Feminist pub XIX: The Bluestocking meanders into May

[YonicScrewdriver]

We're running at about six weeks per pub at the moment! So if you want chat with a feminist flavour, or with fellow feminists, or just want to admire our patriarchy blaster cannon and goat - welcome!

Last pub Here

I may have gone a bit emoticon happy with that last post.

Elisaveta I felt really angry when I heard that on the news. There are people involved. Impact of 40% cut!! Fingers crossed for you and your DH.

I have also heard that they're attempting to repeal the FOI laws, and following public pressure against reintroducing bee-killing pesticides are now taking those discussions out of the public eye.

What's the price of a person to the tories? I am really appalled that so many working people genuinely believed that these gits have their interests at heart.

Gah the pub dropped off my active threads list again

Now to catch up.

You know those moments where MN suddenly makes you laugh so hard tea comes out of your nose? I just clicked on a thread in Site Stuff (I'm sure many of you will know which I mean) that has over three hundred posts. When I last looked there was only the OP. My phone shows most recent first. I click on the thread and am immediately confronted with a dictionary definition of megalomania. Guess that thread didn't quite work out as intended!

Going back a few weeks to the hidden sexist perils of spectacles. I went for magic lenses that go dark in the sun. As we've actually had a bit of sun recently, my eyes have been obscured pretty much every time I've been outside. The amount of men who seem to think that if they can't see my eyes then I can't see them staring at my chest is quite astonishing.

Stormy

Ah yes, men and boobs. I normally have small ones. Being pregnant (and suddenly much more well endowed) was quite the eye opener as regards the male population's view re their right to stare.

Not totally feminist but... despite getting over 1/2 million signatures on a no confidence in Jeremy Hunt petition, all we got in return is an email slagging off consultants and how greedy they are.... from a politician who has just awarded himself and his cronies a 10% pay rise.

Put me in a sleeping pod and don't wake me until the fucking revolution.

Never mind the sleeping pod. There are no pillows in there.

Let's just start our own feminist colony on a farflung planet instead.

It will take a long time to get there. So along the way we shall invent a new language that contains no misogynist or derogatory terms. We shall take vines with us, to plant upon arrival to ensure the colony's wine supply.

Um. That's as far as I've got with the planning.

Possible trigger warning - I want to ask a potentially upsetting question without upsetting anyone too much (does that excuse me at the start?). It's inspired by the clothing and transgender threads. I could start a new thread if it's interesting, I don't know that much even. Lots of people on here who know more than me.

My question is, Are sex attacks attacks on the sex or the gender? What do you think?

The most obvious immediate answer seems to be the sex because it doesn't matter what you are wearing, but does further reflection not suggest that it is actually gender? It certainly doesn't matter what gender identity is going on in the mind of the victim, and how they are expressing that, what matters is what is going on in the deranged mind of the attacker - I want to emphasise that. Whatever it is that is being expressed through (intimate) violence is the issue. And sex attacks and harassment occur because the attacker is utterly contemptuous of a whole group: because of a power differential, the idea that male gender is superior to the female. Isn't that a gender construction?

If it's the gender they're attacking, then the gender divide is an important contribution. And so emphasising the gender differences from birth through clothing or any other means of performing stereotypes is never going to be helpful. We would be better off emphasising the similarities, from birth, and expressing that with unisex clothing.

Or am I just tying my brain in knots to try to justify myself.

I would suggest that sex attacks are based on percieved weakness. So both sex weakness with a female viewed as weaker than a male, and gender weakness with feminine viewed as weaker than masculine.

Sweet and stormy, you need a chest tattoo, then you can console yourself that everyone is looking at that

Oh good, no one hit me yet. I am a coward.

The sex weakness does have a base in reality, although I'd argue that some of it is the socialised differences in aggression levels.

It's something I've thought of too techno, and I confuse myself when thinking about it. I'd be interested in a thread on topic,and would take part but I'm not brave enough to start one myself. I know theres a good chance some posters will show up with bigotry transphobic accusations if trans is mentioned.

Sometimes I think gender has nothing to do with it, because say a girl living in some cultures will still be forced into marriage and raped, I don't think her saying "I'm a boy" would stop that at all. But then I don't think it's the sex that makes men rape or be violent, it's in part the attitudes passed down through socialisation, so I guess that would be gender?

I think sex determines how people view you and treat you, and people have their views on how to treat women through socialisation? I dunno, that might sound like a load of drivel, though. Like I say, I confuse myself thinking about it.

I'm... rapidly realising I can't respond to that properly while holding a phone, a fag, and an umbrella. Feel free to start the thread on it before I get to the laptop at 6pm!

In short though: INicked, it looks to me like your confusion may stem from trying to bear in mind two opposing theories of what gender is.

I know it's been said before and it will doubtless be said again, but, really. WTF? Who decided to turn sex categories into gender categories without consulting the world at large? They are not the same thing, as I'm sure both sides of the rad/trans debate would agree. I feel very strongly that if people would just stop insisting that biological sex categories are defined by anything other than biological sex, then we might all be able to make constructive progress. But until then there is no way forward.

Okay, I have dryness, I have keyboard, I have many swirling thoughts that will probably come out a lot less coherently than I'd like.

Gender-as-socialisation within the mind of attacker: yes, I agree with that. The concept of "toxic masculinity" is possibly relevant. Our whole socially constructed system of gender gives out an awful lot of messages about men and women, their roles and purposes, and in the minds of certain types of individuals, in certain circumstances, that translates into just cause for a physical attack.

How the hell that fits in with gender-as-inner-identity, I haven't the foggiest. Does anyone know if there's data detailing the nature of crimes against transwomen? Because if they're, for example, likely to end up raped by the type of individual whose mind is susceptible to our society's toxic ideals of manhood, then we could safely say that it's the gender-as-perceived-by-the-attacker that puts a person at risk. But if they're likely to end up beaten up but not sexually assaulted, then we'd have a good reason to think attackers attack based on biological-sex-as-perceived-by-the-attacker.

I had a lot of trouble writing that paragraph because the true meaning of "gender" in this context is so slippery and elusive. No amount of reading seems to help me to grasp what a gender identity actually is without making reference to either biological sex or femininity in the socially constructed sense. I know I'm not alone in this. I'd hazard a guess that your average sex attacker doesn't have greater insight into gender identity than the rest of us, so I'm pretty damned sure they attack women because women are biologically female. It's got fuck all to do with how those women identify internally.

Socially constructed gender (aka what feminists think "gender" refers to) attributes different traits and propensities to different sexes, entrenching a divide between the two and so creating strife between them. Think of sex as bodies and gender as minds. Minds aren't little isolated bubbles, immune to the tides of society. They're programmed by the society they live in, and they remake society in their turn, in a neverending feedback loop.

Innate gender identity (aka what trans* people think "gender" refers to) doesn't seem to have a great deal of relevance to the fact of sex crimes. Because the perpetrators of sex crimes haven't a clue what gender their targets identify as - they have no way of knowing unless explicitly told by the target - and so are clearly not aiming their attacks at one particular gender identity. We do know perpetrators of sex crimes target women of all ages, sizes, colours, sexualities, women in makeup and women in tracksuits, housebound ninety year olds, and twelve year olds on their way to school. Do all of these females have the same gender identity? I was first raped before I had any idea what a gender identity was, so how could I be said to have had one then?

Gosh, this is getting long. I'm going to disappear for another smoke and hope someone else comes along and posts before I waffle any further.

O-Kay, I bit the bullet and stuck it up as a thread, in the same words. Sorry Stormy, I didn't see your big post before opening it up (I keep having logging in problems so it took a while) do you want to just copy and paste it in or shall i?

I'll let you, if you're still around - if I open any more threads I'll never get to bed tonight!

Hello all! Been away. Camping in the rain. Will catch up when dry.

Welcome back *copper.

We are off camping in the Lake District at the end of Aug, I really really really hope it doesn't piss it down all weekend. I don't mind a bit of rain, I like the sound of it hitting the tent, but if I had to camp in the weather we've had here last few days, I'd have wrapped up and come home :)

Top Tip #1: Make sure DC actually pack more than one pair of socks.

Top Tip #2: Make sure they don't go running about in the rain in crocs when they've only packed one spare pair of socks.

Top Tip #3: Sainsbury's sell socks.

I guess top tip #4 would be 'never camp too far away from sainsburys or other purveyor of emergency clothes/rations'.

DofE is great for teaching kids to pack socks, pity it can't be done before teenage.

Some sainsbury's cafe are very friendly. Our local one is a purveyor of bad mood.

I've dried most things. DH can dry the tent.

DC have obviously got their minimalist tendencies from us. We pack small too. But not that small... Silly kids.

And I've ordered more stuff for my PFB going to secondary school. More to the point, I've bought a laundry pen.

I have never thought of looking for socks in the supermarket. I usually go in there for other stuff, you know, like rice and pasta. I don't think they actually sellsocks in my local supermarkets.

They sell socks in Tesco here, but it is a Tesco the size of an aircraft hangar and sells everything. We avoid the place because it makes DD scream.

So this Amnesty International prostitution as a human rights thing. It scares the bejesus out of me. Not on the grounds that it entrenches women's position as the sex class either. Does anyone else here follow with growing horror what Iain Duncan Smith is doing to the benefits system? It's such a scarily clear and easy path for them from this point to claimants being sanctioned because they refuse to prostitute themselves.

Suffices to say one must identify the purveyor of socks when on holiday.

at Amnesty.