Feminist Pub IX. Newbies and regulars welcome - pop your cognitive dissonance down outside and have a gin.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Right, thought I'd better start a new pub. I warn you, my knowledge of Roman numerals conks out shortly after this one, so either buffy will have to start the next thread, or we'll have to go Arabic.

Everyone is welcome in - if you want to chat, or just jump in with a question/link/gin, please do. Especially if it's too small for a thread or you don't feel up to thread-starting.

The old thread has, at my count, about 9 posts to go, and it was here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2126791-Feminist-Pub-VIII-not-as-prolific-as-the-Swaggerers-but-there-are-cushions-and-consciousness?

We were just chatting about feministy light reading, and will doubtless meander onto other topics shortly.

i was so slow to post that!

we must stop cross-posting like this LRD

rosa i don't want to speak for annie, but it may be to do with children being born jewish from a cultural POV - the mother has to be jewish as it passes down the female line. annie may have other reasons of course

rosabud - the simple answer is that at that stage we hadn't ruled out moving back to Israel. DH is Israeli and I lived there for 6 years - we moved to the UK when the previous intifada ruined the economy and DH lost his job. Sad but true, in Israel non-Jews aren't quite on an equal footing to Jews (different ID cards, somewhat second class citizens etc). Judaism passes down through the mother. So unless I was Jewish, our DC wouldn't have been Jewish.

As it turned out, when learning more about Judaism in conversion class, I found that the Jewish moral compass aligned much more closely with mine than Christianity's ever did. So while I might not believe in god, if I'm going to associate with a religion, I felt much more comfortable with it being Judaism.

One of the great things about Judaism is that faith in god is not actually required!! Though Orthodox Jews would probably disagree with me on that point.

X-post Petula. You were mostly right.

Sorry, petula!

i really enjoy celebrating both the christian and jewish festivals. there are lots of similarities so some of hte jewish rituals feel very familiar and of course i know all the stories well. and there are contrasts too that are really interesting - e.g. the focus on worship and rituals being carried out in the home, which for someone who is CofE would be more likely to happen in a church. dp is atheist but we still have a hanukiah, and i feel quite emotional when he says the prayer and lights the candles each night. if it's at the same time as advent we have the hanukiah and the advent candle burning next to each other

I have faith, it's broadly Christian, even more broadly RC, with slightly pagan overtones. I was very lucky as a child to have a very good friend who was Jewish, her parents would invite me over to celebrate Hanukah with them each year, and she would come to us for Christmas and Easter.

Mary Beard is getting a bit of a kicking again, being called an old biddy and the like. When she tweets about it, some man comes along and asks her why she didn't expect this. Women, especially older women must not have opinions, and if they do, they must keep them to themselves. On a more amusing note... there is a Twitter account called @NoToFeminism which is very very funny.

I've started a Coursera course in Physics. It's fab, DH looks at me like I've grown a new and different head when I explain things. Not worth anything academically, but I think it keeps my brain ticking over.

Good stuff, Capt. I signed up for a Coursera thing in genetics, never followed it up. One day...

Well thank you for that - I didn't realise about the mother-line or the second class citizen thing in Israel - how very interesting.

Thankyou for the Glosswatch link too - it argued against that column brilliantly.

Marking my place now I've finally wended my way to the feminist pub. Sure you covered this yonks ago but does it have a name, the pub?

The last sentence in that Glosswatch article is one of the best ever reasons for feminism.

Hello Elephants, I too often wonder whether the pub has a name. I just refer to it as The Pub. :o (Yes, I capitalise it in my head, weirdo that I am)

Hello Elephants! Don't know if The Pub has a name. But it's a good pub.

I was very disappointed in the Lucy Mangan article. It was funny though that the only children I know who endlessly make up rules instead of just bloody play are boys ... But people see what they want to see. Hey ho. What do I know? I'm only a woman.

Agree with DoctorTwo - "If only we could all be men then there’d be no need for feminism at all." How disappointing it is that these pesky women persist to hold the untenable position of being women.

We kicked around various names but I think the consensus was The Pub!

Hello elephants, lovely to see you in here! I think we decided that nomenclature was a devious tool of the patriarchy. Or something.

buffy, if you're around - I was wondering how you're doing? And your dad and sister?

I am sitting here trying to write lectures, which is quite fun but quite scary, and trying to work out how to talk about gender to undergraduates. I would really like to get it right, because when I did my undergrad degree it really turned me off academic feminism for a long time. Maybe I need a virtual an a quiet corner of the pub. And a ploughman's with Stilton.

what was it that put you off when you were taught it LRD?

I'm trying to decide whether to read 3 versions of the same dull article or to attempt to learn to play Bach's Partita No. 2.

I have read three versions of the dull article ...

LRD I rather like getting lectures just right too. Have fun.

Also, did anyone else read Lucy Mangan's column in The Guardian magazine on Saturday? About the Terf debate. I know her column is meant to be funny and light-hearted, but it rather depressingly missed the whole point and about six minor points too, while she was at it.

Yeah, I read it. It's quite depressing the extent to which women have the responsibility to be nice and welcoming and make it all safe for all regardless of the consequences for us.

petula - possibly partly me being immature! But I think it was a less exciting time to get into feminism, too.

My memory is that academic feminism struck me as a bit Emperor's New Clothes, really. There was also a strong implicit dislike of it, which now I look back, I can see will have been the usual tendency to make out that anything to do with feminism is less rigorous and exciting.

What we got seemed to be badly historicized, and that's something that worries me. So you'd get a really detailed reading of female desire in a medieval poem, and it just left me cold because I'd be thinking 'well, you're really stretching credibility to find this reading, and making it all very complicated'. I really want not to do that, but it's surprisingly hard to remember what undergrads will think is implausible feministy stuff.

upto - I'm touched you think I've the least chance of getting it 'right'! I'm gunning for 'not completely wrong' (the feministy bits, that is - I'm not actually an idiot in the subject itself).

i think i would probably have been the same LRD

tbh i wouldn't know where to begin, having next to no academic feminist instruction beyond what i chose to do myself in art history. maybe you need to get them angry about the obvious to start with?

There are many, many women out there who identify as feminists and are all for equal pay and no compulsory leg shaving but who have never interrogated the basic assumptions our society holds about men v. women, boys v. girls.

Lots of these women have just never thought about it, and when something makes them question their world view it's like a lightbulb goes off above their head and they rethink everything. But I can't believe Lucy Mangan, a well-read media feminist who must be 40 odd by now, has never been exposed to a critique of gender. Or considered that if the answer to the TERF debate is so obvious to her then maybe there's something she's not getting.

It is very depressing.

petula - I dunno how angry I can get them, because I'm slightly nervous of doing it at all. I suggested doing a lecture series on gender and they let me, but I don't want to march in and turn it into a feminist consciousness-raising session because I suspect they'd go ballistic.

So it has to be plenty of nice old-fashioned close reading of texts with the feminism slipped in there.

Anyway, I'm wittering on. But I'll get there.

irene - TBH, I bet she's doing that classic 'I feel I must comment, and I have nothing to say, so I shall claim nothing needs saying'.

I am really noticing how many people seem to feel they have to express a position on this issue. And there does seem to be a fair bit of pressure to do so, too.

i'm certain you'll get there LRD!

Thanks!

maybe she feels she has to take a position but doesn't want to put herself at risk of the TERF accusation? i don't want to excuse her or suggest that she isn't expressing her own opinion, but we have all seen what those tarred with the TERF brush have been on the receiving end of