Its all one big conspiracy

[yazz21]

Its only after all the transgender threads on here recently, that I've thought about feminism, and started looking into things. The more I read, the more I learn, the more shocked I am.

Its just like one massive conspiracy that I never saw. Now my eyes have been opened to it, I can't stop seeing it. (Not that I'd want to.) I see everything around me so differently. Just little things that all add up to keeping women subordinate.I never realised how much my behaviour, thoughts and actions is not innate, but things I've learned through socialisation.

I really wish I'd seen it all earlier, but for some reason I had this notion that feminism was just men hating women who were probably hairy and/or lesbians I wonder who benefitted from me thinking that.

I'm not sure what my point is really, but I feel really angry on behalf of women and really want to do something about it. However there are no feminist groups/meetings in my area, and I'm not well read enough to start one. Any other angry womenn here? Also if anyone could reccomend some books, so I can further my understanding. I would be really grateful.

I feel the everyday Minimalism movement is inherently feminist and has really got me thinking about what I spend my money on and why over the last few years.

People really don't like to think of themselves as being constantly manipulated by the capitalist machine but of course we are. It can take a great many personal decisions to step away from buying magazines that make you feel bad about yourself and disconnect from the never ending stream of advertising and marketing we are subject too - it can be done though, and once you disconnect the influence wanes quickly.

It's not enough to feel ashamed of hairy legs and pits - that could be easily dealt with by a basic cheap razor. No you need the extra special, luxury, higher performing and infinitely more expensive razor - because you are worth it and you NEED it. And more than anything these companies are driven by wanting to get their hands on your money.

Until you don't need it anymore. Until you have a breakthrough moment like the OP has, like so many of us have and you just see this shit for what it is. A commercial exchange, where many companies will go to great lengths to prey on and even create/invent insecurities in our lives (feminine odour anyone) in order to get us to part with our money.

Garlick, I find this stuff about mega-corporations fascinating. I can picture a couple of the companies already - I worked at one of them until very recently, although on the IT side of the business. Seeing their product range at their HQ was a real eye-opener - brand names you would never associate with the corporate name.

How significant do you think it is that men are at the helm of most of them? Could you see a difference in corporate culture, or marketing emphasis, if women lead these companies?

I have no idea, Yops, but I really REALLY want us to find out!

Great thread.
It's like Women's bodies are prime for public ridicule in a way that's sonehow different to the way we discuss men.
Today at a lunch with girl friends I noticed them discussing tennis players - Nadal etc and what great players they were. Then it came into Serena Williams and all they could say was how butch and manly she looked, how ridiculous she looked. Not one woman in the group ( bar me) commented on what a superb athlete she was.
I thought. This is a feminist issue! He way we view ourselves is so warped.

They thought Serena looked ridiculous????? Bloody hell..........

I don't think it would make any difference if women led these companies. Whoever gets to the top of the management chain is going to be totally inculcated with the values of capitalism. The marketing specialisation is a problem with modern capitalism I think, it's not particularly gender-specific. I'm grumblng because I've recently moved to a new area and am having to find new supplies of all my favourite products. This includes plain old ecofriendly multisurface cleaner. Can I find it? I can find bathroom cleaner, kitchen cleaner, kitchen floor cleaner, kitchen surface cleaner, tap cleaner fgs, no multisurface., all in nice small spray-top bottles instead of a decent sized pouring bottle, when did that lot all diversify?

I think conspiracy is a helpful way of thinking about it - the last time a guy made a joke about women drivers it struck me that we'd never met before, he didn't know me, we had nothing in common, but he assumed I'd find it funny if he said women are shit drivers. In fact, more than that, he assumed that the way to get me to like him was to make that comment. Just as if it was a password or a secret handshake, a way of murmuring 'I'm one of us, just like you are.'

It's astonishing how often men try to bond with other men they've never met by being sexist. All the way from comments about nagging wives when you meet a new girlfriend's father, to 'jokes' about putting a drug in a woman's drink from the guy on the next barstool. There may not be meetings and initiations, but an awful lot of men act exactly the way you'd expect them to if there was some great secret sexist fraternal lodge we were all members of.

pialogue.info/books/Century-of-the-Self.php

I just found this link, about how the modern marketing and capitalism was created - "What the corporations realized they had to do was transform the way the majority of Americans thought about products. One leading Wall Street banker, Paul Mazer of Leahman Brothers was clear about what was necessary. We must shift America, he wrote, from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs."

They certainly used gender to create markets - I'm sure I remember a clip of Eleanor Roosevelt of all people (perhaps it wasn't her) telling women they had to express their individualism through clothing, perhaps it's in that link if I read all the way through it - but it isn't solely gender based. The aim is the marketing and creating consumerism-led economy.

Um. Hope that's interesting.

Yeah, I mean those are especially depressing examples, which is why they've stuck in my memory. A lot of people say that men are only sexist amongst their friends, or in company where they know it won't be taken seriously, but that has not been my experience. I've had it quite frequently as a lowest-common-denominator thing, something they assume we have in common.

I'm not sure where it originates, though I'm tempted to blame the way our culture immediately groups boys and girls into separate 'classes' throughout their growing up. It may be nothing more sinister at root than 'Hey, I see you've got a Man U key ring, I used to have a season ticket!' in origin, any 'in-group' connection might work. But of course it intersects with all sorts of power imbalances and structural problems, so the guy's thoughts go from 'must find something in common' to 'we are both part of the category male' to 'male identity is reinforced by the degradation of women'. Though I'm not a social scientist so that's just a v speculative take on it.

Ha! Physician, heal thyself, (Or at least make meaningful interventions in the structure of thy socio-cultural context), to mangle an old phrase.

Oh, that takes me back. A mate of mine went through a phase of declaring anything he wanted to ignore 'an effect of discourse, innit.' Closing time at the pub, looming deadlines, the calorie content of fried breakfasts... It was more reliably funny than you might have thought.

Has anyone else seen this sketch on advertising by Mitchell & Webb?

I have witnessed groups of men saying things, about their (grown-up) daughters, about their wives, nudge-nudge-wink-wink - we all know they can't be trusted with my credit card, must buy them a diamond ring to make them happy etc. Makes you feel pretty uncomfortable.

REALLY well said, Quite I find myself attacked & being 'paranoid' if I remark on this in a discussion! Obviously the fact that I've spent half my life going "Er, have you thought about what you just said?" in my capacity as nearly-as-equal-as-a-bloke woman does nothing to mitigate my feminist tendency to raging paranoia and making stuff up.

Women do a bit of bonding over "men are stupid", I think, and a few other sexist things. But there is a difference in nature - the mindless shite men say about women is often quite predatory and/or specific. There isn't a vast shared store of father-in-law jokes, for instance, or phrases like "look at the state of that" for men. Most superficial female bonding happens around our gender role performance - children; hair, clothes, diet; wifework - or other women's, as sleb gossip.

We exist as adjuncts to other people's lives, mainly, which is why England's tweet about the women's football team was so offensive and so easily done.

Thank you Buffy, for expanding my statement that women have more freedom than men to choose clothing, saying that more options don't equate to more freedom. That's a good way to put it, and I can recall seeing that idea carried pretty much to the limit on TV. They were interviewing a nun who lives in a convent, and the interviewer asked the obvious question, "Haven't you given up all your freedom?" And the nun replied, "I don't think so at all. All those things people concern themselves withjobs, relationships, what to wearthey're all irrelevant to me. I have the community here and my link with God, and I feel totally free." That might not suit many of us, but it's a point of view.

Regarding deodorant (mentioned above): even here where everyone is using a made-up name, will anyone admit to not using it? As it happens, I don't, and before anyone asks, no I don't have social problems as a result! It may not be a feminist issue, but it certainly is a concern about how things are produced and marketed. The manufacturers have got us (almost) all feeling insecure about whether our natural bodies are fit to go out in the world without adding chemicals, and I just feel insulted by that idea. Imagine the bad old days before that stuff was invented, along with the marketing techniques to make us think we need it. Yet somehow the birth rate was higher then.

I've heard of a concept called "homosocial behaviour". It's where we act in ways that reinforce our membership of a group, helping us feel less isolated. Sometimes it seems as if a lot of gendered behaviour is like this, people reassuring themselves that they are a "proper woman" or a "proper man". Men making disparaging remarks about women to other menor outright bullying of womenmight be a part of it. And maybe women making negative comments about other women's appearance is part of it too. It's all very nebulous and hard to prove, though.

Since you asked, Tei ... I didn't use deodorant for years. Had to start when the menopause did. I suspect it's more genetics than anything else; some people do pong more.

YY to 'homosocial', though it's a new word to me. It's a tribal thing and is common across many species in their various ways. I did tons of work on this - understanding (and trying to manipulate) self-defined groups. It is all nebulous, but not actually that hard to pin down. Ime people who find it mystifying are those who over-estimate their cultural independence. Opinion-forming cliques are actually very self aware and can clearly describe their micro-culture.

Fascinating stuff! People are so odd, and also so predictable

I don't use deodorant either (or antiperspirant for that matter) and I don't shave under my arms. Apparently I must be really smelly but no one has ever told me. I think that's pretty unlikely as I've been told plenty of other things about my appearance. I do have the dry earwax gene though, so probably genuinely don't have much BO (at least from my under arms anyway). I don't use smelly products mainly because they make me feel ill.

I did a marketing class a little while back and found it enjoyable but also abhorrent. There was an interesting moment in the class when the professor mentioned razors for women as being largely a marketing play used when the manufacturers of razors needed to make up for changing trends in men's shaving (I think it was the change from barbers to doing it at home), and there was a bit of an influx of breath around the room when the professor said that women didn't shave before then. It was depressing.

Talking about men bonding over joking about women, one of the weirdest "jokes" I hear time and time again is that men are under the rule and thumb of their wives, a kind of winky "better check with the missus - we all know who the boss is!" type joke.

Loads of men I know do it, some affectionately some not, didn't even Obama do it about Michelle?, but even when done affectionately it's still irritating because I've only met a couple of partnerships where the woman is clearly dominant.

I wonder why