female identifying only area at Glastonbury.

[Playduh]

http://i-d.vice.com/engb/article/glastonbury-announces-revolutionary-women-only-venue?utmm_source=idnewsletter

This just makes me so depressed. How have we got to a place where men are deemed so incapable of behaving themselves, women need to have a place to hide.

I'm teaching my son about respect and consent. Why am I bothering when society seems to think it's better to just fence off the women?

And (I accept I'm probably going up in flames for this one.) 'female identifying'? So it's not a safe place for women, it's a safe place for 'non-men' again isn't it?

"The fact that men's predatory disposition is unknowable should never have been raised, because you cannot use the same analogy for any characteristic other than gender."

The extremely unique violence perpetrated by human being males is not an argument against fear, it is an argument for fear.

Males and females share humor, love, fear, outrage, rejection, joy, and the entire panoply of human emotions, but men encourage, participate in, and excuse each others violence to a widespread degree that makes male violence unique.

www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431

Would you revise your hypothetical to take this tragically universal fact into consideration, or would that wreck the pity party you're trying to throw for yourself via your wife and daughter?

"Similarly, men with dark skin are Schroedinger's terrorists and Schroedinger's suicide bombers"

People are not afraid of your wife and daughter. PEOPLE ARE NOT AFRAID OF YOUR WIFE AND DAUGHTER.

You don't know that. You don't know her. What if my wife is a teacher? What if she abuses children in her care? What if she abuses our children? What if she is a carer who mistreats elderly and vulnerable people in her care? You don't know her.

What if my daughter takes part in on-line bullying? What if she encourages other girls to pick on vulnerable girls in her peer group? What if her cruelty drives vulnerable girls to self-harm, bulimia, anorexia, suicide? You don't know her.

Male violence and abuse is much more prevalent than female, but it is not unique. That is nonsense.

grim

Forgive the physics lesson but it is relevant.

Despite common understanding, the original Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment had an unquantified probability involved, so there is not a 50/50 chance the cat is alive or dead. Also, the point of the thought experiment is NOT that there's no way to know whether the cat is alive or dead without opening the box (though it's correct). The real point of the thought experiment is this: because the release of poison relies on a Quantum event the cat is actually, very literally, both dead and alive at the same time. Opening the box forces reality to shift from the Quantum world to the Classical world and makes the Universe decide the cat's fate. Scientific experiments have proved that, in simplified version of this, the experiment holds true.

Now, grim, this is the important bit. In real world experiments, the likelyhood of finding a "dead cat" is entirely dependent upon the probability of the deadly random event taking place. Whilst the principle holds for any probability between 1 and 0, in the real world we only care when the probability is of a value that impacts upon us. Schrödinger's Pet Shop with a probability of deadly radioactive decay of 1 event per cat per hour will go out of business. 1 event every million years will do fine.

So, whilst you are logically correct, in the real world it doesn't make sense to treat terrorists and rapists as equivalent. The probability of any particular woman being raped is high enough for it to be a genuine concern, the probability of any particular person being blown up by a terrorist is almost zero. The woman's fear of rape is rational, the Islamophobe's fear of terrorism is completely out of proportion to the risk.

As for comparison with racism and ethical equivalence... the comparison you're looking for is this:

In America, is it wise for a young black man to consider the possibility that a white cop in a black neighbourhood will mistake him for a criminal and shoot him?

Does answering "yes" mean he's a racist? Possibly. Does being racist against white cops increase the young man's chance of getting home at night safely? Yes, because some white cops are also racists. So, who's racism is the real problem here, that of the young black man trying to get home or that of the cop with the gun looking for someone to shoot? And can we fix the white cop's racism by stopping black kids being afraid of him? Or does it make more sense to stop white cops shooting innocent black kids?

So it is with Schrödinger's Rapist. If women are sexist against men, it's because men are sexist against women and will act on that sexism to commit acts of violence against them. The only way to tackle women's mistrust of men is to make men more trustworthy. Men telling women they have no right to be afraid of them because it's sexist makes the problem worse because it reinforces the male-biased power balance.

There, Mansplained it for you. :D

And very well mansplained it was to. Did you read the bit where I said that I get the Schroedinger's rapist argument, and that I neither disagree nor think that it is sexist?

Trying to move the goalposts from your initial canard about terrorism to the unrelated subject of generally cruel behaviors is really quite weak.

Interesting post, Clangersarepink.

It was in response to People are not afraid of your wife and daughter. PEOPLE ARE NOT AFRAID OF YOUR WIFE AND DAUGHTER. I didn't move the goalposts - you did. You have made the classic Fwr feminist assumption that women are inherently saintly and incapable of violence or abuse.

We were talking about terrorism and fears of terrorism driving judgments about terrorists, and you brought your wife and kid into a discussion on who is afraid of terrorism, who stereotypes brown people as terrorists, is it fair to be afraid of brown people because they could be terrorists and how might sex intersect with fear of violence and terrorism.

Then BOOM! "What if my daughter picks on girls, girls aren't angels y'know, wah!"

Just keep denying the MRA charge all the while pulling out MRA 101 debate tactics that do their worst to avoid acknowledgment of the absolutely epidemic scourge of male violence ruining this beautiful world.

People still aren't afraid that your family womenfolk might be terrorists even if your daughter is a mean-spirited shit.

You explicitly said that no-one is afraid of her. You wrote it, about someone you don't know. Then you accuse me of dragging her into the argument. So now you have to play the MRA card. Well done. As I said earlier, there is no middle ground with bigots. Good night.

But the conversation was about fear and perceptions. Now I don't know (although I'm comfortable in saying I think it's unlikely) if there is anything about your wife that might legitimately make strangers fear her, but I very much doubt that anyone fears your daughter (assuming she is a child).

People bring their experiences and what they have been told and make deductions based on them. Often not very accurate deductions, but we base our fears on some sort of calculation. Women are told from a young age that they aren't safe on their own, that they should dress in ways that make them 'less of a target', that they are taking their lives into their hands if they walk down the street at night etc. They see on the news the all too frequent reports of women being abused and killed by men, and then add in their own experiences, and most of us have a few.

So we worry. We worry about random men we might encounter at night and whether we might in some way be 'asking for it'. We worry less about our male friends and our boyfriends/husbands although in truth we should worry more as we are more likely to be attacked by them.

Perhaps we also worry about terrorism, but then lots of terrorists are men, so that's really just an additive factor isn't it?

Sure there have been terrorist attacks, and many more planned and foiled. But then the same could be said for sexual assaults couldn't it? I'm sure that most rapists plan far more rapes than they carry out.

Oh but you are a thick one, aren't you?

Yes indeedy, I decided to temporarily leave off the discussion of fearing rape, terrorism, male violence, and racial profiling to make a random statement asserting that no one has ever met your wife has ever been afraid of her for anything she has ever done or been suspected of doing. You got me!

5 people have been killed by terrorists in the UK in the last ten years

That is nonsense. Goodness knows where you found that figure.

I was out for a run yesterday on a canal towpath and there were a few other people walking along that I passed (with difficulty ). There were a couple of lone men, two teenage girls walking a dog (maybe one of them was grimarse's daughter??) a male/female couple.
Now, I did have a slight worry that when I passed the girls they might have thought I had a big arse or they might have took the piss a bit (I'm so old now that they probably didn't even register my existence though!). The couple I didn't worry about because they were adults and one of them was female so, from experience, I knew it'd be pretty unlikely that there would be any danger for me.
The 2 separate men that I passed, I did think twice about. It's unlikely that either of them would be a rapist and also the sort of rapist who would attack someone in a public place, and I would have been really unlucky to have come across a man like that on that particular day and time. I don't run at a regular time so no one would have known I'd be going etc etc. The official advice for women is to vary thief route and not to go to the same isolated place at the same time to avoid giving a man the chance to attack you, shockingly this is the kind of risk assessment that women really have to do in real life every day. I'm not scared of women attacking me, or teenage girls, because they generally don't attack anyone. I am (a bit) scared of being attacked by a man because women and men are often victims of male violence. It's just common sense that I'm statistically safer with a woman than with a man. Everyone is, men, women, and children. Women are less violent than men. It's just true.
Sorry this is probably too simplistic but I just wanted to say it because this is real life for women in the world of men.

What no one seems to have pointed out about terrorists, is that they are also predominantly men.

lass I got it from here

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_Great_Britain

7/7 was 11 years ago so I didn't add it in. If I had then the number would go up to 57. Compared with around 1100 women killed and
If you have better stats let me know, I'm not sure its really relevant though, there are definitely are not even close to 2 people a week killed by terrorists in the UK.

There were approximately 10000 convictions for rape and sexual offences in 2015 alone
www.cps.gov.uk/news/latest_news/highest_ever_numbers_of_violence_against_women_cases_being_prosecuted_and_convicted_in_england_and_wales/

Hey though, terrorism is equally a risk and we should definitely all be scared of brown people

That terrorism figure is way off. 4 people were murdered by terrorists in one week earlier this year in Belfast.

Hey though, terrorism is equally a risk and we should definitely all be scared of brown people hmm

Not non-existent doesn't mean equal.
I haven't read that anybody has said they are equal risk.

Ah, well, that explains it - that page is Great Britain, not the UK.

Vestal, where are you getting your 15% of men are rapists statistic from?

There are some references here sapac.umich.edu/article/196

Surveys have consistently reported that college men acknowledged forced intercourse at a rate of 5-15% and college sexual aggression at a rate of 15-25% (Koss, Gidycz, and Wisniewski, 1987; Malamuth, Sockloskie, Koss, and Tanaka, 1991)

The national survey of rape conducted by Koss et al. (1987) revealed that 1 in 12 college men committed acts that met the legal definition of rape, and of those men, 84% did not consider their actions to be illegal

In a large study of college men, 8.8% admitted rape or attempted rape (Ouimette & Riggs, 1998)

So it's a pretty substantiated figure (I've seen other studies supporting it among sailors I seem to remember as well).

There's an interesting discrepancy between admitting 'Rape' and admitting

Aaand Grimarse succeeded in derailing the conversation and now we are all trying to prove to him that we are right to fear men, instead of having any kind of productive conversation.

Which ... kind of in itself proves that we need women-only spaces for feminist debate.

Reclaim the Internet comes to mind. FWR board a target, and threads are so frequently derailed.

Back to Glastonbury, how do they justify this decision?

Women only would mean there's safety from groping. Which is a very important and big difference to the alternative.

Self-identified women only would mean there is ... what? Freedom to use the pronoun "she" for everyone in the tent? How does that make a music festival any more fun?

I think back to my mum telling me in the swimming pool changing rooms when I was little, that there wasn't any reason to be embarrassed, we all have the same bits.

I remember once I'd grown up, going into my first London gym, full of naked Scandinavians using the hair dryer and repeating it to myself - 'no-one cares, we all have the same stuff, it's fine', or in communal showers at a biker rally. And it was true. None of the women cared, it was friendly, there was chatting and laughter, and women just getting on with each other care-free.

When that's not true though, when we don't all have the same bits, then how does that work? I can't imagine ever being comfortable enough to go in communal showers at a biker rally if men were in there too.