Feminist Pub 16: where the Bluestockings develop armoured stockings to deal with the thousand paper cuts

[FibonacciSeries]

Carry on.

I'm very ignorant on these issues. I understand that femininity is a construct and that rings true to me. I don't know about the other issues. I'm of the live-and-let-live camp. As long as nobody comes and tell me what it is or should be to be a woman.

I think I'm pretty much with you.

Though, I do think that, for the vast majority of people, construction has most of the influence. I think the numbers of people who're absolutely gay/straight is tiny.

I think some of this is an overlap between the (not really) cool and (not really) edgy "I kissed a girl" thing and the post-modern queer theory that everything is constructed. I tend to bristle against that although obvs gender (as in roles and behaviours attributed to men and women on the basis of their sex ie feminine/masculine) is constructed.

It turns out that feminists have been fighting for women to take over the roles of the Ghostbusters.

I must have missed that bit of activism....

Really?

The rest of us have been working non-stop fitting it in between the ritual humiliation of baby boys and the secret plan to take over the world.

I won't hang up my feminist sword until they remake the shawshank redemption with an all-female cast. Then my work will be done

Oh, well, thanks for the invite....

And arf @ Petula...

I missed it too, Puffins.

Actually, it's the sort of thing I would have received and ignored, other than briefly wondering why anyone would want to bother making Ghostbusters at all.

Excellent plan, puffins, it'll cheer you up no end.

buffy - really? That's .... odd.

Well, there is that EBearhug, yes.

In what way staged? As in a double bluff?

Thanks for the thoughts, folks. I'm glad I'm not the only one slightly baffled by it. I certainly accept that sexuality is probably more of a spectrum than a binary, much the same as gender, and that society's default of "heterosexual" can be very damaging. But I also think it's incredibly damaging to people who are very much on the homosexual end of the spectrum to speculate that they have any choice in the matter. Especially since so many people will only view sexuality and gender issues in simple binary.

But of course.

I have just, on the basis of your post, come up with a delightful feminist reading of Chaucer's Prioress's Tale. I'm sure that was actually all about Jewish feminists humiliating annoying small boys who refuse to learn their lessons.

Where does sexuality as a construct put paedophiles of pre-pubescent children?

As people who know their sexual feelings, be they nature or socialised or both, should not be acted on because of the damage to the other party, I would say.

What would you say, carol?

Alongside other people who don't care about consent, regardless of whether they want to have sex with people of their own or the opposite sex

Delegating to his scribe and then moaning about it, buffy, and possibly, dunno. Christine de Pizan is cited a lot as a proto-feminist, and she was around then.

carol - Gail Dines has interesting (and disturbing) work on this. She interviewed men in prison for child sexual abuse (IIRC - might have been men who watched child porn - sorry if that is the wrong term), and found many of them hadn't actually been attracted to children initially, but that they explained they had this compulsion to seek after something taboo, something more extreme.

It was really horrible. I heard her talk about this a few years ago and it really stayed with me.

That Cromwell is a snake!

See, I don't accept sexuality as a social construct. There are too many people who find that their personally experienced sexuality is at extreme odds to that deemed "acceptable" to society (including paedophiles, homosexuals, dominatrices and anything outside of the heterosexual vanilla brand of sexuality) for that to ring true for me.

There are probably many people who perform heterosexuality because of societal conditioning when they would otherwise be bisexual, asexual or have other "non vanilla" proclivities. But for all of sexuality to be a societal construct? No.

I don't think it is purely a construct either, annie.

FWIW, you mention performing heterosexuality, but it would be perfectly possible to find heterosexuality deeply unappealing as a result of conditioning (eg., abuse). So it could go both ways.

(I'm ignoring the Wolf Hall, not out of rudeness, but because I have to watch it on catch up later.)

I think it probably falls into the same category as "to what extent are men and women innately different" - we basically don't know because we can't separate ourselves from our socialisation. And I'm not sure how important it is becausw the distinction for me is between people who want equal, mutually respectful and enthusiastically consenting sexual relationships and those who don't

That's true, petula.