Anyone else seeing a pattern of behaviour by some biologically male posters (some of whom identify as trans, some of whom don’t) on this board? It’s got me thinking about the issue of observing women’s social boundaries.
I wonder if any of the women who frequent FWR are given to going onto a board primarily aimed at/used by members of a group they are not a part of and trying to impose their views on the regular users there, trying to make them conform to what they think they should be doing and thinking?
So, for example, do we go on boards dedicated to issues of, say men’s health and steer the discussion to our gynae issues, or womansplain to the men about prostrate cancer? Do we go on boards for gay men and berate them for their sexual orientation? Or try to take over TRA boards, derailing every thread we can for the purposes of our own agenda?
This may be a shot in the dark, but my guess is the vast majority of FWR users don’t do this. Maybe even not any of us. I know I’ve certainly never spent so much as 10 minutes doing that. And the idea of spending hours, days, weeks or even months doing that is not one that has ever seemed attractive to me.
And yet... some people who are biologically male seem to be magnetically drawn to FWR for the sole purpose of berating female people, disagreeing with us, telling us either that feminism itself is wrong, or that we’re doing feminism wrong; how we’re not good feminists, not even good human beings; how they know better than us what feminism is, what being a woman is; what a woman is in the first place; and how we’re all just rotten to the core, really, because we don’t behave as they think we should.
It just seems to me to be a particularly male pattern form of behaviour. And one we see a lot of on here. And it got me thinking about the whole power dynamic that this reflects.
It reminds me of going to pubs when I was younger, before I was invisible, and the reality of not being able to sit alone with a book or talk in peace and quiet with one or two friends without some man coming over and trying to invade my/our space, engage us in conversation, take our attention away from ourselves/each other and refocus it all towards HIM.
The way some men just won’t take no for an answer when you try to tell them, politely, that you’re happy without their company thank you, and sometimes (often?) turn outright nasty and resort to verbal abuse and maybe even physical threats. (And as we know, at the very extreme end of the scale, there are men who take women’s lives because they had the temerity to say no to them.)
How many middle aged women approach groups of young men in a pub or a park, or anywhere, and try to force them to engage in conversation with them? It’s not a thing, I don’t think? And yet that type of middle aged man when I was a 20-something could absolutely be counted on to try to insert himself into your evening or your quiet lunchtime moment, and I know many, many other women have had the same experience, and it still goes on now.
Of course a pub is a public place. It’s in the name. And so is an internet forum. Open and accessible to all. No one is breaking the law by trying to talk to people who aren’t interested in talking to them, if that’s as far as it goes. But there are social mores, there are accepted conventions in civilised society (or there are supposed to be), that say it’s rude and boorish to force yourself on someone who plainly doesn’t want your company, on a group of people you have no connection to, that it’s not a way that anyone with any sensitivity to or respect for their fellow human beings behaves.
Women in these scenarios tend to want spaces of our own where we can just be ourselves, free of the demands to centre men in our interactions. We have traditionally been excluded from much of the “public square”, so that access to our little corner of public space is thirsted after in a way that biologically male people perhaps won’t appreciate, having never been denied it in the same way. And we are protective of it. We want boundaries.
We don’t want to impose ourselves on others, we just want our slice of the pie. We merely want the right to talk about our own experiences and formulate our own opinions without constantly having to centre those who don’t share our experience. The second sex for so long, we are still trying to shake off the shackles of being made lesser, and find our own voices - our own entitlement to say what we think, what we know - our entitlement to take up space.
Whereas the biologically male people in these scenarios, heirs to virtually the whole of the traditional public square as they are, want the whole pie. They seem to feel that their rights are bring curtailed if they have to cede even an inch of the public space they feel is theirs by rights. They seem to feel they’re absolutely entitled to impose themselves on women, wherever and whenever they want to. They have no respect for any boundaries that we might try to erect. They have no respect for us. I suppose they don’t really see us as full human beings in our own right.
They seem to be determined to invade, insert, penetrate the small spaces that women have tried to create for ourselves. It seems to be all about seeing our boundaries as an affront to their rights to behave as male people have always traditionally behaved: as the lords of the manor, the default humans, the ones around whom the world turns.
(Tiresomely necessary disclaimer: NAMALT, of course. There are some perfectly pleasant male people who pop up on FWR to engage in good faith, who make reasonable observations, who treat women with respect and are met with civility in return; they don’t try to dominate or overwhelm the conversation with their own view, and they listen to other people even when those other people are female. Just as in the pub it is perfectly possible to have a pleasant exchange with a random man who is not trying to force his company on you but just treating you like a fellow human being, and only taking it further if and when there’s clearly a reciprocal interest.)
It all comes down to power and control, doesn’t it? That intent to dominate, control, take over, impose, subjugate. Instead of a wish to communicate with and reach other human beings, it’s the urge to bend others to your will, a fundamentally dehumanising perspective. I don’t think that women tend to do this to men in the way that (some) men do to women; apart from the fact we don’t want to, I don’t think we can. And that’s irrevocably tied up with the enormous power imbalance that still exists between biologically male people and biologically female people.
We don’t insert ourselves into the discussions that biologically male people, whether they identify as trans or not, have about their own lives and experiences, on boards that are aimed at/designed for them. We don’t want to force them to do anything; we don’t want to force our opinions down their throats and make them agree with us. We just want to be free to talk amongst ourselves.
Unlike those male people who do want to force us to engage with them.
We just want boundaries; they don’t want us to have boundaries.
We would like them to stop them doing something to us; they would like to keep doing the thing we don’t want them to do to us, regardless of the fact we don’t want them to do it.
It’s a free country, and a free internet: anyone is indeed entitled to post on any public forum. But it’s very interesting to observe how this dynamic works, and the complete lack of symmetry there is.
This is not a conflict of rights. This is traditional male domination of females. This is a feminist issue.
I don’t know what the answer is. Like I say, we can’t prevent anyone from accessing a public space. We can try to ignore, but that only goes so far when someone is determined and persistent, as that particular type of biologically male person tends to be. We can obviously form private groups and forums and take the chat away from here but then the public aspect is lost, the right to the public square has been given up, so that’s not a real solution.
But we can name this behaviour for what is is, we can say very clearly that we see it and we know that it has a truly repugnant level of misogyny at its core. And that as feminists we recognise this as part of the oppression we, as the second sex, still face on a daily basis.
So what do you think? Should women be allowed to have boundaries? Would it be possible to discuss this, here on the FWR board that you might reasonably suppose was for feminists to discuss feminism, without one of those biologically male individuals popping along to give us the benefit of that person’s wisdom on this thread as so many others?