"Mumsnet hates men"

[AnnieLobeseder]

There's a Facebook page created by some school kids called "shut Mumsnet down cos they hate kids" or some such thing, which is harmless enough.

But they've posted this advert from F4J, which is rather more sinister.

I wasn't aware that it was mandatory to hate men to be a Mumsnetter. I shall have to inform DH at once that he is to leave home and never see the DDs again.

They're rather sad and scary aren't they?

TBH, even if nothing else were an issue, the statistics on women killed by their partners would swing it for me. It gives me the shudders every time I hear about it.

There's a blog about it here. Note that she acknowledges the cases from 2013 include not only those we know were women killed by men, but also those where the men have been charged - because her project is ongoing.

kareningalasmith.com/counting-dead-women/femicide-118-uk-women-killed-though-suspected-male-violence-january-november-2013/

The statistics for men killed by other men are high too, though that tends to be on the streets rather than domestic, so it's not a pretty picture.

Oh, and I missed a comment - thanks happy. I just mean, it's as well to be aware I might be.

The article about women GPs was disgusting.

Oh, and sorry to triple-post, but nicky, google is your friend. Here you go, have a trawl:

www.google.co.uk/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=studies+discrimination+women+medicine&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=HCXIUtfEBYSzhAfT2oDYBw

Thanks ArtetasSwollenAnkle for bringing a new word to my vocabulary.

I am assuming you are being serious rather than sarcastic, Doc, in which case you are welcome. The idea of kyriarchy, for me, makes a better attempt at explaining the complexity of how society functions.

Completely agree, Buffy - there is room for and validity in the study of specific groups. I just think that this is a reason who people can buy into equality, but not necessarily feminism. As we have seen from posters on here, even those who have not heard the term before, many women recognise that society is made up of far more than just a gender binary.

I understand why feminists are reluctant to explore it - they are immersing themselves in problems much closer to home.

Buffy Am I making sense

Yes, thank you for taking the time to articulate so well your concerns.

I would actually debate some of the points that you raised in this post - although not about violence - and I think that it could be an interesting debate. However, I do have things to do now.

I'll consider my response to your post if I may and come back later.

Yes, I was serious, I'd not encountered it before. I like it when I learn new things, and kyriarchy seems like the right phrase for what's happening.

Nicky if you feel western women are entirely equal to.men then I can see why you aren't interested in feminism. There's nothing wrong with that. Others feel that there are still major issues to be faced in terms of women's equality and freedom so they discuss and research that. Again, nothing wrong with that. If feminism isn't for you that's fine, however, I don't understand the need to request other people not to be feminists? Could you explain it?

I understand to a certain extent the discomfort that men feel when they read feminist forums. I used to read forums where black people would talk about whites and I would think "that's so unfair, I'm not like that! Things aren't that great for me either!"

But that's the thing about privilege, it's not something you know you have. I was talking to a black friend about my experience of being pregnant and how nice strangers had been to me, giving me seats, smiling and asking the due date. I'd expected her to agree with me. Instead she said her experience had been the opposite and that people had been offhand with her. This bugged me for a while so I told it to another friend who laughed and said "well they probably thought 'here's another one coming'". The irony was that at that time I was the single mother on benefits, not my friend.

That's when I realised that I had white privilege. I know my friend doesn't hate whites but I'm sure she'd like to have the same privilege of going through life without people assuming that she's a scrounger. Wanting to have the same opportunities as someone doesn't equate to hating them.

Completely agree Kasey. And what you are describing is kyriarchy, not patriarchy, which was my point all along. For feminism to hammer home patriarchy as the root of all injustice becomes a barrier to non-white, non-gay, non-born-as-a-woman people who might otherwise support it's aims. I have seen black women on here complain about this. I have even seen older posters complaining about ageism. So, take your focus off why men feel uncomfortable - I guess that is inevitable - and look at why women might feel exactly the same.

Except feminist analysis is not that patriarchy is the root of all injustice.

That would be a pretty stoopid analysis.

But it is a moot point and a strawman as it is not feminist analysis.

Feminist analysis that I have read, identifies submission/domination hierarchies as the root of class privilege injustice.

Which is a little more complex and encompassing that what you have presented as feminist analysis Artetas.

Then I bow to your superior knowledge, Beachcomer, and I agree with you - it isn't. I will point future references to patriarchy on MN to this discussion. Your opinion will carry more weight than mine.

I agree with bBeach but if you could point me in the direction of feminist analysis that does see patriarchy as the root of all injustice I'd be interested to read it.

Oops cross post

Well I could point you to links to websites, but then we will argue about semantics. So let me withdraw the implication that all feminist analysis refers to the patriarchy as the root of all injustice, as it is wrong.

Kasey a term in feminist analysis that would fit that situation with your friend is intersectionality ie the iways in which different forms of oppression (sexism racism ageism etc) act together go create a certain social environment. What your friend experienced wasn't "purely" racism. People feel free to judge and comment on pregnant women regardless of race. That is the effect of patriarchy - women generally are the focus for comment and judgement in terms of both appearance and motherhood. The comments and attitude you experienced were positive because you appeared to fit the "correct" model of motherhood.
Your friend was up for comment and judgement because she was a woman but she was black so the comments were negative. That negativity would likely have been less if she was expensively dressed with a posh accent (effect of class) or if she appeared to be just visiting (effect of class/nationality/status). Negativity would have been greater if she'd had other children with her or if she'd appeared poor.
It's not straightforward. Feminism is one specific way of looking at society but to ignore other aspects of social structure would be far too simplistic and render theories pretty meaningless.

Here is a blog post of what kyriarchy doesn't add to the party (and seems to be mainly covered by intersectionality as Cailin described)

I'm not wild about 'kyriarchy'.

But it doesn't matter. In real life, if you talk about kyriarchy and I talk about patriarchy, it doesn't matter so long as we are both noticing and fighting discrimination.

What does matter a lot is when people start saying 'well, but, feminists, this term would be better because your term might upset people, it might seem discriminatory, it might look privileged'.

That is belittling misogyny.

I'm a white, middle-class feminist. I know I have a huge amount of privilege in a huge amount of ways. But the best thing for me to do is to admit that, admit I'm ignorant, try to use the privilege to call people out for discrimination in the contexts where I do have privilege. That doesn't require me to pretend I don't believe in feminist analysis.

Incidentally, structurally, it would be a 'win' for whoever you imagine the kyriarchy/patriarchy/bastards to be, if the only women who were considered opressed enough to discuss oppression were multiply oppressed. Those of us who don't have the extra oppressions put on us ought to be pushing back extra hard against the ones we do know about, IMO.

Btw, I'm hestitating here because I don't know feminist analysis really, but beach, can you correct me if this is wrong:

As I understand it, radical feminists would say that they treat 'patriarchy' as the root issue, the thing that expressions of misogyny come from.

Other forms of injustice are rooted in other forms of discrimination/usurpation of power, such as racism.

But the 'radical' bit, I've always assumed, has to do with how you tackle the problem, by treating misogyny as the root cause, rather than (say) by objecting to certain things like rape myths but not to others like porn.

I'm posting because quite often people define the 'radical' bit of 'radical feminism' on here and it seems relevant.

Artetas, there is a lot of excellent feminist writing on the web but I tend to think of feminist analysis as in the "founding thoughts" IYSWIM of feminist tenets as being from a time before the internet.

Anyone can write anything they want on a blog/website and call it feminist theory. But surely what we mean when we refer to feminist analysis as a "thing" is . Published books. Not blogs and websites (even though, as I said, there is excellent feminist writing on the web).

The foundations of feminist theory have been a long time in construction, dating back to at least pre witch burning times and leading a long and rich history through convents, midwifery, Florence Nightingale, Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Millicent Fawcett, etc and of course the enormous influence of second wavers such as Dworkin, MacKinnon, Freidan, Adrienne Rich, Melissa Farley, Mary Daly, Kate Millet, Sheila Jeffreys, etc.

There is much brilliant writing, searing analysis, incisive thought and original thinking in the rich history of feminism and its analysis of society and political structures and paradigms.

There is much tendency to dismiss a lot of this brilliance, simply, of course, because it is the work of women. I have rarely read writing of such clarity and incisiveness than that of Dworkin, Millet or MacKinnon for example (after having waded through reams of works by men at uni).

I don't like seeing such incredible work reduced to a throw away sentence that misrepresents and reduces to a point of meaningless.