Is a woman's gender/sex viewpoint mostly age-related?

[Terfulike]

Given the thread on BBC WhatsApp groups, is it an age issue? Is it related to young women having less experience of concrete sex-related experiences such as motherhood, rape, maternity leave impact on career etc. And how would these aspects be communicated to young women? (I'm 53 with 4 kids)

I think age must play a part - simply because experiencing different things informs your opinions, and you experience more things over time.

Do women become more feminist over time then 🤔? I certainly have.

I suspect being gender critical skews towards women who have experienced many decades as females but there are definitely much younger women who are too.

I'm sure many who have bought into gender ideology will grow out of it as they age and reality hits. A few years down the line these may end up being the women at the forefront of trying to undo a lot of the mess they unwisely contributed to.

And in answer to your second question, I think by discussing these things with our children and younger friends and colleagues (both male and female though).

And perhaps also the younger generation has more experiance of people being openly trans? although I sometimes think that is experimentation with gender identify which is different to trans as I understand it. Guess my age!

Unfortunately I don't think that it's because the rates of rape and sexual violence are going down, and I worry that young people are prepared to accept such violence as normal, which may make them more tolerant of greater risk.

ask questions, sometime they don't know the difficult questions to think about.my dd hadn't thought about the rape crisis centre question for example.

I think as you get older and realise exactly what you are capable of handling every day you are less prepared to tolerate sexist crap and inequality.

I think by definition as a woman gets older she is more likely to have experienced sexism. After all, sexism exists, and you can't un-experience it once it has happened.

Motherhood radicalises.

There's nothing quite like using your body to do something only female bodies do to bring home the impact of having that kind of body in this world. You go into motherhood thinking you'll come out of it still the same woman you were, and that others will continue to see you as the same valid human you've always been. Instead you find they now see you entirely differently. You've become their mum and your job is apparently to put yourself last - the job spec of mums worldwide.

When I was younger I thought I was holding my own against the men, beating them at their own game. I thought I was living evidence that the only thing holding other women back was themselves. Look at me - am I not proof that women are equal, or could be if they just believed more / tried harder / committed to stuff / stopped being such victims?

In essence, I was the special girl. I was the Belle who read books whilst the other silly girls waited for husbands.

And gradually I grew up, and realised that the illusion of equality doesn't outlast your twenties. And that the 'special girls' are just a handy tool for men to use to explain why most women are just a bit inferior, really.
Like hey - we've had a couple of female prime ministers, so that proves there is no sexism, what's your problem!
And then if you look closely, you start to see that it wasn't equality in the first place. Not even close. It was just a nicely marketed package of choicychoice 'feminism' telling women that wherever they end up is exactly where they deserve to be, because they chose it.

But it's very easy to believe that you are the embodiment of equality as a young woman, and the alternative realisation is very, very uncomfortable. Plus, it makes you awfully unpopular if you don't agree with all those lovely young men that everything is just ticketyboo for women today.

There are so many trans women who don't make the change until they are middle aged - late 40s onward.

There are so many women who don't see the inequality until they reach their 30s, have children, so 20s onward, or have been abandoned by their partner - any age.

Some women experience domestic abuse. Not age related.

I'd say that's age or experience related and a generational thing too.

I'm sure your question would be answered under the rules of misogyny.

Motherhood has definitely made me think "Oh! So that is where the inequality really gets a grip"

But as a teenager, the behaviour, conversation, porn of the boys was so disgusting and demeaning about women I was furious about that aspect, also the impossible beauty standards, double-standards around sexual activity - open misogyny, rather than division of labour, medical inequality, etc.

I don't interact with many males who would openly be as disgustingly misogynist as I did when I was a teen now, motherhood has made me feel really good about my body since I now see it as functional rather than decorative, so really the emphasis has changed.

I’m 36, child-free and getting more radical by the day.

I agree that the more you see of the world / the longer you’re in it, the more you spot the shitty misogyny (if your eyes are open).

As a young woman I lived in a very gender neutral bubble. We all wore jeans and checked shirts no sexualised clothing or extreme grooming, and mixed freely. I was never limited by my sex so I didn’t really realise how many women are (or how I would be as a mother or in other circles or just how things would change between the 90s and now).

Barracker Fantastic post, I agree with everything you have written. I too was a Belle and thought equality had been achieved. Motherhood has taught me so much and I wish younger me had grasped much earlier the impact of children on equality.

I’m in my early thirties and don’t have kids and am very gender critical.

I do work with pregnant women and young families though, and I was brought up my rad fems (my mother was a political lesbian that’s how hardcore they were) which I hated at the time but has totally shaken my worldview.

Our (male) manager was telling me the other day that he was horrified when a staff survey suggested 60% of women thought that having a child/another child would have an adverse effect on their career. I put forward the view that (a) they were very perceptive and probably right and (b) agreed it was appalling that this was the case. This was the same manager who said our massive gender pay gap would be fixed by replacing the lowest paid women (mainly cleaners, basic admin, caterers) with men I think he has some way to go

I agree with so much of the above, but also, having 2 kids has made me see just how much of a person is personality. I mean, I must have known before, but watching 2 babies go from tiny, out of focus humans and slowly sharpen into themselves really made clear that enormous chunks of a person were there from the beginning - my DSes had their specific personalities from the beginning - nascent, but still them.

And then also seeing that they're radically different to each other - how 2 people constructed of DP and my DNA can be such opposites is amazing - and then their cousins, also all so very different - and none of it is predicted by sex.

It made me more tolerant (DS1 is dyspraxic. DP, given they are so alike in so many ways, probably is too) of people - as long as they aren't being jerks, it took me out of the centre of my own universe, and made me have to go with the flow occasionally.

This might seem like I'm coming down on the side of gender - but actually my kids show me (even more than I already knew) that gender is bunkem. that we all have personalities, and gender is externally enforced, and no-one is going to define me because of my genitals (because that's gender - you must like pink because you are a girl - I can tell this because of your be-vaginaed body), but that doesn't mean I don't have specific genitals that perform a specific purpose (I am a girl, therefore I have a vagina, and you shouldn't infer anything more than that about my interests)

Now that I realise I thought of myself as a 'special girl', I see other 'special girls' all over the place - many in politics. All a bit self-congratulatory and a tiny bit sneering of the 'lesser' girls. The whole, I'm-not-like-the-other-girls, I'm an honorary member of the good-as-men club. I made it, what's up with you that you haven't?

And generally, they have no self-awareness or understanding that being a member of a teeny minority of women 'allowed' to consider themselves equal to a mass of mediocre men is still not equality.

Lots of young people like to see themselves as vanguard/radical/pushing the boundaries/liberationists. The actual causes change with the decades, but the psychological rewards remain the same. And the influence of peer pressure is also much greater at that age. And critical thinking abilities aren't really mature until age 25 or so.

It is absolutely age depended, imagine being in your teens/early twenties now with social media, hyper groomed bodies, porn on mobile phones, and identity politics just to name a few things. When I was a teen in the 90s we all wore plaid shirts, jeans and dms and moved freely. I was into Le Tigre, riotgrrrl stuff and artists like Cindy Sherman but I don’t think we generation Xs were that much into this pomo individualism the kids are into now. Oh and motherhood and life and the experience of sexism on a pretty much daily basis in a very male dominated industry (I’ve had a complete career change since).

Great post Barracker. My DD aged 12 gets the GC debate. My SDD aged 24 gets it but can’t talk about it with her peers or male partner without being accused of bigotry.

I'm 53 with 2 kids. I think my generation of feminists brought up with Germaine greer and the tail end of Spare Rib with transexuals a very very small minority thing and they all had surgery or were just creepy transvestites don't really understand how young feminists today can want to be just handmaidens for men who want to tell women how to really be women despite not actually wanting to remove their male sexual organ. It all seems bonkers to me. How did a small group of men manage to persuade young women that they were worth listening to and should be chosen over women to represent them?

I'm 42 and gave always been gender critical

But I have to pay more attention because the problem of gender is getting worse, when I was 20 I thought it would be dismissed as a false construct by the time I was 25.

In terms of feminism generally, I've always been a feminist in the sense of concerns on objectification, equal opportunity etc.

2rebecca
I don't know how that happened either. But I have seen posters on MN who didn't know why sex segregation happened in the first place.

If motherhood was key, surely we wouldn't have so many anti feminists in MN?

No-one is arguing absolutes though.

"Every woman becomes a diehard feminist upon becoming a mother"
No.

Only that for some women motherhood provides a rude awakening to misogyny that they can no longer ignore.

Individually, in my experience and the experience of friends:

Motherhood

Working in STEM or financial sectors/ the city or probably politics.

Age, career furthering etc - more likely to be working with older men or having to 'prove yourself'

Being sexually assaulted

All definitely alter the gender / sex view point. The last one that springs to mind regarding gender, was a gender neutral changing room voyeur issue which stopped the person in question being able to swim without company of a close friend at those baths.