Deadly silence - what happens when we don't believe women

[LukewarmCustard]

Great Guardian article on the critical importance of disbelieving women to the maintenance of the patriarchy. Except TWAW, so it looks like we should be believing Karen White rather than the women Karen sexually assaulted.

I have no idea how you can hold onto the view that TWAW and yet write this paragraph:

Because the existing power structure is built on female subjugation, female credibility is inherently dangerous to it. Patriarchy is called that for a reason: men really do benefit from it. When we take seriously women’s experiences of sexual violence and humiliation, men will be forced to lose a kind of freedom they often don’t even know they enjoy: the freedom to use women’s bodies to shore up their egos, convince themselves they are powerful and in control, or whatever other uses they see fit.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/21/what-happens-when-we-dont-believe-women

I've always found it's best not to take anything Jessica Valenti says seriously.

For example:
a recent study found that trans girls have nearly double the suicide attempts of their cis girl peers
So transgirls have a similar suicide rate to boys? Who'd have expected that!?

I see Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti are pushing a new book.

Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti can bleep the bleep outta my feminist face since signing their names to this statement pulling out 'if he hit her it's only because she maliciously goaded him cuz she WANTED him to hit her' blaming women for when TIM's stalk, harass, and attack non-compliant women:

"We also reject the notion that trans activists’ critiques of transphobic bigotry “silence” anybody. Criticism is not the same as silencing. We recognize that the recent emphasis on the so-called violent rhetoric and threats that transphobic feminists claim are coming from trans women online ignores the 40+ – year history of violent and eliminationist rhetoric directed by prominent feminists against trans women, trans men, and genderqueer people. It ignores the deliberate strategy of certain well-known anti-trans feminists of engaging in gleeful and persistent harassment, baiting, and provocation of trans people, particularly trans women, in the hope of inciting angry responses, which are then utilized to paint a false portrayal of trans women as oppressors and cis feminist women as victims.

may17.org/over-700-trans-and-cis-feminists-sign-international-statement-for-trans-inclusive-feminism/

insideandout3 That statement is grim.

I'm amazed that the Guardian is still in business.

That statement is indeed grim. It's worth reading the entire thing, but I can shorten and simplify it for them:

Women: bend over

I'm amazed that the Guardian is still in business.

It doesn't do them any favours when they publish people like Valenti (and a dozen or so others I could mention). But then again, they had a scoop today on the Jeff Bezos story, demonstrating that they can be very good at what they do (see also the brilliant work they did breaking the Windrush story, which might otherwise have gone unreported). They're very much a mixed bag, and if we didn't have them, we'd miss them. Probably.

Valenti has always been a terrible writer, unable to see, let alone comprehend, anything in the least bit nuanced.

And for me that includes "believe women." I generally take the approach that I believe in the basic honestly of a person who says something unless I've some reason to suspect dishonesty. That is to say, I assume they believe what they are saying, so long as there is no reason to think they are being disingenuous. Whether I believe they understand the situation or are mistaken etc is a different story and depends on a lot of other things.

Well, that’s a lot of revisionist history! Feminists have very definitely NOT engaged in violent rhetoric over the past 40 years. The most critics can point to is the feminist theory that if gender itself, as a form of socialised oppression, didn’t exist, genderism wouldn’t exist and so there would be no one claiming an opposite sex gender identity. Which is a completely logical statement. It’s not eliminationist — what an emotionally manipulative and hyperbolic word to apply here: no feminist has ever called for anything like pogroms, FFS.

Once again, postmodernists twist and abuse language to make words mean whatever they want them to mean. Disagreement is hate, questioning is violence, positing a theory about the relationship between gendered socialization and gender identity is eliminationist.

While, of course, removing the words “girls” and “women” from anything related to female biology isn’t “eliminationist” under their specially redefined definition, it’s “inclusive.”

American feminists have totally bought into backlash narrative regarding the Second Wave — they did that quite happily beginning in the early 90s — with not much in the way of actual theoretical critique as much as it was emotional repudiation. So much fun to criticise and kick at Mummy, to tell her everything stupid and wrong she did and how much better YOU’LL do it, even as you take everything she fought for you to have as merely your birthright. For instance: Katie Roiphe. For Instance: Rebecca Walker.

Tbf: they wouldn’t be published anywhere at all if they hadn’t joined in on backlash narrative.