Julie Bindel's withering review of Alison Phipps' latest book

[MrsSnippyPants]

"Reading the back cover of the soon to be released Me Not You: The trouble with mainstream feminism, I assumed Titania McGrath had churned out a new book. But on further inspection I realised it is in fact the latest from Alison Phipps, Professor of Gender Studies at Sussex University – a disciple of the ‘sex work is work’ and ‘trans women are women’ faux-feminism cult. This book has clearly been written for the hard-of-thinking."

www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-latest-gender-studies-literature-is-indistinguishable-from-satire

So middle class white women purged Harvey Weinstein from Hollywood with little care for where he would end up next - the subtext being he’ll be somewhere less elevated abusing black women ?

What utter garbage. My 13 year old has already had multiple sexual approaches from abusive men - waiting for a bus, on her way to school etc. She is white and middle class. Are we supposed to not react so that my 13 year old can be a buffer, absorbing this abuse in order to protect a 13 year old black girl ?

The one thing all women have in common is our experience of abusive men. We all share that regardless of class, race, nationality

Trust the TRAs to attempt to drive a wedge through this shared knowledge. Fuck off Alison.

Yes, it’s untrue that they don’t get any funding. Sally Hines got a million of public funding to study pregnant men. Some academics got 750k to investigate whether sex shouldn’t be recorded on birth certificate. What funding there is in social sciences disproportionately goes to these woke idiots.

Sally Hines is an idiot too. I see her Twitter profile has "fighting Tories all the way"

That's all I can see because despite the fact I've never tweeted anything to anyone, let alone to her, I'm blocked.

Heaven help us if the likes of Hines, Phipps, Ash Sarkar, Owen Jones actually get a real say in informing government policy.

None of these people are any use for anything. Jones I suppose does support himself by his journalism but Hynes and Phipps main talent is applying for grants and sitting on quangos and I bet Sarkar won't be far behind.

Fighting the Tories? Nah, with the state the left is in I'm Tory all the way now.

It was bad enough when they blocked people who'd tweeted things they didn't like. When they started trawling through people's likes and blocking them based on liking unapproved tweets it all got a bit "are you in need of psychiatric assistance?"

It can't be healthy to live your life that way, even if it wasn't so bloody annoying for everyone else.

I fear you are right, Reality. Who knows what will happen in the Higher Ed sector after the pandemic? I can’t see there being more funding and informal networks based on patronage and power might become even more important.

Apologies if this isn't quite the correct thread- there are a number of options where it could go.

Kehinde Andrews is a professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University.

He has just declared Trevor Phillips is no longer a member of the black community.

mobile.twitter.com/kehinde_andrews/status/1237007992794615810?lang=en

Kehinde Andrews
@kehinde_andrews

Trevor 'formerly of the Black community' Phillips should have lost all support from Black folk long ago. I wrote this piece for

@OBU_BlackUnity

a while back when #TrevorPhillips was indulging in what Malcolm would have called 'modern day Uncle Tom coonery'

I'm not fond of Katie Hopkins but I don't have the ability (or desire, because reasonable human being) to kick her out of category "woman" because that's not a thing that it's possible to do, any more than it's possible to make Trevor Phillips not be black. So what is "community" meant to mean in this context?

Loads of academics write ideas that go no further than their immediate peers and that’s fine. (The downside of that is that loads of good academic ideas go unnoticed which we could benefit from, but that’s for another thread..).

I strongly believe that eduction for its own sake is of benefit to all of us in society because sooner or later we can use that education we were given to do good. The next thing I used to follow that thought up with is that an academic education helps with critical thinking, which is a key life skill.

What really worries me is that the current university system doesn’t seem able to distinguish between pure politicking and actual research, or maybe I have missed the point and we’ve always had this? Academia in general doesn’t seem to be able to step in and do anything about its own climate of fear where facts and evidence are being suppressed and increasingly far reaching political claims are never being examined because to do so would be ‘wrong think’. The marketisation and consumerisation of students paying fees as if an education is a service rendered, has presumably encouraged this.

This is all over the public sector by the way not just in academia. I absolutely agree about the ‘indulgences’ only being granted to those who perform the right obeisances. So it’s inevitable you get people playing that game and kind of not their fault in a way.

So the far more worrying and difficult to crack problem is not what a few vacuous, man-pleasing people are saying. It’s the fact that they are just a product of their really quite toxic environment. If they want a professional profile, what else can they say?

This is what I mean about always needing to ask why people rally around certain political theories. We need to ask why is it acceptable (and in some circles required) to have those views? The problem is that as the political pendulum swings back the other way the political nuance gets lost and women’s needs seem to be always getting lost between the endless lurch between polarised ‘regressive’ sex stereotyping and today’s ‘progressive’ sex stereotyping. Sorry to be such a fucking downer but we have not got even close to getting these system-level problems sorted and now it feels like we’re looking down the barrel of another massive global recession and it’ll be women in the firing line again.

Also as a PS, I always feel like I have to say this to refute the bullshit claims made about the far right/gender critical relationship. These political viewpoints are not necessarily linked in any way. I can’t vote Tory ever and I am massively fucked off with the woman-hating state the Labour Party is in, doubly fucked off in fact because Labour disappearing up its own arse means that there is no other good option for me to vote for. I’ll have to not vote if it comes to it and I have personally huge struggles with doing that given the history of grudgingly giving women the vote, although I absolutely respect others’ personal decisions around that.

Goodness knows.

I can only hope that Covid does bring a sense of perspective. The pronouncements from these people just get sillier and sillier- surely it must give pause for thought?

I strongly believe that eduction for its own sake of benefit to all of us..

What really worries me is that the current university system doesn’t seem able to distinguish between pure politicking and actual research, or maybe I have missed the point and we’ve always had this?

That's a point I saw earlier today in relation to Phipps- I can't remember where , but yes, there is no distinction between politicking and research.

Phipps book will not be subject to any proper peer review and it will become part of the syllabus.

I don't know if it has always been like this.

Good post, ChattyLion, the problem seems to be systemic and has little to do with Phipps as a person. She collects insults levelled at her by gendercritters and Piers Morgan in her twitter banner, to show what a bad girl she is. But it actually isn’t about her ...
What is the cause? A mix of marketisation and maybe also the ‘impact’ agenda?

I'd say Phipps is both a symptom and a cause, in that she will influence her students to continue along the same path.

Besides if she as an MP can do a “joke” stab threat, why can’t he as a candidate make a joke about not being a rapist

Seriously

What are they 4?.

Just because someone makes a shitty joke doesn’t mean that someone else making a shitty joke is ok

I hear a shitty ‘joke’ i dont think...awesome, now i can make a shitty ‘joke’

Mainly cos im not 4!

Oh my god i should really read the whole thing

Yeah obvs making a joke about raping someone is EXACTLY the same as using an idiom

The critique of Phipps as a white, middle class woman is not because this is an inherently wrong thing to be and rendering all white, middle class claims/feminism null and void, but that her argument rests on it being a wrong thing to be and therefore sawing off the 'logic' branch she is sitting on and making her a hypocrite to boot.

I don't really see why anyone here should feel the need to defend mentioning being white and middle class, unless they are Phipps, because she's the only one who used it in that stupid manner.

I care.....Because I hate lazy generalisations, whether it is Alison Phipps, or anyone else, making them

Well yeah, they are fucking annoying

Worth starting a thread about?

Is it an effort, in pointing blame at white feminists, to avoid blaming men? Is that what all this is? Judge and blame everyone bar the actually rather enormous elephant in the room- much as people come on mumsnet to accuse us of killing trans people with our 'concerns ' over gender ideology, rather than ever mentioning male violence?

Well, this is the nonsense, Scrimpshaw. The men who rape and abuse women of any skin colour on a large scale, and transsexuals when given the opportunity, do not do so because they've been reading RadFems.

Far Right misogynists are not holding it all in until Julie Bindel tweets about single sex spaces, and then cannot contain their rage against black trans prostitutes.

Phipps & co have created a fantasy to concoct 'academic' bullshit around, in a weird Ponzi scheme designed to maintain their own position in the hierarchy. It's a shell game designed to exploit the weak for the purposes of the privileged.

I agree Scrimpshaw.

Underlying it also seems to be this wierd idea that women doing anything that men aren’t invited to, is a worse crime than.. well anything you can think of.
It would actually be hilarious if it wasn’t so toxic.

Daca I agree about the ‘impact’ agenda. academics needing to chase profile all the time to help them get funding and attract students to their courses is not helping with any of this. I feel like any solution to this has to be made institutionally but I don’t know what form it could take other than just saying everything has to be up for debate. Actually some things aren’t up for debate because they are just true. Like gravity, or biology.

Inevitably the cycle of fashion in the academic impact agenda will mean that funders will (by chasing some other agenda) see off some of the more out-there silly thinking over time. But unfortunately that cycle certainly doesn’t guarantee that anything better will rise to prominence to replace it..

Scrimpshaw you’ve hit the nail on the head. People like Hines and Phipps blame feminists while deflecting attention from the men who rape and kill. It’s quite blatant misogyny packaged as progressive wokeness. For Hines and Phipps, the most oppressed women are men and anyone who disagrees with this is labelled as a hateful bigot. I don’t see it as much different to the women who gleefully claim that they’re not feminists because they’re not ugly man-haters. Even the suffragettes had to contend with female dissenters who wanted to uphold the patriarchy. It’s disappointing but it’s a mistake to think that all women are feminists.

It’s disappointing but it’s a mistake to think that all women are feminists.

I agree with this, but I think it's interesting that the position of most feminists here is that not all women are feminists, but feminism is for all women.

Phipps, Hines et al seem to think that Feminism is for the appropriate women - the ones who tick specific boxes. They cover this up by chanting obfuscatory nonsense about their bastardization of intersectional feminism that dilutes it to a catch all 'equality' movement, but even that is a lie, because it's all about maintaining a hierarchy (and thus patriarchy).

The key thing that strikes me about Phipps, Hines etc is that they really don't like other women very much, in general. They always seem to be on the lookout for opportunities to tear other women down in a way that comes across as a sort of mean girl/Highlander hybrid to me, and has very little to do with anything I'd think of as feminist.

Not that I think they like men much either, they just come across as rather unpleasant people who'd stab their own granny in the back if doing so could help them get tenure.

Dworkin
Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class,
including all the women you don’t like, including all the women you don’t want to be around,
including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don’t want anything to do with any more.
It doesn’t matter who the individual women are.