Please recommend me some feminist resources, but don't forget to centre the menz

[Iveputmyselfonthenaughtystep]

A fb group I'm in had a post from someone who has located their feminist anger and wanted recommendations for resources. This group full of wonderful, passionate, intelligent women who were all saying that intersections feminism is the only one worth anything (fine in principle, but...) followed up with TWAW. Because feminism that centres men is the only intersectionality that matters, obvs.

I didn't say anything, what could I say? I'm just baffled and kind of hurt and disappointed. I've left the group. I just needed to vent somewhere where people understood.

I hope that made sense. Rant-typing is notoriously inaccurate

Seems like a good opportunity to post one of Posie's best rants on exactly this subject. It was a couple of years ago now, so there might be a lot of relative newcomers with us now who have never seen it:

It's a wondrous tale:

Right, today I went to this feminist fair thing, and it was a conference and it was advertised as "all genders". So that immediately pricks at my ears that it's gonna be ridiculous.

Posie at a libfem meeting.

For Watchmen fans - "I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me!"

I’d have been tempted to stay and ask inconvenient innocent questions, to make them think. Particularly about the policy of putting intact male rapists in women’s prisons, allowing male bodied sportspeople to injure women players and take their sports scholarships and medals. Ask them to quote a single transphobic sentence by JKR. Or at what point a transitioning man magically becomes female, and how that is defined. Those sort of questions.

I'm in a FB group (mainly women), it's been a big source of support for a long time. Yesterday the conversation turned to male violence and domestic violence because of recent events. One woman had to pipe up and say, but men suffer violence too, and a few others liked her comment. I won't leave, because I love the group, but didn't feel I could pop my head over the parapet. It just depressed me, it's like responding to BLM by saying all lives matter. None of the group would do that, but can't see how they are putting men to forefront all the time.

Did you watch Question time last night? The first item was about violence against women. The points raised were good, but there was one woman who immediately made it all about the poor men. I just rolled my eyes because there is always one. At least Fiona Bruce had the gumption to point out that the problem is male violence. The discussion was reasonably good, but didn't go nearly far enough.

Babydoc

It's not even a trans argument though, which as we all know can be contentious. It's just the basics of putting men over women and the fact that it's women doing it, blows my mind. I can understand people thinking they are being kind and inclusive in the trans argument. But just in general life, women prioritising men...why?

Everyone else in the world seems entitled to self-interest, other than women. Nobody asks anti-racist groups to centre white people or disabled activists to foreground abled bodies; but women talking about their own issues are constantly asked to stop and consider men.

No feminist would stand in the way of men centring men in a discussion about male on male violence. If men want to start a counting dead men project, they should absolutely crack on with that.

The reasons men assault, rape and kill women are, by and large, different from the reasons men assault and kill other men. The big conversation might be male violence, but male predation on women is a constant threat to women. Yet our conversations are constantly interrupted by men asking, “what about me?”

Why are men unwilling or unable to do their own work? I imagine the answer is that male predation is part and parcel of toxic masculinity. Dead men are collateral damage and dead women the reward for being part of the system.

Because feminism that centres men is the only intersectionality that matters, obvs

Tangent alert!

That isn't what intersectionality means. A good way of explaining intersectionality (out of its original context which was about sex and race) is about sex and lesbianism.

Lesbian women experience oppression coz of their sex - i.e patriarchy. They also experience oppression coz of their sexuality - i.e. because they are lesbian in a lesbophobic/heterosexist world. They don't experience these separately, as in in one box their oppression because of their sex and in the other box their oppression because they are lesbian, but these intersect and shape their overall experience. Their experience of patriarchy and sex based oppression is shaped by lesbophobia and vice versa.

It isn't what Twitter thinks it is.

@SusannaMorvern

I'm in a FB group (mainly women), it's been a big source of support for a long time. Yesterday the conversation turned to male violence and domestic violence because of recent events. One woman had to pipe up and say, but men suffer violence too, and a few others liked her comment. I won't leave, because I love the group, but didn't feel I could pop my head over the parapet. It just depressed me, it's like responding to BLM by saying all lives matter. None of the group would do that, but can't see how they are putting men to forefront all the time.

The answer I have recently given to that was "Yes. But this is a post where women are discussing issues that affect women. We can do that for ourselves, can't we?"

No mention of anything controversial and many who had liked the "Don't forget the men" comment started discussing the comfort a female only discussion brought.

But I did hold my breath for a while.

I have a feeling I’m in the same group. The most I felt I could do was ‘like’ the posts directing people here.

I think you might be, @edinburghFeminist
It's sad that we're so frightened to speak out, but that's hoe I feel. Frightened.

Yes me too. Frightened and furious. Constantly.

Could you propose starting with feminist history so that the group has "context for current thinking". An opportunity to read seminal works by Dworkin etc and see if any of them wake up along the way?

Someone did recommend starting with actual books and original feminists.
Although apparently Germaine Greer is a transpose, so ignore anything she has ever said

Or transphobe

It’s just infuriating isn’t it.

A FB group I’m in, for women, has a post about women being scared and why we’re scared. I’d been pleasantly surprised to see women being kept central to the discussion on every single one of the first 50 or so posts - until now the mother of a trans woman has arrived to tell us all that her daughter has an extra layer of fear than the rest of us mere women, so it’s actually much worse for her.

I'm sorry OP. The Facebook thought police can be very anti woman. I've encountered it a few times.

I always think (and hope) that many women in the group are quietly thinking what you are thinking but are too afraid to put their head above the parapet.