Guardian eradicates women

[ASmallMovie]

The Guardian, a once fantastic champion of women’s rights, managed to write an entire article about periods without using the words ‘girls’ or ‘women’, presumably lest they offend.

Utterly depressing.

The original speech by Jacinda Ardern talks about ‘girls’ missing school due to period poverty, but this article avoids the apparently now offensive word ‘girl’ and refers to ‘9 to 18-year-olds’.

How the fuck can the Guardian editor and all its reporters be okay with this?

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/26/new-zealand-supermarket-chain-countdown-becomes-first-to-use-period-label-on-menstrual-products

The Body Shop is going to be confused; they just finished lecturing everyone to #DROPTHEPWORD. Of course, they might have meant p for profits rather than p for period.

As for the Guardian - reporting on what Ardern said but changing her language from girls to people seems like a deliberate attempt to hide the structural sexism. At best, it's missing a clear opportunity to highlight it AND making the reporting less accurate at the same time. They could have avoided this by just inserting the Ardern quote rather than quoting a few words and paraphrasing the rest.

Anyone who wants to call me a menstruator can fuck off to the far side of fuck and when they get there fuck off some more. "Simply factual" my arse.

By all means call yourself "menstruator" if you want to be a dick pandering idiot, but don't call me it.

It’s just shite

Nobody I know says that they are menstruating

They say they are on their period

Ffs.

Who the fuck are they kidding.

Am grumpy today

Wouldn’t you though knowing the absolute shit storm you’re going to unleash if you do dare suggest periods are a female issue?
If a newspaper is afraid to state facts then it is no longer fit for purpose.

It's quite funny that the Guardian is outwoking Arden, who is commitedly TWAW, but even she uses "girls" when talking about periods.

I would argue that the word "menstruator" is offensive and othering for females who no longer menstruate due to age or don't do it due to amenorea. It is triggering to them to be reminded that they are deprived of this bilogical function through no fault of their own.

Kind of like an argument used by TRAs about breast-feeding.

There.

Your starter for 10, oh random new visitor to FWR who is totally cool with being dehumanised by being referred to as a "menstruator":

When a young person is sent to a menstruation hut in the middle of winter in the Himalayas and dies of exposure has this happened because

(a) that young person is a menstruator and unfortunately menstruation is seen as unclean in that society, but other than that, no more dots to connect...

or

(b) she's a girl, and viewing menstruation as unclean happens within a patriarchal cultural context where women are seen as lesser, as unclean, as disposable, and actually her death has something to do with culturally entrenched, culturally sanctioned sexism?

Are deaths from cold in menstruation huts, abortion of vulva-having foetuses, infanticide of vulva having babies, mutilation of the labia and clitorises of some (but incomprehensibly not all, in fact only about 51% of) children, sacking of pregnant people, domestic violence being predominantly aimed at be-vulva-ed people and committed by be-penised people, sexual violence predominantly aimed at people with vaginas and committed almost exclusively (99%) by ejaculators... are these all just random facts about the world that are in no way connected with one another?

Or is there something systematic going on here that we might want to describe using the words "women", "men" and "power relations"?

In contrast there was a lovely piece on women in a maternity unit yesterday. Interestingly it was saying that because there were fewer partners the atmosphere was very different. I would have wanted my partner there but I can see how there are advantages not to:

The postnatal ward is a lovely place to be at the moment. The curtains are open, and women are helping each other and bonding in a way that we thought was a thing of the past. One of the things we will probably review is how often partners are allowed in. Now that is not happening, there is a spirit of female empowerment and togetherness. Those who have had babies before are helping first-timers with breastfeeding, for example. There is also the ability to share stories and to come to terms with your birth experience.

So maybe when you have moved on from bleeding you graduate to being a woman.

Read the Times instead. They've publically supported JK Rowling's point of view about this. There are one or two 'woke' writers, but mostly, they've stood up robustly for common sense.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

Menstruator is a horrible dehumanising word, and was used by the Women's March London simply as a synonym for "female" regardless of known menstrual status giving the lie to the "inclusive" language excuse. This type of language isn't used for men generally. It's an attack on women.

Eresh

I agree. It is deliberately reductive. It simultaneously reduces women to a biological function, while denying that women's biology is what identifies us as a sex. That requires industrial quantities of doublethink. Another recurrent theme. As a PP said, I wonder why aren't men referred to as 'ejaculators?'

Havent they learnt their lesson that the facts and statistics are completely meaningless if we dont know who or what we are talking about.

Thousands of people arent missing school. GIRLS are.that fact changes everything.

I cannot believe that men got a mention in an article about periods but women didnt.

If a newspaper is afraid to state facts then it is no longer fit for purpose

floisme precisely. It isn't a newspaper at all. It's a propaganda forum for breathless, juvenile activists.

@Jaxhog

Read the Times instead. They've publically supported JK Rowling's point of view about this. There are one or two 'woke' writers, but mostly, they've stood up robustly for common sense.

People shouldn’t have to change their political views just to read biology as fact. It’s ridiculous.

Reading a newspaper doesn't mean you have to agree with its editorial stance. I make a point of reading the Guardian, Times and Telegraph when I have time, partly in a "know your enemy" sort of way, and partly because all papers are partial in what they choose to report and what they leave out.

(For instance, my memory is that it took the Guardian and BBC 5 days to report on Cologne when the Frankfurter Allegmeiner, Washington Post, New York Times were all reporting it from early on - and when they did reluctantly report it, the Guardian systematically downplayed the number of assaults, preferring to rely on the police recorded figures when at the time of the assaults the German criminal code only counted something as a sexual assault if you could show evidence that you physically fought back... so not surprisingly the police numbers massively underestimated the actual number of assaults).

To me it looks like they're using the word 'shopper'. They are not stating who will use the products, only who will buy them and I think shopper is fine.

And they refer to 9 to 18 year olds. Not people, not menstruators, not girls or women.

@TheOrigBrave, the exact quote from the article:

"Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister, said at the time that nearly 95,000 nine-to-18-year-olds “may stay at home” during their periods because they could not afford items such as tampons and pads."

It's happening to girls. It's girls who are being disadvantaged. By air-brushing that out, you leave out the sex of the group being hit by this form of discrimination and systematic lack of access to education. That matters.

And, as PP have pointed out, Ahern actually used the word "girls". It's the Guardian who've chosen to crop the quote from her to leave the word out and replace it, outside the quotation marks, with 9 to 18 year olds.

Ardern (damn autocorrect...)

I think you're seeking out to be offended here. The article reads well. It refers to the products not the people using them. It doesn't refer to menstruators as some have said, unless I missed that part. It does refer, correctly, to shoppers. My dad used to buy these products for me when I was young, what's the problem.

Is anyone emailing/complaining?

Yes want

But which 95000 are missing school? How can statistics make sense if its not clear who they are talking about and why does the word "men" not get dropped from the quotes?

It’s the pronoun game isn’t it? What gay people used to have to do (and still do) to avoid people realising they were gay. ‘I met someone nice, I’m seeing them again next week’.

Anything you can to avoid actually mentioning the sex of the person you are talking about. ‘Shoppers’. FFS.

It refers to the products not the people using them.
It clearly went to a lot of trouble to do that, including cutting short a quote from Jacinda Ardern when it would have been a lot simpler to use it in full. So why would anyone go to all that effort?

Thousands of people arent missing school. GIRLS are.that fact changes everything.

But surely women face discrimination because they just love eyeliner. Can't we just bond over eyeliner?

"Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister, said at the time that nearly 95,000 nine-to-18-year-olds “may stay at home” during their periods because they could not afford items such as tampons and pads."

I do hope any male nine-to-18-year-olds who stay at home for this reason are given short shrift.

Perhaps the 9-18-year-old boys can't afford tampons and pads either so they can stay home from school too? So if boys couldn't afford things, would that double the numbers who don't attend school? Boys of course don't need tampons and pads but if it's only about being able to afford them, in the interest of inclusion they should expect boys to stay home too?

Well, no, because that would be ridiculous. So NAME THE SEX it affects, for heaven's sake. Bloody hell this makes me so cross.