A chatty, questions and random comments thread

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

There used to be a lovely 'Chat' thread where we could all be silly or just comment/witter on about stuff, and I've not seen it since this place got renamed to 'Chat'. Would it be a good time to have another random chatty thread going? I think there are some newbies having a look around after the thread about calling yourself a feminist, so maybe it would be a nice thing?

So people can ask random questions or make comments without feeling they have to jump right in to an ongoing thread or write an OP, if they don't want to.

But the point is, you can't expect the vision to come before the lifting of oppression. IMO.

You work slowly towards lifting oppression, and you catch glimpses of what it might be like. But you can't theorize a grand structure out of nowhere.

I think it must have to do with Overton window shifting ... we're getting more and more of the picture.

"I politely note that the ideas you have 'quoted' appear nowhere in my question. I don't assume leaders, a vision or a model, nor an idea of equality, oppressive force or violence."

No but your question implied leaders, vision and a model, and of course for enforcement of such a model you need inequality and oppression, backed up by the threat of violence.

"How do we get to a state where we can know "how the truly unoppressed woman thinks, what she wants, what her actual needs are and how she wants to live"?"

I already answered that.

"How do we envisage the crumbling happening?"

Open your eyes, its happening now.

"Can we have any examples of a "clear, universal and self-evident" vision?"

I can't be bothered to answer this, since it is not relevant until every woman has the opportunity to find voice, (or enough from all different walks of life - for it to reach a critical mass), otherwise you just have privileged women speaking for those who are more thoroughly oppressed. I could suggest, but out of respect for those who have a far worse lot than me I wouldn't, and certainly not in a mixed space.

" I hear echoes of the US Declaration of Independence"

No you don't, you are trying to shoehorn what I am saying into a point in time when a small powerful elite create a 'declaration' to which everyone else must fall in line. That's not the way I see it.

There is a rhetoric/ideology disjunction here. Feminists have the same words open to them as everyone else. Just because the rhetoric associated with freedom is always going to resemble the same rhetoric of freedom in other contexts, doesn't mean the ideologies are related.

Ah.

I see.

Verbiage bereft of meaning, largely.

"How do we get to a state where we can know "how the truly unoppressed woman thinks, what she wants, what her actual needs are and how she wants to live"?"

I already answered that.

If you think

As patriarchy crumbles and more and more women rise from oppression a vision will become clear, universal and self-evident in my opinion. is an answer, fine.

So I asked

"Can we have any examples of a "clear, universal and self-evident" vision?"

I can't be bothered to answer this, so that's a no, then.

I don't hear either a clearly articulated idea - just a lot of hand waving, and I don't see how you will get there.

I suggested separate education might be a way, I wondered if female reproductive control might be a way to achieve what you see as your objectives. Mostly, it sounds like passionate revolutionary ardour - which we've seen in South America, Eastern Europe, the Far East - and it has rarely ended well.

Good luck with your revolution however you manage it.

No, not verbiage bereft of meaning. You're being harsh there.

It's simply that we only have so many words - any description of a lovely, ideal society is going to use some of the same words as any other description. It's inevitable. But it doesn't mean we all idealize the same thing.

I would love to speculate about what a truly equal society would be like. But I know my perceptions will be coloured by the fact we don't live in one. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and as we jolt towards a more equal society, we also get better at seeing what it might look like.

LRDtheFeministDragon

If harsh, I apologise. Exasperated, perhaps.
It's the language I'm asking to be explained.

"A clear, universal and self-evident vision."

To paraphrase, I asked "What's one of them, then?"

I would have to infer from that "universal and self-evident" would show high degree of acceptance as opposed to one which everyone else will follow/fall line with.

The whole until every woman has the opportunity to find voice, (or enough from all different walks of life - for it to reach a critical mass)

tone rankles a bit - who decides what is critical mass, what are "the different walks of life", is this democratic, built upon a republican whose rights are enshrined...

otherwise you just have privileged women speaking for those who are more thoroughly oppressed and this hasty nod to womanism in realisation that WoC have issues with the agenda being pushed forward...

Happy for someone to point me to a 101ish approach to how the replaceable to the patriarchy will look, and paths to achieve this.

How could anyone decide something if it's self-evident?

I don't get it.

You don't need to have people making autocratic decisions in a non-oppressive society, surely? I just don't follow how it could be non-oppressive if people did make autocratic.

I try to think about it by way of analogies. Five hundred years ago (give of take), there were men and women who quite seriously believed that allowing woman (or poor men, or non-educated men, and god, don't even begin to mention men and women who are Jewish or Muslim) to speak would result in complete catastrophe and the utter disintegration of society into a mad free-for-all.

We have moved on. We no longer think (excuse me for saying this, but it is a good example) that Jewish people are out to kill all gentile babies. There were people 500 years ago who would not, I think, have been able to imagine that. They would have assumed it was an 'us or them' situation - someone must be doing the killing, surely?

Thank god we are progressing beyond that. But I think our imagination of what an equal society would be like is still going to be faulty, even if less faulty.

Evolution or revolution? unless the technological advances are made that allow for social change to happen then nothing can happen. If you consider control of reproduction and IVF as an example, it is more palatable to the masses to sell them the idea of IVF for infertility. People are not ready to take on the idea that women could be freed of the biological burden of reproduction. At what point would societal expectations and acceptance of science catch up with technology?

No one can envisage what a post capitalist/ post patriarchal society would be like. Marxists have no better idea of how life might be, although the historical materialist conception of society and change tell us how change happens and what the likely conditions would have to be for that change to happen.

OK, must me my misogynistic mindset learned through oppression under the patriarchy.

I have no idea what a post-patriarchal society would look like.

I have no idea how we would get there.

I don't even see the baby-steps towards it.

I have no idea how we would recognise it if we did.

I don't see evidence of the current class-ridden society crumbling, if anything, across the world I see regression in women's rights and equality.

Saying to me You don't need to have people making autocratic decisions in a non-oppressive society, surely? I just don't follow how it could be non-oppressive if people did make autocratic. doesn't address how will we know if we have reached this state...

FoodUnit 's impassioned argument for women to meet and gather in non-oppressive environments, to create those non-oppressive environments and protect those non-oppressive environments, whilst doing whatever can be done to challenge and tear down patriarchy -blasting away all the barriers that hold women down.

has interesting tonal differences non-oppressive/tear down & blasting but is rather short on substance...

From those non-oppressive environments how do you tear down the patriarchy and blast barriers? At the very least there will need to be some form of engagement with the environment in which those barriers are made manifest.

No, I don't know how we will know how we've reached this state, either.

And I don't disagree that women's rights are crumbling in much of the world. But I hope out hope.

I don't think you being unable to see is unique to you or inherently misogynistic (as you seem to think I'm saying?) - I'm saying, I think this is inherent to all of us, that we cannot envisage all the details of a totally equal society from within a patriarchy.

This is getting into incredibly theoretical stuff, it seems to me, so it is no surprise that we're 'short on substance' - but, forgive me for saying, there are several thousand other threads on those subjects to be read, and that's on MN alone.

If you want to move this discussion on from grand overarching theories ('ooh, wouldn't an equal world be ideal? Why, yes, how awesome') to immediate practicalities ('but right now, what shall I do?'), we can do that.

So: what does everyone reckon is, personally, the one thing they would like to change - or you're involved in changing already?

I am drafting out some teaching plans that I hope will work better for the women and men I'm planning to teach next year, and won't result in the rather dubious, gendered interactions I've seen in the past.

You?

I have just changed a diary appointment from 'girls' night out' to 'womens' night out'. And I sat down with DS1to do a mechanical task yesterday to show him I could do it as well as DH (only to find it had been pre-assembled, rats!)

Nice!

How old is your DS? Is he at the stage of thinking mechanics might be 'dad's job'?

On a wider scale, I am donating to refuges, signing petitions, writing to my MP about abortion rights. I like your thread on teaching style, LRD.

He is 5. He is at the stage of 'girls are yuk!'

TBH I need to catch myself at these things too as I grew up in a SAHM-WOHD family and although both DH and I WOH, it's easy to fall into the gender roles so I am trying to be mindful.

Oh, thank you. It wasn't the most coherent OP, but I was writing v. early, before coffee.

My mate's little boy informed me recently 'girls smell ... you are not a girl'. I had to explains that, sadly for his current views, I am a girl. He was not happy.

DS1 sees no conflict in between 'urgh, girls' and naming his two best friends as a boy and a girl. I've let that one go for now...

Interesting ....

So 'girls are yuk' is not really a statement of how he feels but how he thinks he's meant to feel?

I'm not even sure it goes as far as that - I think he's repeating something rather than anything else. I think it has as much depth as him saying 'I support Chelsea' when (a) he never watches football so has no real opinion on the matter and (b) his football kit is from another team entirely that his uncle supports.

I do say 'no, girls are cool' but the female BF is new - I'll go for 'well, XX isn't yuk, is she?' next time.

"who decides what is critical mass[?]"

Critical mass is not a decision, it is a tipping point when the revolution happens. No one decides this point and dictates it to anyone else, its when people everywhere notice it and say "f*ck me!- the revolution is here! Yippee!"

Its very different to slaughtering a dictator then sitting in his throne.

"I suggested separate education might be a way, I wondered if female reproductive control might be a way to achieve what you see as your objectives. "

So what? Why do you want me to set certain ideas in stone? All we need is to give women the space they need to organise and they come up with the answers to their local needs. No imperious spreading of 'superior' wisdom necessary.

Loving "f*ck me!- the revolution is here! Yippee!"

Ideas set in stone are not a great idea, I agree.

oh if only when it does happen can we please make sure that there is not an elite vanguard of educated white women heading it up

Its my gut feeling that it will come from an unexpected place and spread like wildfire when critical mass is reached

As an aside, looking at some reading on post dominator culture Eisler, Chalice & Blade and so forth.

Also read: an interesting essay framed within sci-fi writing by Liza Yaszek (although earlier modes of feminism posited an inevitable opposition between phallocentrism and gynocentrism without acknowledging how the two are bound together by a shared investment in logocentrism. The task for postfeminists, as Diane Mowery Davis sees it, is to recognize this commonality and then to move beyond it by embracing a "third position that is not really a position at all but a perpetual mobility isn't exactly 101 level reading...)

I particularly liked
In 1985 Donna Haraway's groundbreaking "Cyborg Manifesto" urged feminists to begin seriously considering the promises and perils of a technoscientific culture that reorganizes women's relations to themselves, their families, and their communities in the name of global capitalism. which is rather more what I expected to learn about - but then we all know what expectations do...