Radfem 2013 and the MRAs

[MooncupGoddess]

As many of you will remember, the Radfem 2012 conference in London was explicitly open only to born women and consequently attracted lots of condemnation and anger from people who saw this as transphobic. It was kicked out of its original venue at Conway Hall and went underground (very successfully in the end).

This year Radfem 2013 has not explicitly banned transwomen... but instead it's come under attack from Men's Rights Activists, who have staged a demo at the planned venue, the London Irish Centre, while making lots of unpleasant and ridiculous claims about how radical feminists want to murder small boys and the like. As a result the venue is threatening to cancel the booking.

www.mralondon.org/

bugbrennan.com/2013/04/20/statement-from-rad-fem-2013/

I have mixed feelings about the whole trans issue but have no hesitation in declaring the MRAs utter misogynist knobbers and am disappointed the London Irish Centre has seemingly caved into them.

I have not said men were oppressed due to sex. I am pointing out that women's oppression isn't purely due to their sex.

I've provided a link, how about you provide one that disproves the link rather than just your own opinon? If mine is not valid, nor is yours (equality remember )

I didn't make historical errors, in the main they have been inserted. Either by my poor posting or people jumpng to conclusions about my posts.

I would say you refuse to see what I am saying because it would disrupt your well entrenched beliefs that men are out to oppress women, consciously or other wise.

Your comment about a female Egyptian being a 'concubine' of her brother exposes this.

Men were indeed always the King (ie higher than the Queen) but there is a reason for this (other than the oppression of women). The Monarchy were teh human embodiment of the Gods and Goddesses.

The King was Ra... the top god. IIRC the sun fought the night (Horus?).

The incest thing is now largely discredited. Brother and sister and even fatehr and daughter marrid, but women weren't allowed to marry beneath them. If you are the top woman in a society whom do you marry?

The Egyptians seem to have been aware of the dangers of incest. By only marrying within the family the royals also kept themselves apart from their subjects. Both King and Queen seemed to have been able to avail themselves to the pleasures of groups of hidden wives and husbands, the next king and queen didn't neccesarily spring from the Queen.

The Queens of Egypt seem to have been very important people in their own right, both in power and in religion.

And I will repeat what you do not want to hear.

Men have been treated as chattels. Regardless of what you may think. Go and research it if you doubt it.

MooncupGoddess Sat 27-Apr-13 12:57:55

"I love the way Lazarus sees the Middle Ages through a modern lens. It's like the basket-makers had to demonstrate an annual level of CPD-type related activities, and if they'd had a baby they wouldn't have done any paid work during the year and hence would be seen as out of the game, professionally speaking.

Suffice it to say that it wasn't quite like that."

Not quite.

Just to remind everyone where the town planning non-sense came from...

"BasilBabyEater Fri 26-Apr-13 22:43:56

Public space is not a neutral space, it is overwhelmingly a male space. It was designed in the main by male town planners with male priorities and women are there on tolerance only. That's why men shout obscenities and abuse in the street - to remind us that we have no right to be there without a male owner companion."

It's like something Millie Tant would come out with (Viz character).

"But I will turn off and stop listening when they start saying silly things like I am in some way of responsible, or that men deliberately hold women down or that men subjugate women by subtle town planning."

Ah yes I'm glad you brought that up again - it got lost upthread last time and I wanted to comment on it.

Oppression is basically 'control' of one individual or group by another for the benefit of the controller and to the detriment of the controlled. This control can be applied by deliberate, overt and knowing violence and the terror by implied violence, however it can also be applied in a less conscious and overt way too.

This can simply be by not even thinking about how ones actions effect the group you have power and control over in an 'arms-length' kind of way. Such behaviour is unlikely to be deliberate - it can be quite innocently (ignorantly) believing that you are the default human, therefore what is good for you is good for all- harmless enough if you don't have power beyond those who are just like you, but if you do- dangerous and oppressive to those who are not.

It is unlikely that any feminist believes that town planning is consciously oppressive to women.

Sorry if comment above is a bit late in the thread - I had the window open for some time

Flora, do you know how many 'boys only' schools have now gone co-ed? Not because of some manipulation by behind the scene MRAs or space lizards... but due to market forces. Parents want siblings in one location.

They are just businesses, not some secret part of a masculine dominated military/industrial crypto faciest complex.

It's hardly a secret that men who attended boys' public schools are still disproportionately represented in public life, business etc.

Actually, you did claim men were oppressed due to sex. You responded repeatedly to my posts saying men were not oppressed due to sex with posts about men as 'chattels' during arranged marriage. The fact that your argument is bogus, does not (unfortunately) mean you didn't try to make it. You did.

I do not need to provide a link to demonstrate that the pharaohs of Egypt were mostly male. If you honestly didn't know that basic fact, the onus is on you to educate yourself, not on me to explain primary-school history to you.

You have made a lot of historical errors, starting with your rather hastily-retracted discussion of how women worked at home, and some bizarre and incoherent points about midwives.

You don't seem to understand much about the Egyptian pantheon. I suggest you read up before coming up with bilge about 'top gods' or about male gods being a 'reason' why women were oppressed. You probably also need to consider the very obvious fact that a society that comes up with an image of God as male, probably does so because it is misogynistic. Or are you trying to tell us you believe the Egyptian gods were real beings?

The incest idea is certainly not discredited. In fact, it's been possible to do DNA tests demonstrating that some of the pharaohs and members of the royal family were products of brothers and sisters. Again, educate yourself.

Ah, I see you've moved on to flicking insults at basil because you've no idea how to refute her point.

This is getting tedious.

LazarussLozenge wrote - "the photo. At best you've found a bloke who is a bit of an arse and is taking up too much room."

You seem to be suggesting that a photo of a man on a train taking up more than his fair share of the seating area shows some kind of rare event. This page of the same website shows another 200 such examples. It happens very often. It is not a rare event.

The website was set up to draw attention to male domination of public transport space. It was originally a group on Facebook, but the people running the website say that they closed the Facebook group after receiving death threats and sexist harrassment for daring to highlight the issue.

Lazarus - if you've ever been to a non-Western country you should understand Basil's point about public space being designed for men. I can appreciate that it's less immediately obvious in the 21st century UK, but even now any woman who comes to harm as a result of being out alone late at night gets deluged with an avalanche of victim-blaming.

I think Lazarus is busy googling more 'history', mooncup.

gosh those men must have unfeasibly large bollocks to need to spread their legs quite so far apart

or they are entitled arseholes who don.t realise other people are real, too

what could it beeeeeeeeeee???

LazarussLozenge wrote - "Why do you think women stayed at home, whilst men worked? Sexism in action or just a common sense response to the practicalities of life at the time?"

I think it had a lot to do with men wanting jobs after wars, there not being enough paid jobs to go around, and men being given priority for the jobs that were available.

maybe the practicalities of life (or the lens through which we view them) are sexist

you know, kind of like how to the dude with a hammer, everything looks like a nail

please can someone page me when we get to the argument that sexism and misogyny are natural because coloured berries and fucking bonobos or some shit

thanks

I think that's exactly it, chibi.

It feels as if much of this thread is about looking at everything retrospectively and saying 'oh, yeah, it must have been the most practical solution to oppress women, so that's ok'.

I can't remember who said that common sense is neither common, nor is it sense....
That's the thing - it is socially constructed, and to a sexist society, sexist things seem like common sense.

A poster upthread said that gender was a protected characteristic under equality legislation but that sex is not.

Does anyone know if that is true?

seems to me that the equality act conflates sex with gender- a person can have xy chromosomes and a penis and be a woman- there is no biological sex then

which is great i guess, because if trans women can be protected because they are women in terms of gender, then so can i, even though i am not trans because gender is protected and i have a gender too.

Men were the King.... The King was Ra (the top God).

Yep, no sexism here or in any of the other multi-theistic cultures where the top god was male. Or the mono-theistic ones. Move along, please, ladies.

I'm not sure what my gender is. I have traits which are masculine and traits that are feminine.

My sex is female and because others can identify me as a person of the female sex, stuff has happened.

But according to the law - gender is the protected thing, not sex?

So if someone at work treated me badly because they understand that I am of the female sex, that is not something that is protected? It's only protected if they are mistreating you because of your gender - but as I don't feel that I have a gender one way or the other that is not protected?

If a baby is born and the sex is announced as female and then something bad is done to that baby because the sex is female - then that is not recognised as anti-quality under our laws? Because it would only be if the thing were done because of gender and newborn babies don't yet know what their gender is...

This makes no sense to me.

Sex discrimination is absolutely covered by the Equalities Act, Tabard. The protection for individuals undergoing gender reassignment is a separate clause.

if the world is going to see us as women and then shit on us accordingly, maybe we should say our gender is woman, even when we don't know what being a woman feels like

i don't know.

It's a nasty little catch-22, isn't it?

If we end up having to say 'my gender is woman' we buy into the whole stupid 'women are like this and men are like that' system again.

That's reassuring, mooncup.

Thing is if all women say their gender is female, and gender changes to encompass the characteristics of all those women, the gender has to vanish.

So eg if a women enjoys working with motorcycle engines and plays rugby in her spare time, does that mean those activities will now be considered feminine?

Because otherwise, if feminine remains as it is, and all women say they are feminine, then doesn't that mean that all other parts of themselves that do not fit with that are irrelevant? Doesn't that reduce everybody?

I really have a problem with gender, BTW.