The Feminist Pub - come in and chat.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

This is something like the fourth pub chat thread - please pull up a chair at the bar. Everyone welcome.

Old thread is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/1920422-The-Feminist-Pub-continued?

But it's pretty much full so welcome in.

Oh, yuck, that sounds horrible!

Good on you for complaining about him. I would have found that horrible intrusive too - it is actually pretty threatening, when you've let someone into your home and they then start into something like that.

You're not at all stupid to let it affect you.

rosabud Well done calling them about it.

I'm feeling pretty deflated this evening. First the Amnesty crap. Then personal life. Now people on MN insisting that Dylan Farrow must have remembered wrong and that Allen must be innocent...yeah, children usually lie about sexual abuse, right?

Briar - I hear you loud and bloody clear. It's been a bad week for feminism. I felt very weepy last night.

Victoria Coren is at it again - in the Observer - first she writes rape myths about Polanski and now Allen.

Sorry you had that experience Rosa.

That AI stuff has been very bloody upsetting. Have stopped coming on MN as much really am so MAD all I want to post is Oh fuck off Fuckface, and you and you, sunshine. I'm not myself at all.
My boss - a man of few words usually - has been ranting on about a bad divorce one of his friends is going through. I had to sit and listen to loads of misogynistic bs about some random woman I have never met. Well i didn't have to I suppose. I could've said something but weakly I didn't. feel upset with myself now.

Also am crying my eyes out all week at the news etc. Damn pg hormones. Well I could blame them. But actually the news is very sad. Awful shit happens to people. No it doesn't make me emotionally unstable for noticing that, BIL So fuck off fuckface!

Absolutely Sal - I'm grateful to those that posted on those threads because I just wanted to post you're fucking wrong you fucker.

I'm drinking, trying to watch Babylon and getting told off on a thread about milk.

Wishing all lovely FWR mumsnetters a better week.

Yup, sterling work was done, as per usual.

Is Penguins in?

She just made me agree with something the Sainted Brooke had written and I want A Word,

Did I really, doesn't sound like me.

Ohhhhh, the Texan right-to-fetal-life thing. Yes, that might have been me. Sorry

Yes, that's the one. TBF, Brooke was right about that.

If someone talks enough they have to get something right once in a while.

That's what I tell myself when I witter on anyway.......

Hi
sorry to hear you are all feeling so blue.
That AI thing has really shaken me too. It is so Alice in Wonderland. I just feel so confused and really really worried that this sort of "common sense" has so deeply permeated the culture.

I was brought up in a strict religious tradition which has its own problems with misogyny, but among the gifts that it did give me were a very strong sense of the sacredness of the person, and with that, that sex is owed to nobody. It seems so obvious to me that this is how we look after people, by putting the principled primacy of everyone's bodily integrity and autonomy at the heart of everything we try to do, and I cannot understand how the logic of the market has got that deep into supposedly ethical thinking. I am very confused and very upset. I used to think "protect the human" was such a clear and simple slogan and now it seems all hedged around by "realities" that have nothing to do with the human, the primacy of the precious human individual.

And the defeatism is so upsetting. We accept, in general - don't we? - that laws are to stop people from doing things that otherwise they would like to. I don't see why this is such a glaring exception - that the fact that men really want to have access to women's bodies guaranteed by money, and by the perpetuation of economic inequalities that guarantee a supply of women who will need that money - that these desires are so entrenched, and the inequalities so entrenched, counts as an argument not to bother to make laws about it - I just don't get it.

I was also really disheartened on the much more trivial "is this a nice man or an arse sharing this video, and if he is an arse, why?" thread - because I feel that there is such an appetite to see nothing wrong with anything that a feminist "feels" wrong. Having our feelings argued at and chivvied at and sidelined and trivilialised - ugh it is exhausting. I remember reading on a thread about educating children about boundaries, Custardo said that she told her children to trust their "spidey senses" about whether someone was creepy. I feel that this habit of chipping away at all feminist "spidey senses" - lest, oh horrors, they be unfair - is such a draining, effective way of keeping us all in our place.

and rosabud, well done on reporting that git.

I watched Sleeping Beauty last night with the girls and dp and I laughed (I know we should not find it funny and certainly should not watch it with the girls without talking about this) at the scene where Aurora is dancing with her friends, the animals, and the prince comes and insinuates himself behind her in their place and tricks her into dancing with him. It is revoltingly creepy! And she is taken aback, and even in the animation her body language is cowed, she is trying to be polite while feeling physically intimidated. How "romantic"? - ugh. This is the sort of thing we grow up with so no wonder having arguments with "normal" people is hard.

Worried I may be becoming the stereotpyical man-hating feminist. Went out to dinner on Sat with a bunch of people I don't know well, came back really happy because it was a lovely evening talking mainly to two really interesting women. DP asked about it and I said "I had a great time, got to know x a lot better and y was lovely as always. Didn't end up having to talk too much to any boring men, thank goodness" and then was afraid that someone might overhear me and report me to some authority or other

Sorry that post was so long.

Have a good week everyone

Hello!

Have not posted but have been reading on here a lot. I feel very ill-informed about all kinds of big issues but am learning.

I am musing on the "moral stand" thread. I like the idea of putting it to my nice friends and colleagues that it is morally wrong to discriminate against women and further more, it is morally wrong to do nothing about it and to be silent is to be condoning this morally wrong thing. Anyone wants to put a bet on the rate I will be losing frien
ds?

Also musing on dusk post.

Am just generally musing.

I should like a pint of Babycham or Lambrini or something. Part of my job is to phone through defects on vehicles, and one of the things they ask is what's wrong with the vehicle. I spent part of my misspent youth tinkering with cars, so I know what I'm talking about, but I had some shit head man today repeatedly asking me what I had said, purely because the evidence points to the loom going south. He then asked me if there was someone there who knew what they were talking about, so I got one of the male drivers to speak to him and repeat what I'd said. We're getting a vehicle electrician out tomorrow to look at the loom..... because a bloke told them that that's what it was.

I am very tired and rambling. Apologies. Bleurgh.

CaptChaos on your behalf. Argh.

I've just had it at the moment. Started a thread about Booth babes etc. Women being used as objects to sell stuff. I googled display stands for a conference and half of them had a pretty, young women posing.

Then yesterday, I saw CDs for children. Great - it had the child's first name on it and the songs had the children's name in the song.

Guess the colour of the CDs? They had the same songs on.

That was such a good post Dusk. Thank you. I especially like "sex is owed to nobody". Yes, yes, yes. It is from such a male privileged stance to argue anything else.

And your point about having to constantly justify our feelings is so true. Women's feelings are invalidated all the time. It is so easy to do it. The "she needs a good shag" thread is another example. The OP's feelings are being invalidated as are the teacher's. I absolutely hate it on Relationship threads when people come on and tell women that they should just not feel that way or they're overreacting.

DuskandShiver Just found the clip you were talking about on youtube, I see exactly what you mean. And then she magically decides he's the love of her life??? I suppose at least you can argue that comparing that with the message in Frozen shows Disney has moved on with the times a bit (not saying Frozen is not without its faults but it's definitely the most feminist of the princess films).

I have been reading some things about intersectional/queer/social justice feminism, admittedly mostly on Tumblr, and I think I've put my finger on why it bothers me. There were quite a few posts that criticised the idea that mother=woman, in reference to both child-rearing and also abortion access rights. It felt uncomfortably like shoving motherhood and pregnancy as feminist issues to one side, with the accompanying ciriticism of concern for them as being "cissexist".

My DD has also been asking questions about the whole "queer" thing, which she has obviously heard about from somewhere. I had to admit that I didn't know the answers either. After doing some reading, it all seems very essentialist and about putting labels on people. For instance, an extreme example is describing what we used to call a tomboy as someone with a gender-variant identity, rather than simply a female person who happens to prefer trousers and active sports, perhaps. I have always told DD that being a girl doesn't stop her from doing almost anything she wants, and that includes clothing and hairstyles, and that it doesn't make her odd or especially different. This seems to be moving away from that, and I'm not comfortable with it.

I'm not comfortable with it either.

I have increasingly found people willing to tell me I am 'queer' if I am not a stereotypically feminine heterosexual. It would feel uncomfortably close to 'tourism' if I identified as 'queer', I think.

Thank you everyone for your lovely words. Doctrine, you explained it very well - that is exactly why I felt so yuck (very intellectual word there from me!) about it all, it helped to see it aticualted so well.

Brilliant posts from everyone else. Very disheartening with the Amnesty thing at the moment, very disappointing from an organisation that I have always agreed with on absolutely everything. It amkes me feel like we are "losing."

But we are not......at work today I persuaded some teenage boys that girls are not "a bit to blame" for their own rape if they walk around in the dark with short skirts on. Depressingly, they really really did think that but they did change their minds after a heated discussion and possibly after realizing that I was not going to give in and if they didn't then the discussion was going to eat into their break time

Well done Rosabud. We have to chip, chip, chip away at the rape myths. Each time I come across it now which is way too often i counter it. Calmly, and like I don't care too much (although I do!).

To be fair, I had never been that aware of the 'rape myths' till I read MN - and I was here when the whole thing WBY thing was brewing. It did take that campaign, and the threads leading up to it, for me to fully understand and be able to articulate arguments against rape myths.

Obv you're never going to get through to the MRA type - but everyone else.... hopefully it will sink in.

TheSmallClanger you described why the "queer" movement makes me uncomfortable.

I think they're trying to be progressive and escape sexism by using different words and not paying attention to biological sex but instead it becomes really sexist towards female people, if reproductive rights is not a female issue and a tomboy can't just be a tomboy. Women are an opressed group because of our female biology so ignoring that hides the unequality we experience, it doesn't erase it.

TheSmallClanger - interesting but I am not sure what you mean by "criticised the idea that mother=woman"

Do you mean criticising the idea that mothers are all (subset of) women?

Or... that women are all mothers (you can't mean that, of course, because they aren't)?

I don't know much about this sort of stuff but I suspect I would find it very annoying.
Do you know about otherkins?

otherkins

Perhaps an extreme example to use as an analogy, but I think with gender / sex there is a continuum between matters of preference and matters of fact. I think a lot of stuff about choice and preference is important if it is happening to you but let's not forget the matters of physical fact. Like women denied reproductive autonomy dying. A lot, in Ireland, in the 20th century.

I came across feminism as a girl who didn't fit in, but I knew I was a girl. I wasn't good enough as a girl, but I wasn't confused about being one, although I pretended to be a boy sometimes to save hassle when doing the things I wanted to do. I felt flooded with relief when I heard the message from feminism that "you are a good enough girl how you are." I don't want that message to change into "girls don't exactly really exist" because it turns into "girls don't matter"