I'm not convinced that feminism has helped the women it should have?

[soapona]

I think on these discussion boards and on my Facebook I see women. They don't insist on marriage so they partner remains married to the ex for years and year, they live together and I wonder what will happen should the man die. I also see women with no security living with men with no intentions of marrying and having children. Women moving in with men too soon. In the days gone by women would and could have insisted on commitment. So now the position for women is worse hanging round waiting for a proposal.

I know they don't have to I'm fairly wealthy and a single parent so have choices and always have. I don't have a lot to gain from marriage.

I'm not sure things have got better for women we are expected to do a lot now two incomes are the usual for a mortgage instead of one in the olden days . So it's a given women work, do the most childcare do we honestly think these thing will change when the power imbalance is there from the beginning?

Also the women marrying "beneath themselves", that's not the correct term but a man earning less and not likely to come into a decent inheritance. What is the point in getting married there if you're a women? Perhaps if the woman is wealthy to avoid inheritance tax for her children but other than that I don't know?

So would woman not be happier marrying the same or above and insisting on marriage early on, like it was a given in days gone by?

Surely Women are now in very risky positions due to this living together in a man's property. I see much more domestic abuse these days. I believe the stats are much higher with non married couples. Surely living together unmarried has been caused by equality and feminism and the very people feminists has been trying to help they've hindered.

sakura184
I really hope you don't have a boy child.

“I really hope you don't have a boy child”

People have been saying that to feminists for generations!

I’m English-Irish-Māori. I’ve loads of stories about my working class families and all of them, Ireland, England, NZ, stayed home with their children. I don’t think your claim that only rich women stay home with their children, is correct at all. Certainly not in my own friendship circles. The only mums I knew at school ( in uk ) who worked had fancy jobs and were absolutely middle class. They often made snide comments about us sahm- some of whom worked a few hours a week while kids were at school. A lot of us didn’t have the sort of work that made childcare worth it as well, financially speaking.

“I really hope you don't have a boy child”.

The thing is with this statement although I'm interested to know @sakura184 has a boy. I notice with my own12 year old boy it doesn't matter what my beliefs are the school sells their brand of propaganda which is very left wing pro transgender, abortion, encouraging casual sex, against marriage and but in reality men are the top of the heap and we enable it with encouraging equality. Children are told to question transgender is a hate crime.

Boys are as much victims of patriarchy as girls. Fathers love their children too and children love their fathers.
Ideally a loving relationship with a man would be the best way to bring a child into the world, as long as he doesn't step on mothers rights
I don't believe in the mystical mother. I've seen too many women who shouldn't ever have had children, I've also seen many men who are kind, caring and would do anything for their child.
If patriarchy is embedded in the Y chromosome and not a political, social system then there's no hope for feminism any more than pacifism.

“Boys are as much victims of patriarchy as girls.“

Yes- boys are victims of the patriarchy. And girls can benefit from it. But the % of boys who benefit outweighs the girls who benefit by an order of magnitude.

And, frankly, it’s about time men realised this and did something about it.

If patriarchy is embedded in the Y chromosome and not a political, social system then there's no hope for feminism any more than pacifism.

I've never argued there is hope for feminism. I did think there was at one time, not so much anymore.

On my Facebook today, a feminist I know announced that two of her three sons have been charged with domestic assault, one for strangulation. Her niece told her it was the result of bad parenting.
Mother blaming psychobabble. Women always to blame for men's actions. Patriarchy is so powerful that even the most feminist mother can't raise her sons the way she wants. It's just impossible. We can't know if it's nature or nurture when patriarchy is this powerful, although I suspect it's a bit of both when it comes to men.

I read a book once detailing that the reason Japanese me raped women en masse in China during the war was because Japanese mothers were controlling and the men were just acting out. Mother blaming at its finest

I don't believe in the mystical mother. I've seen too many women who shouldn't ever have had children, I've also seen many men who are kind, caring and would do anything for their child.

I don't dispute this. It seems that most mothers shouldn't have had children to me. But men doing the slightest efforts are regarded as Disney dads, just because they're not doing worse to their kids. Neglect is a mother's crime, and there are plenty of neglectful mothers for sure.
Men and women are held to entirely different standards when it comes to children. I do wonder if mothers could do a better job if society and the state supported them better. We'll never know, patriarchy is too old, too powerful and too far gone

If you want to be a mother but don't want a man you just need to go out for a walk at night in my area, you'll be guaranteed to get raped

Yet another hideously offensive and insensitive pronouncement.

YY I agree with you @sakura184.
But the answer to me doesn’t lie in hormones or protecting women right nowadays. It’s about making men responsible for their part.
It’s about men being responsible for their actions, not blaming the mother.
It’s about making men responsible for doing HW and looking after children. Etc etc etc

FWIW I think that as parents, we can put a lot of effort into parenting our boys so they are responsible, caring, able to do HW and see it as their responsibility etc.
But the environment, school, TV, their friends, all that has, in my experience, an even bigger effect on the children.
As the mother of two boys who are now teenagers, I really thought I could influence them enough so they wouldn't grow up as being entitled, the way most men are. I also know I have failed despite my best effort. They dint see how privileged they are as white men. They dint see how women are made smaller. And I have no idea how to bring that to them.

If you want to be a mother but don't want a man you just need to go out for a walk at night in my area, you'll be guaranteed to get raped

That’s a very insensitive way to make your point

From my own experience though, what I do know is that it is possible to ‘force’ your partner into taking more responsibility and have a more active role in the family.
Yes it was more engineering on my part. And it meant I’ve had to let go of some standards in cleaning etc... at least for a while.
But I am hoping that my two boys have learnt that a father's role include cooking, cleaning and looking after his dcs. That their father’s work isn’t the only one that matters in the family.

Only time will tell though (see post above about how blind they are about their privilege)

But the environment, school, TV, their friends, all that has, in my experience, an even bigger effect on the children.

Yes the fact that the environment we raise kids in is so toxic gives me hope that it's not all in the Y chromosome. If it were, there wouldn't need to be such a concerted effort to turn boys into violent oppressors. Porn being the main example here. Porn is violent woman hating patriarchal propaganda- nothing more, nothing less.

Yes the fact that the environment we raise kids in is so toxic gives me hope that it's not all in the Y chromosome. If it were, there wouldn't need to be such a concerted effort to turn boys into violent oppressors. Porn being the main example here. Porn is violent woman hating patriarchal propaganda- nothing more, nothing less.
Now that is something we can agree on.

Because men use the existence of hormones to portray us, we should deny their role in our lives? That doesn't make any sense

Aren't we getting back to the territory of Criado Perez's book?

IMHO, medicine is the natural territory of women, but somewhere in the Middle Ages men decided to take over and burn the witches.

Why should understanding and accepting the effects of hormones on our bodies be taboo?

Why do we have to pretend that are our bodies are virtually the same as a man's body?

I have been thinking about this and I think accepting or acknowledging the biology of being female has so often been used against us that it becomes easier to ignore it or make it taboo to talk about. And in some cases, talking about biological reality is seen as an attack on other women.

There is also the fact that humans have a tendency to want to put things in a hierarchy. As women are, in many ways, considered inferior, any acknowledgment of female biology is conflated with an admission that women are inferior due to said biology. It's a vicious circle, possibly.

And finally, many humans hate to be reminded that they are part of the animal Kingdom. Women's reproductive biology reflects that ultimate animal nature to an undeniable degree. To deal with the fear of being animals, the biology must be denigrated.

I don't know what to do about this, but these are my thoughts.

ISaySteadyOn

Yes that is absolutely what has happened. Women are denigrated by men and society at large (other women) for being female so that they think anything that is specifically female must be total and utter shit. So caring for children is shit, having babies is shit and so on.

That's why when I gave birth I was appalled to realize I didn't want to be apart from DD and that this was the primal instinct in me. I had no primal instinct to reproduce, I just made a decision to do so, but after my first baby was born the differences between men and women couldn't have been starker to me. And I realized that we had to honor what women do in feminism, for feminism to be worthy of anything at all.

So when I clashed with a lot of feminists I was involved in, some of whom were antinatalists, it just felt like more of the same patriarchal shit of denigrating women, especially mothers, for being women .

I know bioeseentialism is controversial but I actually do think women are in many ways better than men, more intelligent, more biologically resilient, just better ". I know that's misandrist. But my point is just because I didn't want to be apart from my baby and didn't want to go back to work, doesn't mean women are "lesser" than men

I also see that there is a tendency for female biology to be seen as an obstacle to overcome or conquer. I don't think I am imagining it.

ISaySteadyOn

Yes like a friend of mine saying she didn't want to breastfeed because she wanted her freedom. I think about how public shaming of breastfeeding women contribute to this feeling that breastfeeding curtails your freedom. In a normal society we could get on with our work of breastfeeding as well as our other work ( of coffee bean picking or whatever) .
I realize lots of women can't or don't want to breastfeed, totally get that, but it is something specifically female that only women can do and therefore it is utterly devalued. And recently I've come to understand it is massively fetishized by men and trans women who wish they could breastfeed themselves. So bit of womb envy going on there

@sakura184 I'm so impressed by your vocabulary I keep having to look up the words. Who knew there were so many words associated with feminism! What's your masters in? Feminism?

Haha that's sweet soapona .
My masters was in International Horticulture so basically the international trade of fruit, vegetables and cut flowers, which are grown and shipped/flown from so- called developing countries like Kenya, India, Ecuador, Sierra Leone etc and end up on the supermarket shelves in the UK

Sakura, if you believe that women are essentially better than men, then you shouldn't have a problem with men who think women are inferior. You might not agree, but you'd be okay with them having that opinion, would you?

From what I've read, Sakura is far more sexist than the vast majority of men I've encountered.

I think about how public shaming of breastfeeding women contribute to this feeling that breastfeeding curtails your freedom.*

Depending on your lifestyle, the fact that you physically need to be with your baby to breast feed is what curtails some women's freedoms.

Maybe she wants to be able to share feeds.
Maybe she doesn't want to give up her out of the house hobbies.
Maybe she wants to go on nights out or weekends away.
Maybe she doesn't want to be stuck next to a newborn for hours and hours.(DD's record was 10 hours on the breast with small 5 minutes intervals when I needed a wee or she needed a nappy changed)
And so on.

For me, feminism is about liberating women from the perceived ‘differences’ from men. We can all work and earn equally. Parenting should be viewed as a 50/50 job with men and women taking equal time out of the workplace and childcare more heavily subsidised.

Isn't this the vision of feminism that allowed TRAs to argue that there are no essential biological differences between men and women?

I also think it's an incredibly fragile and limited approach. It could only exist from the second half of the 20th century onward, and it may be gone two generations from now.

From this perspective, I don't see how you could argue that earlier societies were actually oppressive, since the tools simply weren't available.
It's a fundamental mistake to think you can liberate people from their biology, that they need to be liberated from their biology, but I suppose that is why it's liberal feminism. Essentially though what you are saying is that to be free, women have to neuter themselves and become a sort of man, and in fact that's what women really want.

Real acceptance and respect and understanding of how to treat people should be as valid and useful to people living in the stone age as it is today. Undoubtably how that interacts with the society and environment will vary in different times and places, but the principles have to work in all of those settings.