The Feminist Pub - come on in, chat, ask a quick question, ramble ... whatever you like!

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Hello and welcome! Pull up a chair!

This thread started when we all decided to imagine what the perfect local for feminists would be like. So far, it has taps with plenty of good real ale, and some decent non-alcoholic alternatives too. There are comfy chairs and there's a feminist film night, as well as lots of nice feminist-friendly books on the shelves and space to curl up and read. The open-mic nights are attracting feminist singers and comedians, and we're just sorting out the feminist creche.

Old thread is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/1875250-The-Feminist-Pub-is-Open-Chat-Rant-or-pull-up-a-chair-here. But don't feel you need to read or catch up - just jump in.

I'm having a nice cup of earl grey but there is wine mulling as requested.

What can I get anyone?

You've used some interesting phrases "power imbalance, doesn't expect me to do everything but it's got to be done"

There shouldn't be a power imbalance - you are doing your job looking after the children and it is not fair on you to be doing most of the stuff just because he brings in more money. The person who earns most money should not have "most power". That's not a good way to have a relationship.

Things need to be done - big deal that he cleans up after dinner. Does he make dinner?

Laundry, cleaning and tidying should be shared responsibilities. Otherwise you are right and he will be seen as "fun dad" whilst you are the one doing the "boring jobs" during the day. I know that if it doesn't get done, things will fall apart but if it carries on, he will just get used to it.

"I do possibly make things hard on myself". I suppose there's a balance between being over tidy and over cleaning and not doing anything. And if people come round, I bet you are the one who think you are being judged for the state of the house rather than your DH.

I decided years ago to live as if I were single wrt money, housework etc. So I thought about what I expect things would be like if we were separated, and try to live along those lines. The thing is, dh does work all weekend if he feels like it, but is is non-essential work he's interested in, so kind of like hobby time, but it is still work.

So now I've decided that Saturday mornings are my time. I get up and do what I want. Often I just go out somewhere, browse some shops, or go for a walk or something. dd & dh stay home & do computer games etc, it's their time together, and quite often he won't have tidied up but will have made sure dd is dressed & fed, and that there is one load of laundry done.

But dd is 10 now so the consequences of just going out & leaving them to it are pretty minor, it would be way harder with younger kids. I do think that just walking out the door for a few hours is the only way to do it.

Yes. Thanks both of you for your comments.
dH does cook, but less so now I am on mat leave. He also sometimes works into the evening. He doesn't get more leisure time, well, not much. But I do think I need to take more control of my time. Stop the potential martyrdom . I finitely feel that I would be the one being judged, because I am a mother, if the house was rough or my DCs clothes were not fresh and clean. (long since given up ironing)
There's definitely the issue of not being able to just walk out the door. Dd is still bf and is very unsettled lately in the evening. So that's put an end to my evening gym visits. I am even considering cancelling my work Christmas meal if that doesn't improve. Obviously DH wouldn't have to stop any plans he had. Although, tbf. He doesn't actually go anywhere really.

Why don't blouses have proper room for boobs?

TheDoctrine, yes, absolutely.
Just like women's clothes so often lack any kind of decent pocket provision - the lack thereof is maddening. Particularly if you dislike handbags as much as I do.

I may not be a "real" woman as I have no interest and actually hate handbags.
Or may I remain in the Sisterhood as I do love shoes?

Oh, the whole power imbalance and expectations thing.
So hard to quantify.
DH earns more than me, I work p/t, but even f/t I'd earn less. And yes, I feel 'under pressure' to only spend money I can justify and to not challenge him on his spending (he's not frivolous or irresponsible, but does prioritise differently from what I would do, often without discussion).

Can I switch topic and have a rant. Yesterday I had a serious gut upset and snuggled down in bed. As my guts were churning, I don't know why but I got to thinking about someone I knew at school 20-something years ago and it nearly made me weep. There was a girl in my year - not in my class but as we did GCSEs we had some common classes. She was polite and unassuming; kind and what you would call classically beautiful - alabaster skin, bright blue eyes, blonde bob. But above all she was clever. She excelled in maths and languages. She scored 9 straight As at GCSE. In short she had absolutely everything going for her. She could have gone on to have her pick of careers. She could have gone on to have her pick of partners. She could, basically, have gone on to be or do anything.

But no.

Her family were Jehovah's Witnesses.

After her GCSEs 'The Collective' made her leave school. She had no choice in the matter; no say. She was a Jehovah's Witness woman and she would do what she was damn well told.

It makes me want to weep to think of it. What she could have been. What a waste of a lovely, intelligent, beautiful life. She'd wanted to go into medicine. Think of that for a minute. Someone so bright. How many lives could she have saved? What if it was she who had worked on the cure for cancer? Or HIV? What has society missed because of that small minded bunch of zealots.

To quote Stephen Fry:

'Religion. Shit it'.

I don't know why blouses don't have proper room for boobs and I don't know why they put the button in the most stupid place so it will definitely gape.

Housework. Deep sigh. Oh my god fucking housework.

however, can I just say that although I am practically ALLERGIC to the "just don't do it" non-solution (for a million reasons that are too boring and obvious to go into but mainly because it is parrotted on here by denialists who a. insist there isn't really a problem and the vast majority of men are not unconsciously freeloading gits, and b, (illogical to hold both positions at once) the problem is the woman's to solve so stop moaning and solve it by doing this very impractical thing that will make you very uncomfortable)) - I have oddly found in recent months that things I am pretty certain won't have been done - have. I love it. I am exhausted and tearful a lot of the time these days. Not on top of my game. I do not recognise teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown as a strategem to get a person you live with to hang the washing out, but things are changing round here. After nearly 10 years.

I get THE RAGE about housework.

I just want to send a lot of sympathy to TheRealAmandaClarke. how old is your baby? Hard times when you have a bf-ing unstable littlie. I remember going out to a class when dd1 was quite small and dp insisting that I get out for an hour and a half. I loved it. When I got back he clutched hold of me at the door and said "you are never going out again" because she had been screaming. He thought he was joking but I felt this sick horror rise up through my insides because that - exactly that - was the case, and it was NOT FUNNY

(shudder)

Sorry that is not helping. It really is not for ever though. Just feels like it at times.

Yes > to TheRealAmanda.

We had a man mansplaining today! I watched agape! My first RL mansplaining!

Pacific to go back to the question you asked me ages ago about "Germany as a feminist", there are two more points that have come to me since. One is the fantastic provision of childcare and general acceptance that children need to be looked after rather than trying to ignore the fact they exist, as in there is childcare, but there is also flexible working and in my experience, a willingness to work around the fact that you have children rather than demanding impossible commitment (although this may just be my experience, as I had this in the UK to an extent, although DP didn't at all.) The second is the openness of brothels and strip clubs to the point that there are "erotic women waiting for you" advertised on the panels on the ends of trolleys much like various products are advertised in the UK, and huge open billboard or panel ads. You walk down the street and there are bars with illustrations of women dancing, or posing in pin-up style on the outside of them. So again, quite mixed.

On the housework point. YES. I get very frustrated with the "Stop martyring yourself then!" posts, as though women who find themselves doing the majority of housework/childcare are actual control freaks who have actively put their DH's off doing anything. I got this advice several years ago when posting about XP and was told "You have to train men, lol!" and "Don't tell him he's doing it wrong, you'll emasculate him!" Right, so it's perfectly fine for him to change DS' pooey nappy and not bother to clean the shit off his arse properly so that he gets sore, and to leave the dirty nappy and the water pot in the middle of the floor, for DS to crawl around and tip over or open and spread everywhere?! I mean, it's not much to ask is it? It's not that I was moaning because he'd selected the wrong design of nappy out of the packet! It's pretty fundamental that you THROW IT AWAY rather than expecting the housework fairy to come along and do it for you?

Haha, what happened Copper?

Can't say too much, or will out myself. But man tells women why women don't get promoted. It's because they have babies. So naive I almost pity him.

Lol. DP was playing an online game today. He has just started to run a new "guild" which is a group of people playing together. He was saying that a lot of people in his guild have children and he said that it was slightly annoying in the middle of a big important fight when someone would just say "Oh, gotta go, baby's crying!" and leave and the rest of them are all AAAAAARRRGGHH now we're losing!! (in a good-natured way).

I said his guild was very feminist-friendly and he looked really confused and said "Not really, not unless you're talking about attitudes people haven't had since the 1940s!"

Oh, how I laughed. I wanted to point him to the 6 or 7 threads every week about partners who put video games above their children...

Just watched an interesting programme on catch up called something stupid like "Date my porn star", thought it was going to be rage inducing, but didn't expect it to be so sympathetic to the porn stars and so anti the porn industry. Was an interesting watch. Basic idea was they took three guys who are obsessed with porn over to LA to meet their idols and go on a date with them, along the way they take them to view porn shoots. Which are pretty fucking awful, and two of the three seemed really shocked and upset by what they saw. Interesting to see their realisation that porn involves real people, not just objects. Third bloke appeared to learn nothing unfortunately.

That's interesting MoG.

I have a blouse from TM Lewin that doesn't gape, all it takes is having a few extra buttons so that the button spacing is less.

Buttons cost buttons (groan...) so why don't all shirt companies do this?

Arsing blouses. They are basically designed to make you feel there is something wrong with your tits.

Actually of course the design just doesn't work for women... because it is copied directly from the male shirt, which doesn't have to contend with boobs. School uniforms for girls should not include shirts/blouses... they add an extra layer of shame and embarrassment to what is already a horrid time of life.

Why bother burning bras (a genuinely useful garment) when one could burn blouses?

Oh, I quite like a nice fitted blouse. I do have small boobs though.

"School uniforms for girls should not include shirts/ blouses..."

this exactly.

Nothing wrong with blouses, they just need to be cut properly, with e.g. gathers or panels and bust darts.

Goldie I understand your rant. I have a particular interest in religion and feminism. I am American; much of the backlash against feminism in the States comes from religious conservatives and fundamentalists. For example, there is an organization in the US called the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, one of whose stated purposes is to counter the effects of feminism.

Leading from the discussion about housework, what about Christmas? Organizing, planning and most of the execution involved in making sure the family has a good Christmas seem to be almost universally the province of women. I rebelled against this years ago, with the result that we have considerably downsized Christmas in our family.

"counter the effects of feminism"

That's just grim. Dare I ask which areas they are most trying to counter?

"counter the effects of feminism"

I'm reading Hardball by Sara Paretsky now, and that's got some description of how a woman is treated by her father who is a church leader and it's not pretty ...

Murder They are concerned, I believe, with countering the effects of feminism in Christian churches, especially evangelical ones. cbmw.org/core-beliefs/

CBMW wikipedia

They have changed their website and it seems not as easy to navigate as before and I could not get from the link above back to their main page so here it is.

cbmw.org/

LordCopper Thanks, I just looked up Hardball, and it sounds like my kind of book so I just bought it for my kindle.

Argh! Christmas.

The thing is, it's really easy to say that men & women should do Christmas equally, but there are always issues that muddy the waters.

In our house I also have to wade through the silt created by the following:

dh really hates ALL the organizing, and would actually do nothing for Christmas, not even eat a proper meal, rather than organize it. Related to:

MIL (who a friend of mine with a lot of psychiatric training & experience says that MIL fits the description of borderline personality disorder) is totally hyper about Christmas. It HAS to be perfect. IF not there will be much wailing and whining. It has to be at her house, by her rules. Even her own mother & family say how obsessed & even oppressive her version of Christmas is (e.g. she doesn't like people getting off the sofa, she like us to sit there so she can look at us)

As a teacher I do get more time off, so I am the one at home in the final run-up to get things sorted out.

Both sides of the family send me all the emails etc about what gifts to get, so dh is far less aware of all the lead-up (yes, I do share things with him)

dh works longer hours than me, so I do have more time to sort things out.

Due to MIL he gets horribly stressed about present buying, even freezing in a shop & unable to buy anything. I don't give a shit about the whole 'it has to be perfect' so get something reasonably suitable and tick it off the list. I can do the whole of Christmas in the time it takes him to do 1 present.

I now do most of the present buying etc, but make him sit and write out cards, help put up decorations, wrap gifts. I have to use the same coping mechanism that I use for SN kids to make this happen. LAst night he was getting stressed about how to write out the envelopes for a card, in case it didn't look quite right! See, his feckin' mother & her control techniques get him even now. He also takes care of dd while I go out shopping, and I quite like this arrangement, and he never whines about how much it costs, just lets me get on with it. He pretty much does Christmas dinner, and makes the cocktails, so Christmas day itself is pretty relaxing for both of us,

BUT I STILL GET THE RAGE ABOUT HOW MUCH I HAVE TO DO BEFOREHAND!