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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Feminism: chat

Original poster

Dark and stormies all round! Bluestocking piss up

992 replies

QuentinSummers · 08/06/2018 23:05

A friendly place for feminist or general chit chat. Welcome all!

OP posts:
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11
ErrolTheDragon · 09/06/2018 00:18

Limonene.

My pad suggested limoncello when I started typing that... wouldn't mind a little bit of that over ice.

ILikeyourHairyHands · 09/06/2018 00:18

May I?

I only have big reds, illicit prescription pharmas and extreme annoyance to bring to the party.

R0wantrees · 09/06/2018 00:20

Permission if you google Rowan trees folklore, its quite interesting. For a rather spindly tree, they have a lot going on!

PermissionToSpeakSir · 09/06/2018 00:20

indeed. Her writing is amazing - but all her nonsense about toilets being for 'defecating' only made me wonder if she gets out much, and if she does, how often she actually brushes with joe public in the bogs like us normals.

R0wantrees · 09/06/2018 00:21

ILikeyour Extreme annoyance sounds interesting.

PermissionToSpeakSir · 09/06/2018 00:21

i will

PermissionToSpeakSir · 09/06/2018 00:22

indeed. please offload

R0wantrees · 09/06/2018 00:22

I think the toilet thing is more to do with her belief that some English folk have a strange sexual connection with toilet stuff.

BertrandRussell · 09/06/2018 00:23

I'm very very old and I don't think of Greer as the dry academic type....

ErrolTheDragon · 09/06/2018 00:24

Dry like wine, maybe...

R0wantrees · 09/06/2018 00:26

I think that a chapter in 'The Whole Woman' may make sense of a lot of things for me. Off away tomorrow to the sea... with it (& a standby book). I will take whisky too.

PermissionToSpeakSir · 09/06/2018 00:27

okay - dry is the wrong word - but i think she is uncomfortable with activism - she prefers analysis.

PermissionToSpeakSir · 09/06/2018 00:29

Do you fear she is becoming a rape apologist?

R0wantrees · 09/06/2018 00:30

I do wonder if there is a significant difference given she comes from Literature rather than politics, sociology etc.
I didn't realise how significant the chasm in discourse until I tried to switch.

R0wantrees · 09/06/2018 00:35

The capital letter is a typo rather than value judgement.

PermissionToSpeakSir · 09/06/2018 00:36

ha ha. So Rowan's are something of a witchy tree... and you can also make booze out of the fruit..

R0wantrees · 09/06/2018 00:39

Witchy in a good way- in some places they might be described as 'wise women'! I would describe some of my best friends as witchy-like!

I don't claim wisdom... I was looking out of the window when I had to choose a MN name.

PermissionToSpeakSir · 09/06/2018 00:43

I've got this book shop.nationaltrust.org.uk/britains-tree-story/p2166 and I love it. I've visited a few and it is always magical.

R0wantrees · 09/06/2018 00:44

I've had another whisky so will disclose that the Rowan in our garden (there are others on the other side of the wall) was planted when we decided to try to start a family.
I wanted a tree there, so jokingly called it the fertilitytree.
I'm more invested in naratives than superstition though and things went more wrong than we could have anticipated.

Its a lovely tree though!

ILikeyourHairyHands · 09/06/2018 00:45

I don't think Greer is becoming a rape apologist.

I understood completely what was saying.

I've been raped, in my first marriage and by a bloke I thought was my friend when I was 19.

It was shit, but it didn't diminish me, it didn't destroy me, I hated the fucker's for it, but there was no way I was going to report and go through a rape trial. I had a life to live.

Germain makes the very pertinent point that rape is generally a very fucking sad and mundane crime, but the process of prosecution flays the woman involved.

Much better to make it a shit thing that men do, make the bar for prosecution lower, make the punishment lower BUT make rape itself an unconscionable act.

Let it be known that you are a rapist and let society do the rest.

PermissionToSpeakSir · 09/06/2018 00:46

Btw bertrand I hope I wasn't being an arse -like i was dismissing your concerns about Greer.

R0wantrees · 09/06/2018 00:50

ILikeyourHairyHands I think I understand this. It's nuanced.

R0wantrees · 09/06/2018 00:55

The only gender theory that I have really studied was a subsiduary option. I took Women's Studies and my first essay way 'Is there such a thing as marital rape?' I don't thing people appreciate how recently the law changed.

PermissionToSpeakSir · 09/06/2018 00:56

I can see how the gravity of rape in law is muddied by patriarchal notions of 'damaged goods' - women as men's property.

It probably is worth revisiting because it is ridiculous the way people think only 'monsters' could perpetrate it and they don't see how utterly mundane it is, as you say, Hands, which doesn't help secure convictions.

I have an uncomfortable instinct there is something reactive about Greer writing a book on rape at this time - as though she is chiding radical feminists for perceiving it as the crux of male domination. Maybe I'm wrong.

Judashascomeintosomemoney · 09/06/2018 01:03

Does anyone remember back when M15 were recruiting from MN? I wonder how all that went, and if some people are on a right cushty little number getting paid to MN all day
And the thing is that no one will know who —we— they are Smile