Are you scared?

[Jeanhatchet]

I. Am. Terrified.

The pace and scale of the attack on women and specifically feminists is like nothing I have seen in my lifetime.

Women are being arrested for speaking about being female. Women are insulted with derogatory terms for using words referring to their own bodies and the functions of those bodies. Suspended from their own political parties. Hounded from their jobs. Thrown out of their online spaces and denounced as bigots. Prevented from meeting to speak together. Prevented from hiring spaces to speak to each other. Being forced to say things that aren't provably true and that they really don't believe. Called terms that make them unsure of themselves. Gaslighted into accepting those terms. Made to feel guilty for wanting space where they feel safe and that has always been theirs and protected legally. Feeling uncomfortable for wanting to assert their legal rights. Feeling uncomfortable for saying no to male bodied people. Feeling uncomfortable for being lesbian and wanting only female partners. Feeling unsure if they can speak because they are terrified of upsetting a body of people who seem to have more power in every area of their lives even though those people are a tiny tiny minority.

As I just said elsewhere.... some women can take the temperature of the social/political/cultural water and feel their feet getting hot. I hope other women can feel this happening before women as a sex class is boiled alive. It is already uncomfortably hot for women speaking out. We are risking an awful lot.

I continue speaking out. I will be speaking at events wherever I'm invited about what is happening. Am I scared? Damn right I'm scared. Speaking about my body and beliefs about that body has become a revolutionary act.

Rather than ask if I'm scared that women are under such an organised, aggressive and escalating programme of attack I ask this of women who aren't scared .....why aren't you?

I ama scared. Not for myself, but for all women. And I am angry. So angry you wouldn't believe. How dare they try and gaslight us over our very existence? How stupid and unthinking are some of these people? I always thought it would be abortion rights that would bring me out on the streets. I think it's this. And I think it will be the cracking point for a lot more women when it starts to affect them and their daughters. Like austerity, it doesn't touch a lot of people. With austerity they are going to start screaming when their bins don't get emptied. With this they are going to take longer to wake up because so many women don't think they have a right to be free of men.

I will fight this.

How stupid and unthinking are some of these people?

They are not unthinking - they have very carefully figured out how to gaslight people into taking pity on them and vilifying the nasty women. To be fair, it really doesn't take much for some women to go against other women if they think it keeps men happy.

Not scared. Very angry , very determined and saddened at the reality it's exposed of how much of society truly believes at gut level that women are subhuman, and how skin deep women's rights are. Essentially women may have rights so long as they in no way inconvenience a man. Fuck that. I am not going along with that. They're going to need a bigger bat.

@larrygrylls and yet there are so many women loving this post by @Bloodmagic .... an awful lot. You're in a minority Larry.

Oh, ignore Larry, Jean - he's a regular.

Bowlofbabelfish May 3 at 10:04:

There was a shift in the media a while back with 24 hour news. It meant that content was more important than facts - any errors just got a quick errata that no one noticed at some point in the flow.
Then it kind of mutated to news not just not being fact checked but anyone writing anything in the web. So now opinions are edging out facts.
And then slowly, the opinion based stuff takes over. Trump and fake news - casting doubt in the few remaining outlets that do actually check facts.

That's a very interesting point. The idea that just the plain old firehose-of-"information" aspect is a significant component in the degradation of real information and therefore understanding.

I think you're on to something. The really valuable part of that insight is it points the way to at least part of a solution.

Shut down the firehose. We need manageable trickles!

No, I have no idea how to accomplish that, but if we at least know the direction to head in, we have a better chance of getting there.

Fantastic post, @Bloodmagic.

I have been pondering Bloodmagic's post, as it was thought-provoking. I remembered that most male calves are destined for veal crates or fattening up for steaks. Very few are retained for breeding.

Maybe we could keep Chris Hemsworth in a field somewhere boat?

Ha Sontaran!

I will confess to thinking about Bloodmagic's 1 man/100 women = the village keeps going, and then wondering how you'd get around the massive in-breeding issue & half-sibling pairings one generation later. I read and watch quite a lot of sci-fi, so I'm quite used to entertaining the idea of alternative universes etc. Having lived in a remote area with a mobile library service when I was a teen, it occurred to me that Bloodmagic's notional universe would need 'travelling inseminators' to mix things up a bit. I can't decide whether that's only a fun job in concept and whether, like people with jobs that involve a lot of international travel, the novelty wears off pretty quickly. It's when you puzzle through how to prevent the half-sibling/cousin pairings (and the rapid spread of STDs) that you start to see the benefit of many more men and a stable society with a reasonable grasp of lineage and record-keeping.

So, I want to thank Bloodmagic for giving me something different to think about on my morning commute today. I wasn't looking forwards to going back after the bank holiday & I forgot all about work until I was standing outside my building.

I'm not scared exactly - but I know that I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege where I am cushioned in RL from this stuff (there are pretty much zero trans rights in the country where I live, and the likelihood of keyboard warriors doing something that affects me in RL is fairly similar, for various reasons including having my own armed security ). So I feel like a distant observer.

Having said that... I have just read the Handmaid's Tale. I know, I know, I should have read it years ago - I sort of felt like I knew it, because so much has passed into popular culture (I knew what a handmaid is, where Gilead is, what a Salvaging is etc etc). But the detail of it...well, it reads like an account of five years down the road and that is terrifying.

Because uni-age women aren't experienced enough to recognise their own oppression, they swallow the "trans women are the most oppressed" narrative hook line and sinker.

^^ Yy to this

boat

I'm scared too. And angry. But with myself as much as with what is going on now. As in, I took my eye off the ball. It's not exactly that I thought the feminist war was won, but I did think there was a general forwards trundle.

Ah, I have not worked out how to put line breaks in! Please bear with me. Post was going to continue:

Oh FFS. Post was going to continue:

I know, from lurking (and very occasional posting) here that a lot of women had NOT taken their eye off the ball and that's really important. I also know that I'm not going to get a kicking here for having done so.

Re the post about younger women earlier in the thread, I completely agree that there's such a lot that they don't know yet. We probably can't even expect to be able to tell them they are wrong. After all at their age they are supposed to be thinking they are right, starting to think "for themselves". We just have to bite the bullet of being right (but repulsive, see "1066 And All That") and press on. What will be worse in twenty years' time: telling our daughters "oh, yeah, we just gave up" or, "we knew you'd hate us to start with, but we couldn't not fight"?

But yes I feel scared. But also somehow refreshed - eye back on the ball. And, sometimes, optimistic. For example the FBU (Lucy Masoud who has spoken at a Woman's Place talk is a firefighter) have endorsed what A Woman's Place is saying: www.socfem.net/2018/05/london-fbu-lgbt

Because uni-age women aren't experienced enough to recognise their own oppression, they swallow the "trans women are the most oppressed" narrative hook line and sinker.

Or perhaps they have come to view trans women who were assigned male at birth and been gendered boy/ man for part of their lives as being one the many iterations of what being a woman in the world can be.

Or maybe they understand feminism as being rooted in the view that the most authentic source of knowledge about our realities is our own experience.......

Which does give this anachronistic strand of trans-exclusionary radical feminism one of it's paradoxes - feminists telling people (including trans people) that they are not the authorities on their own lived experiences.

Or perhaps they have come to view trans women who were assigned male at birth and been gendered boy/ man for part of their lives as being one the many iterations of what being a woman in the world can be

Why can't they be one of the many iterations of what being a man in the world can be? Why isn't OK to have a beard and also wear a long flowing skirt and lots of jewelry?

What will be worse in twenty years' time:

Telling our daughters that we were so change averse and transphobic that we couldn't see past our own anti-trans ideology.

Which does give this anachronistic strand of trans-exclusionary radical feminism one of it's paradoxes - feminists telling people (including trans people) that they are not the authorities on their own lived experiences.

You're going to have to go elsewhere for whatever anachronistic analysis it is that you are looking for; discussion here seems to me to be very much up to date.

I also have not seen anyone telling trans people that they are not the owners of their own experinence. Just that they are not the owners of other people's.

Or maybe they understand feminism as being rooted in the view that the most authentic source of knowledge about our realities is our own experience.......

I might buy that if there was the faintest recognition, care about or respect for the lived experience of women and why their authentic knowledge about their reality is causing them to point out ways in which self ID in its current proposed form negatively affects them.

Your post pretty much demonstrates, this kind of feminism is about respecting specific people's lived experience and knowledge while actively suppressing and shaming into silence the experience of others. In fact almost entirely others whose lived experience and voices are inconvenient to the narrative.

Why can't they be one of the many iterations of what being a man in the world can be? Why isn't OK to have a beard and also wear a long flowing skirt and lots of jewelry?

They can if that's what they are, it is ok. But some women don't want a beard, have no interest in skirts or jewellery, and feel more comfortable with breasts and a vagina instead of a penis.

I think feminism is netirely about change, @supermatchgame. I mean, obviously if you're quite happy with the status quo that's your prerogative.

Nope not scared getting more and more pissed off with every passing day. Empowerment is what is needed, not fear, we have done it before we can do it again.

I also have not seen anyone telling trans people that they are not the owners of their own experinence. Just that they are not the owners of other people's.

I see that quite a lot on here, daily, telling trans people that their experiences are not authentic or valid. Not theirs even - because they are not women/ men so they cannot have any experience of being a woman/ man. I don't recall seeing trans people saying they own anything other than their own experiences.

care about or respect for the lived experience of women and why their authentic knowledge about their reality is causing them to point out ways in which self ID in its current proposed form negatively affects them.

I've seen many trans women talking about exactly that: how unregulated self ID could negatively affect women including trans women.