles and stereotypes?

Cote - I didn't argue that boys and girls are exactly the same. I argued that it is almost impossible to know if they are. I worked with under 5's when I was much younger and kids are smart. They see the world around them, they know there are boys and girls toys, colours and ways of behaving. Whether some is innate or not I don't know.

And there was someone on FWR in 1 thread who knew a lot about the psychology of children's play who explained that children have schemas (I think?) that children follow in play. Sos ome children are into throwing, catching, etc and the form of play they do will follow this schema. Sorry can't remember it properly to explain it, but it made sense to me and seemed to be a much better academic explanation than some "research".

You said, in your list:

"gender is socially constructed... RadFems thus want to get rid of gender."

That sounds to me like you (and RadFems in general) think that there is no innate difference between girls and boys. Otherwise, how can you say gender is a social construct and how can you possibly think you can get rid of it?

Cote, I think I have explained that in follow up posts already above i.e, that some RadFems think there isn't and some do - but that they do agree that gender is largely socially constructed. And i have given examples to explain this

Cote - quite a lot of feminists (like me) believe that on a population level there may be some differences between boys and girls, but that there is much more variation within sexes than between them. And that it is important not to encourage stereotyping, which tends to have an oppressive effect on children's lives.

Beachcomber - I think they were only given these toys to play with. Cars and trucks to girls and dolls for boys. The point wasn't even whether these are gender-specific toys but what they did with them: Girls gave their trucks names, tucked them into bed, treated them as friends. Boys crashed their dolls into each other and threw them across the room as projectiles. Changing the toys around didn't seem to affect what kids do with them.

There was also another experiment with monkeys where male monkeys prefer boys' toys and female monkeys (like girls) didn't seem to have a preference.

I have a boy and a girl, and there is definitely a difference in the way they see the world and the way they act within it.

Cote - have you never seen a small boy pretending to breastfeed a doll? Or a little girl putting together a complex train layout?

Also, you haven't addressed the point about boys and girls being treated differently from birth, which has been supported by several experiments.

I agree that we should not encourage stereotyping (as in boys are strong, girls are weak so boys should play football and girls should stay home and learn to knit) but denying the differences between the male and female of our species is a step too far. It is not the reality.

My 2yo dd is already aware of girls and boys being different. She keeps asking for the 'pretty pink cup', or she wants the pink trousers/top/dress. This is nothing I have done, in fact I really encourage her to like other colours and not go for pink all the time. It's other people around us that have exposed her to the stereotype. Our cm is very good at making sure there is no distinction between toys at her house, same as at our house. But she is given toys/clothes from other friends and family where it is handed over saying 'I thought she'd like the pretty pink one' or 'she seems like a girly girl so I got her pink', so our house is filled with pink tat because it would be cruel to take away something she ahs been given and wants. I seem to spend all my time encouraging her to play with 'boys toys' and she resists everything because it's not pretty and pink :(

I think sex and gender are being used here as though they are the same thing.

Sex = female/male

Gender = feminine/masculine

Or certainly that is how they are used in feminist analysis.

Sex = concrete biological reality

Gender = social construct (in the way that race is considered a social construct).

I have never seen a small boy breastfeeding a doll but not saying it can't happen. I've certainly seen DD play with DS's train set.

I'm not saying children don't imitate adults. They do. I'm not saying girls will only play with dolls and boys will only play with cars, either.

But reality changes. A century ago lots of people said that women weren't capable of abstract thought, but they were drawing a false inference - the reason women seemed less intelligent than men to many people at the time was that they had had limited educations and hadn't been trained in abstract thought.

Of course males and females are different. Females carry and birth babies is the fundamental difference.

I would think race is a concrete physical reality rather than a social construct.