Why a lot of women don't come on the feminism threads...

[Scarletohello]

So I posted this question earlier, why don't more women come on these threads ( considering how many women are on MN)

The replies saddened me. Are we doing something wrong? I remember a thread some time ago asking how many women lurk on the feminism threads but never post. I was shocked by how many women read these threads but didn't feel able to join in. I don't think feminism has to be particularly intellectual and I would like to be able to educate more women about feminism, how it affects women in many different areas of their lives, offer support and talk about what we as women can do about it.

Please have a read of this thread and tell me what your thoughts are. I want us to be as inclusive as possible as it affects us all...

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/2222959-To-be-a-bit-dismayed-if-4-million-women-visit-this-site-why-are-there-so-few-posts-on-the-feminism-threads

"Anger is clearly an issue."

Certainly is. It's something women are not supposed to be.

Yy, in disagreeing with someone, I am not angry. It is common to assume someone challenging your opinion feels anger as they do so, but it's often a baseless assumption.

I'm also quite uncomfortable.with the idea that people shouldn't feel aggrieved.or angry, your feelings are your own business (and problem) in my view. I'm happy to challenge people's views but in my world, you've an absolute right to feel how you feel about that.

But for some people, being disagreed with, or having a flaw in their argument pointed out, or having their actions questioned, is reason to take offence and find the other person aggressive or rude. I think if people are going to take that stance then it kind of rules out some kinds of discussion.

^^ This, yes ,exactly

Yy, not sure what you can do there either when you are stuck in a loop of
"You are being rude!"
"No, just disagreeing"
"See! Aggressive!"
"No, I was just disagreeing"
"You need to stop being aggressive!!"
"But all I was doing was giving a counter argument?"
"You were being rude and aggressive, and you still are!"

There seems to be no way out.

In that type of conversation, even saying that you can see someone's points and explaining which bits you agree with, just the act of saying why you disagree with other points can be seen as aggressive.

Don't have a problem with anger, passion or disagreements. What I do have a problem with is perjorative language used to describe my legitimate responses. I sadly note I was accused of 'harping on' within a few posts last night.

Nor do I think it is acceptable to gloss over the behaviour of Dittany and her ilk as some kind of legimate expression of female empowerment. It was nasty bullying and I will call that when I see it.

Nor will I apologse for continuing to remember it and be disturbed by it. It was 2011 and it remains a clear and unpleasant memory. And I am fairly resilient.

But if my triggers have lead me to unfairly characterise anyone's arguments, I am sorry as I agree that's unhelpfully.

Buffy, I believe our last outing led directly to you changing your name to the reasonable feminist! . The family law advice thingie that was directly created by mumsnetters is here www.childprotectionresource.org.uk and I think it is an amazing example of the power of collective action and the number of unique users every day is steadily growing, most people coming through an organic web search. So thanks!

"I sadly note I was accused of 'harping on' within a few posts last night."

I missed that, that's a bit of a sexist phrase to use isn't it? Definitely not on.

Spero - I first wandered onto this board when Dittany et all were here. I left quickly, I have to say. I did it because Dittany had commented on a few threads on other boards and I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

It is, in a weird circular way, itself a feminist issue, isn't it?

I really think it is Buffy, and also I think the flip side is also a feminist issue - the way women are socialised to, or tend to for whatever reason, back out, back down or get upset when faced with disagreement and then complain that someone wasn't being nice to them.

I've tried to put that as simply as possible but right there I feel people could take offence at my "attack" but I'm just describing what I see - it's also a tendency I recognise in myself especially when I was younger.

I think this is probably as good a place to do it as any, but in the hope you're still lurking, FrauHelga, I'd just like to say sorry for not pitching in in support of you on that other thread (my excuse being that I was lurking at work). I thought you were being unjustifiably attacked for your sexuality and some extremely nasty things and unsubstantiated accusations were said to you.

(FWIW I do think your sexuality is conditioned by the patriarchal society in which we live, but then so is mine, and mine's as vanilla as a very vanilla thing. In fact, quite arguably, my sexuality is more dangerously conditioned because we are so used to narratives about vanilla sexuality that it passes under the radar - cf the great thread "Feminist head, handmaiden hormones", whereas people whose sexuality is statistically speaking less mainstream are much more likely to examine their sexuality critically and think about it, and only do stuff they are explicitly comfortable).

But Buffy, it is down to you - if you hadn't sent me that message, I would not have come back to mumsnet. And we all needed each other to make it work, it was the perfect synergy of about 20 people's talents and energies and we fortuitously came together at the right time.

Sorry, I don't want to derail or keep harping on about my delicate feelings but can we just be clear on one point - there is a distinction between legitimate disagreement, passionately expressed and outright abusive behaviour.

Dittany followed me onto a thread where we were discussing some really sensitive issues around care proceedings for the sole purpose of denouncing me as rape apologist.

I get that anger and passion in women are difficult for some people to handle. I live it every day. I am a lawyer, and a forceful one when I need to be. But I know full well people - men and women - respond to my assertion in very different ways than they would if I was a man and those ways are generally not favourable. I am perceived as 'aggressive'.

So I am not trying to shut down legitimate debate. The line between acceptable assertiveness and abusive aggression is often blurred and for women there are all sorts of other issues to compound the blurriness. I do get that. But the sheer scale of the abuse and nastiness I see some feminists mete out to others on line is not something I think any of us should tolerate, celebrate or attempt to minimise. It is corrupting and has done enormous damage to the feminist movement.

No Spero you are right, defending legitimate argument and saying it is not an aggressive thing to do only holds up as long as you are not, actually, aggressive, demeaning or contemptuous.

I see a lot of scorn and nastiness on MN in the name of disagreement, on many topics and some far more than in FWR. I hate it and actively try never to do it. But I have been caught up in it when trying to simply put a POV.

I will never forget arguing a feminist point in a calm and rational way (this was before the FWR topic existed, AFAIK) and someone taking massive offence because I had compared some aspects of X to Y and they insisted that I was therefore saying X was as bad as Y, which I explicitly wasn't. They called me pathetic and dim and tried to rally others round to agree. I will never support that kind of bullying from either side of any argument.

I am not talking about disagreeing with somebody as being a form of anger.

Obviously people are going to disagree on a discussion board.

It is the case that anger is promoted on here by numerous posts where people clearly state that behaving angrily is an acceptable response in feminism.

I do not believe it is and leads to low standards of discussion which puts posters off. Discussions are better when people try to really understand what the other person is saying, respond to what they are saying and do so in a respectful manner.

Trying to keep this short and thus limit my engagement

1. Some people cannot take disagreement. This is a personality flaw and a social impediment, not gendered. It's generally worth a few reasonable tries, but sometimes you just have to give up because they won't change.

1. Dittany used to hound posters for answers to her comments, as in "You still haven't replied to my post at [time 10 minutes ago]", repeatedly over several days if she felt it necessary. I don't know why she did that; it was extremely rude. (No, she didn't back off if you said you didn't want to respond.)

1. The concept of pervasive patriarchy is fundamental to women's lives and to feminism. It's the hardest thing for many proto-feminists to accept as reality, for the very simple reason that it's ingrained in much of what we've learned about the ways of the world. Saying something is anti-feminist, to someone who's simply taken on board that it's a fact of life, can feel very aggressive. They will naturally defend it - if we want to open their perspective, it needs to be done gently.

I don't think I've ever been on a thread where it's men talking passionately and heatedly about something (eg. poverty) where they've been called out for being too angry and unwelcoming

I'm not on any male-dominated fora that discuss social issues, but am on several programming ones. This happens all the time!

Tangentially (or not,) social expectation of female appeasement is a very big issue imo. I'll start another thread on it when I've got a bit of time, either here or in Chat.

Discussions are better when people try to really understand what the other person is saying

Gosh, almond, I could have made my post so much shorter!

Good to see lots of opposition to bullying/abusive behaviour.

The abuse of women should never be acceptable, and we shouldn't accept it.

People behaving really angry about social issues is all over the internet, and is not unique to feminism. Within feminism, this board is fairly mild.

But people still find it angry, and being in an angry environment makes people behave more angrily, because they become used to seeingit as normal, or they don't and go elsewhere.

I've started and deleted posts for this thread several times now. I feel very conflicted about FWR. I feel I should feel welcome and included and part of discussions about a topic that very much interests me - I give a lot of thought to feminist matters and absolutely consider myself a feminist - but I just don't feel welcome, or included, or part of discussions. I don't like the atmosphere. It was a lot worse when Dittany was queen bee, but I dip in periodically and it's still not for me.

I think this is partly because my feminism is strongly influenced by queer theory and I have a lot of FTM friends, so the whole transactivist debate just feels stupid and nasty to me (and I'm not pointing fingers at either side here).

But more generally, I think FWR sometimes suffers from the same malaise as a lot of internet activism, which I can only characterise as a kind of emotional exhibitionism. It's not unique to FWR or to MN (you see it on all kinds of social media outlets, about all kinds of topics) but consists of people competing to post things on the internet that position them as the most 'pure' proponent of a particular strand of belief or ideology. The ideas themselves may contain much of value but the aim of posting them is less to bring about positive change than it is to shore up the poster's own identity and self-perception. On MN, the Politics and News sections suffer from this to an extent as well.

I'm not saying everyone on FWR does this but it is there as a strong undercurrent. And to my mind this undercurrent makes genuine, thoughtful, empathetic exchanges of views and lived experience very difficult. I suspect it's a failing of the internet rather than of individual people as such but the places where it tends to get most out of hand are generally groups of people who gather around radical / social justice type causes and to my eye FWR isn't exempt.

"It is the case that anger is promoted on here by numerous posts where people clearly state that behaving angrily is an acceptable response in feminism."

I don't actually see people saying this at all. In my experience, the anger tends to come from people opposing feminists/feminism..............

On the point about posters in FWR using obscure feminist terms that people don't know or understand: I find it ironic that people have used feminist terms, such as patriarchy, in other sections of Mumsnet, including e.g. Style and Beauty, and it hasn't seemed to be a turn-off for posters in those sections. But, when feminists use feminist terms in the feminist section, it's a problem?

I do, however, think that the language of feminism should as accessible as possible to as many women as possible, but my point is: FWR should not be held to a higher standard than the other Mumsnet boards.

Education of women about feminism or conversion of women to feminism does occur in FWR, but it's not the job or the duty of posters in the FWR section to educate or convince or convert other posters. If someone reading an FWR post does not understand a word, abbreviation, phrase or idea, then they are free to ask its meaning. Many posters do so and receive a short, easily understood explanation, given without judgement. It happens very frequently. Someone may be kind enough to give a newbie an answer, but I think nobody has a right to expect FWR to be their effort-free zone.

FWR posters come from a range of backgrounds. FWR posters are just ordinary Mumsnet members like you. It is a myth that they are all white, middle-class, feminist studies university academics sitting in their ivory towers as they allegedly "police" the feminism party-line. I only know of about 3 FWR regulars who are academics, and I think none of them "do feminism" as their job.

If you do decide to post on FWR, and you have been up all night with a sick child or had a long day at work followed by making dinner and putting the kids to bed, making you too tired to google a feminist term or get your head around a feminist idea, please try to bear in mind that perhaps FWR regulars may have had as stressful a day as you, or even more stressful. Regular posters on FWR are just ordinary women, who have busy lives too, just like you, with the same number of hours in their day. Like very many other voluntary unpaid activities, feminism is as much about what a women puts into it as what she takes from it.

the anger tends to come from people opposing feminists/feminism

I do think this is often due to cognitive dissonance, though. OK, it's also due to misogynist trolling, but to me it is unreasonable to assume that from the off.

OtheHugeManatee, great post. Says it all really. I know my impatience and descent to sarcasm often detracts from the points I want to make - but this is what I would say, if my personality flaws did not get in the way.

it's not the job or the duty of posters in the FWR section to educate or convince or convert other posters

It's my job! That is, it's a job I really don't mind doing. I'm not the only one. Why not just leave us be, only joining in when you have something to raise?