Being a woman is scary - Guardian article

[nellodee]

www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2019/mar/25/being-a-woman-is-scary-the-unspoken-danger-of-declining-a-mans-advances

Although, of course, being a TRANS woman is scarier.

Jameela's pinned tweet:

"It is never too late to check yourself and right your wrongs. I used to be slut shamey, judgmental, and my feminism wasn’t intersectional enough. Nobody is born perfectly “woke”. Listen, read, learn, grow, change and make room for everyone. We aren’t free til ALL of us are free."

I assume perfectly woke is the state of mind we should all be aiming for, sort of akin to godliness.

Very glad to hear that Deborah Orr has changed her mind and is being very vocal about it too

Dear god, poor Jameela. What a horrifying story about being punched in the face.

The trans reference in the article just seemed to have been shoehorned in

I assume perfectly woke is the state of mind we should all be aiming for, sort of akin to godliness.

Yeah, nirvana is so over now

I think it’s worth mentioning that Deborah Orr got sacked from the Guardian at the beginning of last year, and hasn’t written anything for the newspaper since, I think, January 2018. I suspect it was because she was no longer fitting in with the editorial tone...

The trans reference in the article just seemed to have been shoehorned in
Yes and the reference to sex workers instead of prostitutes is just as crass - I'm not aware of pimps and porn makers living in fear of unwanted advances. Do they still have sub editors? Cos it reads to me as if someone else stuck that sentence in.

That article was by-lined Laura Bates though, she of Everyday Sexism? That's really disappointing, if it's the same person.

Yes, it's the same Laura Barton. I'm just looking at that sentence again:

"For certain groups in particular, including trans women, women of colour and sex workers, it is well documented that refusing unwanted advances can result in aggression, physical or sexual violence, or even murder."

Where is it well-documented? She doesn't provide any links. We know that all women who refuse unwanted advances at at risk of physical assault. It wouldn't surprise me if this happened more often to women of colour than white women, though I'd like to see the evidence, and of course we know that prostitutes as a group are particularly at risk of violence.

But is there any evidence that trans women who turn down men's advances are more likely to be assaulted than women? We know that the murder rate for trans women is lower than the murder rate for women. We also know that in countries where trans women are at particular risk of being murdered, it's because a high proportion of them are working as prostitutes. I would like to see some solid stats in support of her assertion.

Michael Buerk apparently tries to put his finger on the problem in the Radio Times today.

This is the Daily Mails article taken from it:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6849855/Michael-Buerk-says-BBC-young-urban-middle-class-risk-smaller-worldview.html

I suspect there is some truth there.

1. The big name London private schools, with the loss of the assisted places scheme and the growth of the City have become a lot less diverse, in terms of income (the children of doctors or middle ranking civil servants have all but disappeared), yet far far more diverse in terms of race or religion. To some extent this means pupils with family and cultural links outside the UK. Not bad in itself, but many will not have spent much time outside the M25.

1. London is less accessible for those hoping to start an arts career form outside London, especially those who are less well off. Living is expensive and there is less money in things like journalism. To land the BBC or Guardian job you probably need experience and to get that experience you probably need the resources to write without being paid and ideally the contacts too. Plus the demands of diversity might mean that the Jameelas from their central London private schools are in the queue ahead of the bright working class boy from Huddersfield, the sort of background that was common when Buerk was starting out in the 60's. Provincial newspapers are dying a death so no longer provide a launch pad, and sadly a couple of years writing about mobility scooter accidents for the Bournemouth Daily Echo probably does not give you the woke vocabulary to shine at a BBC/Guardian interview.

Readership normally provides a reality check. However because of their alternative sources of funding, both the BBC and the Guardian, for now at least, have less need to keep a wider less-woke population on board.

Needmore, did you mean to post in this thread? I mean, it's a very thoughtful and interesting post but I'm not clear how it relates to the topic.

My apologies if it does and I'm being dense!

I did. It was sort of about where the Guardian and Jameela are coming from. The article seems to be aimed at a urban, young, affluent and woke readership, and so linked with the Buerk article I read this morning. (For whatever reason the Mail have two versions of the same article the second focussing more on the private school element, both contents presumably covered in the source article. )

I thought the Buerk article was useful as it attempts to explain what none of us really understand, which is why the Guardian and its allies keep printing such god-awful light-weight stuff.

I don't know whether Laura Bates is GC - she may not be. But the more I read that phrase, the more it feels clunky, lazy and under researched. I'm inclined to think she either stuck it in as an afterthought - and maybe after a nudge from the Graun - or that someone else added it. If it's the latter, I would imagine she's mightily pissed off.