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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Great Hadley Freedman article

28 replies

WotgunShedding · 26/06/2021 09:51

She gets it all in there - wrong side of history, protected beliefs under the Equality Act, beardy blokes performativily berating women (she didn’t mention beardy - that’s my addition), Puritanism.

What fab read!

amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/26/people-have-told-me-i-am-on-the-wrong-side-of-history-but-i-still-want-to-be-their-friend

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NoTruckWithFrontedAdverbials · 26/06/2021 09:55

Nice article.

guinnessguzzler · 26/06/2021 09:58

Hadley getting it right again.

ApresMoiLaDeluge · 26/06/2021 10:04

I read this article and came straight here to check if it had been clocked yet (long time lurker but never posted until today). Wondering if I have the guts today to post the article on my FB page and see how many ‘friends’ I lose…

NoTruckWithFrontedAdverbials · 26/06/2021 10:07

It might be ok déluge. The article is very calm -recollection in tranquility and all that.

ADialgaAteMyDog · 26/06/2021 10:13

It's a great piece and I hope a sign things are improving. I very much doubt she'd be published saying that a year ago. Well done Hadley, I hope she has a great day off twitter, ahead.

Letsgetreadytocrumble · 26/06/2021 10:18

Great article. I really feel like the tide might be starting to turn with the whole 'cancel culture' thing, not just on the trans issue but with anything. I'm hoping that soon enough it will become very 'uncool' to publicly call for heads on platters simply for a difference in opinion, and that tolerance of different views will become more widely accepted.

Letsgetreadytocrumble · 26/06/2021 10:20

I wonder if the 'wrong side of history' thing is a direct reference to Owen Jones, he is always saying that.

WotgunShedding · 26/06/2021 10:34
Grin
Great Hadley Freedman article
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BraveBananaBadge · 26/06/2021 10:48

That tweet, Wotgun! Talk about bizarro world.

Well done Hadley, you rock. Calm, intelligent and rational unlike the Twitter random telling her it will get people killed (FFS!)

Unsurprisingly not open to comments as her column usually would be?

EsmaCannonball · 26/06/2021 10:56

I wonder if the age of social media means we forget history more quickly despite more information being available to us. In my lifetime I have met people who lived under Stalin or Mao, people who fought the Nazis or were imprisoned in concentration or labour camps, and one man who survived both the concentration camp and the gulag system. That generation of people are all dead or dying out now and it feels as if educated people under 30 (where these totalitarian regimes find their disciples) are completely divorced from history. They think they've found this brand new route to progress and that older people are scared of challenging change; they don't realise they are scaring older people with echoes of the past.

I read Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time recently. It's about Shostakovich's experiences as an artist living in the Soviet Union and some of it had such resonance with modern cancel culture. We are living in an age when publishing workers demand that books never be published, let alone banned or burned. Are the cancel culture ideological purists going to change as they grow up or are we going to end up with these people in actual power?

ArabellaScott · 26/06/2021 11:21

Well done, Hadley. It's hard to lose friends, but it's harder to live in fear of being honest, I think. At least in the long run.

ArabellaScott · 26/06/2021 11:28

@Letsgetreadytocrumble

Great article. I really feel like the tide might be starting to turn with the whole 'cancel culture' thing, not just on the trans issue but with anything. I'm hoping that soon enough it will become very 'uncool' to publicly call for heads on platters simply for a difference in opinion, and that tolerance of different views will become more widely accepted.
Let's hope so.

I had thought the other day one effect of all the baying mobs, outrage hysteria and petitions demanding people are sacked for expressing an opinion considered 'wrong' may be that political protest becomes easier to ignore. It's just noise, it's meaningless, it's absurd in so many instances these days.

What happens when we are faced with genuine threats, rather than just unpopular opinion? How do we protest, then? To counter the madness of counter-culture, we learn to ignore it. And then our recourse to genuine peaceful protest is weakened.

I recall sitting in the road on the day war was declared in Iraq - an illegal war, FFS, something that genuinely cost hundreds of thousands of lives. At least a million people marched in protest that day, we stopped traffic. It had no impact.

Are we protesting to make ourselves feel better, to reassure ourselves we are in the right, to express ourselves? Does it actually have any effect?

GammyLeg · 26/06/2021 11:32

Hadley 🙌🏻

Fishdoggy · 26/06/2021 11:36

"I’m old enough to know there’s a difference between denouncing bigotry and demanding everyone march in lockstep with you. If you’re more interested in performing your own purity than understanding people’s plurality, you’re not looking at progress, you’re looking into a mirror."

Great article and I may have to steal the last lines. Sums it all up so beautifully.

Ifyourefeelingsinister · 26/06/2021 11:37

Wonderful article, thank you Hadley.

Bollockstothat · 26/06/2021 11:48

Are we protesting to make ourselves feel better, to reassure ourselves we are in the right, to express ourselves? Does it actually have any effect?

I call this virtue wanking - politics designed not with the purpose of connecting with reality, the messy and often unsatisfying world out there that requires compromise, but as a form of self-gratification, designed to give the individual pleasure in their own rightness and superiority. Succeeding in achieving positive change is always second to feeling and being seen to be virtuous. Autoethicophilia, perhaps.

Great article by HF.

DisappearingGirl · 26/06/2021 12:13

I noticed this the other day - the banjo player from Mumford & Sons tweeted that he liked Andy Ngo's book and there was such an online pile-on - not just on him but on his fellow band members and their families - that he's felt forced to leave the band.
www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/10/winston-marshall-break-mumford-and-sons-rightwing-commentator-andy-ngo

There's a thread about it in Chat:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/4279742-Mumford-and-Sons-cancelled

Interesting as in some ways I think the trans thing is just one manifestation of the recent trend towards social media based virtue-signalling pile-ons bullying and destroying individuals' lives.

DisappearingGirl · 26/06/2021 12:14

I call this virtue wanking

I love this, haha

BraveBananaBadge · 26/06/2021 12:32

I'd forgotten about the Mumford furore until this week - no fan of anyone involved, but it gave me such rage that someone felt forced out of their band - their job - for reading a book. I feel so sorry for the guy. Why the band didn't stand up for him in this is unfathomable.

Hadley makes a similar point about Trump's memoirs and she's not wrong. Irrespective of anything else, he's a former president and his version of his time in office will be a matter of historical record, not something that measures the character of anyone involved in printing it.

WotgunShedding · 26/06/2021 12:33

Virtue wanking is an amazing turn of phrase.

disappearinggirl that’s my thread!

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EsmaCannonball · 26/06/2021 13:30

Given that Andy Ngo has been mentioned, it's so noticeable that so many TRAs and antifa members are young, middle-class and white. Burning things down isn't going to affect their community. A few minor criminal convictions aren't going to stop their parents getting them a lucrative career the day they decide to cut their hair and start making money. I've seen so many trustafarian types do that. The one person I know who actually takes refugees into their family home is an ex-military, card-carrying Tory voter. The people I know who actually work to make a difference for the poor, the abused, the homeless, the addicted, and so on, are all boring middle-aged people. Boring middle-aged people are great. They actually do stuff.

DisappearingGirl · 26/06/2021 13:34

disappearinggirl that’s my thread!

Oh so it is! Yeah I'm no fan of Mumford and Sons or Andy Ngo or Trump for that matter, and probably wouldn't choose to read their books / listen to their music, but that doesn't mean I think their books/music should be bullied out of existence

FlowerArranger · 26/06/2021 14:08

Great article by Hadley!!

And some great posts here too, especially @EsmaCannonball @BraveBananaBadge @ArabellaScott.

And special thanks to @Bollockstothat for the reference to virtue wanking. Must remember that!

mummarama · 28/06/2021 09:57

Hadley is fab. She was one of the few Guardian journalists who stood up for Suzanne Moore when all that kicked off.

TheHandmadeTails · 28/06/2021 12:41

mrwinstonmarshall.medium.com/why-im-leaving-mumford-sons-e6e731bbc255

I just thought I’d share what he’s written, the Mumford & Sons band member, as he’s been mentioned.