Interesting reading - what do you make of this?

[NiceGerbil]

Hello

The Pullman thread sent me down a Twitter rabbit hole that stalled when I got to this

mobile.twitter.com/alisonphipps/status/1411387723034902531

Some extracts from their book are there- have a read (not sure how to put the text here!).

I found the extracts totally fascinating. If I knew nothing about this topic, I'd think well. IMO clear, succinct. Persuasive in the confidence of the points/ arguments.

Thing is it's... I suppose maybe true for an American USA context for the religious right who I would imagine fit what's written more or less.

Of course it's referring to all women who think sex is a thing that matters.

Would love to discuss if anyone wants?

Haven't rtft but this was the first I'd heard of the term reactionary feminism

Haven't read the links yet, but doesn't Alison Phipps have form for truly DARVO presentation of 'facts' - accusing black people, like the Southall group already mentioned as racists? Whilst being rather white, privileged, middle class herself..?
The whole women are manipulative not victims is incel culture. Hugely popular and being churned out as 'truth' for the masses within such as Jordan Peterson's books?
To be fair, women hating/blaming women is nothing new. I don't think she's going to achieve some kind of mass epiphany in the population with her ideas. She's tapping into the misogyny that's always been there.

I am very interested in talking about this further. If anyone wants to see what is happening to feminism they need to look at disability.

The social model of disability has been amazing in challenging the oppression we face as has the campaign for us to be included in mainstream education. However if you have paid any attention to what the Tory government has done (and labour before it) you will see that taking away support that helps disabled people live their lives is being framed as empowerment. Parents whose children are being bullied and not getting adequate support in mainstream schools are being accused of choosing to exclude their child.

Why is Alison Phipps a more acceptable face of feminism than Julie Bindel (whose campaigns have actually achieved things for women)? It is a nice acceptable version of feminism.

I was at uni when everyone was a line dem loving radical centerist. They thought I was nuts with my lefty views.

This is interesting.

I’m not an academic so a lot of this goes over my head but could your third emerging strand here be the growing movement for non- carceral feminism which seeks to abolish policing and prison for sexual offences as they (one of their arguments) disproportionately penalise minorities.

Its been said before on here that much of this is “I’m not one of those bad white people/privileged/well offs/women/feminists (delete as applicable)- look at those ones! I want to keep my privileges! Take from them instead!”

So black women can be “white feminists” (boo!) ordinary (often working class) women and “privileged” (boo!) anyone who shared a platform with anyone vaguely right wing (which given the left won’t allow any discussion of ideas they disapprove of) is exactly the same as the worst of the right (despite the alternative being unable to say anything) and it all comes from wealthy, fortunate people who will never need the services they are closing down.

I’ve worked with girls who are disadvantaged in every way. Victims of economic poverty, dysfunctional and abusive households, CSE victims. The kind of girls who grow into women who go into refuges or even prison. But as they are white girls it’s argued they don’t need to be protected from rapists in those places. And to care about them means you can’t care about the BAME girls and women who are also suffering. Whilst some professor gets a book advance bigger than a few years income for me. Because they are the “good ones” simply for saying TWAW and Sex Work is Work. Well they aren’t and it’s not. But it’s not their world so they can lie and fuck the less fortunate over. It’s like the Victorian idea of deserving versus undeserving poor all over again.

I compare the language used in those excerpts with Trans (Helen Joyce).

It is impenetrable, really poorly referenced, entirely rooted in theory no real people in sight, makes grand sweeping statements, makes zero attempt to examine the argument from any view point other than her own.

Compare to Trans
Fully referenced, beautifully written and really engaging, personal stories balanced with commentary, crystal clear at all times.

Hmmmmm.

Nice gerbil you and others may be interested in reading Dani Ahren’s review of this book in the Radical Notion.

theradicalnotion.org/activism-as-ethical-consumerism-a-review-of-me-not-you/

I have read Alison Phipps’s other book Politics of the body and I think that in her chapter on birth and motherhood she does make some good points but her analysis is very poor and where she does use facts she takes them badly out of context to make her point. She misrepresented the findings of the birth place study for example. The statistic she took was accurate but it did not prove that home birth was dangerous (the study recommended homebirth as a safe option for 2nd snd subsequent babies of women who have had an uncomplicated birth).

She argues that breastfeeding is white supremacy and designed to keep women at home. A lot of it is just bashing women for their choices. Bodily autonomy especially around pregnancy and birth is really important (one of the things those horrible feminists that she hates fought for).

She can talk about "political whiteness" but the reality is that there are a lot of black and brown women protesting this, it's pretty racist to ignore them.

Both her and Hines have been asked about this on Twitter by black and brown GC women and abolitionist women. They gave a full and reasoned explanation of why they held their views and didn't block or run away or ignore these questions.

Oh wait.

Postmodernist language games woke cool girl dick pandering fun feminist BS versus traditional values conservative dick pandering cool girl anti-feminist cos feminists are mean BS.

Very succinct!

She argues that breastfeeding is white supremacy and designed to keep women at home.

Eh? Where do these muppets get these ideas from? Breastfeeding is very important and a normal part of motherhood in many cultures around the world. A number of my friends from school (we're Indian) who now have children of their own have been breastfeeding their kids until they were about 2 or even 3. Those who haven't been able to breastfeed their kids for long (ironically due to work) have expressed a level of sadness about it because they found it a great way to bond etc.

It's bizarre how these academics and activists in their ivory towers seem to despise women who are not rushing to jump back into the capitalist hamster wheel, framing a natural part of motherhood and child rearing as 'keeping women at home', yet the same people bang endlessly on and on about how bad capitalism is.

She argues that breastfeeding is white supremacy and designed to keep women at home.
Interesting. So, according to this logic, women who breastfeed is the issue, rather than the patriarchal structure that makes it hard for women to breastfeed and fully participate in public life.
Blaming mothers for their own lack of power in a patriarchy. How very feminist of her.

For people saying that this kind of writing is over your heads, I just want to highlight this comment by Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel prize in physics:

There was this sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on the list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly so I can figure out what the hell it means.”

So I stopped-at random-and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

Then I went over the next sentence, and realised that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.

These excerpts are an example of that. They are written using specialist jargon and flowery, complicated language. When you translate it into plain language it says nothing.

Please don't feel intimidated by people who wrote and speak like this. It's deliberate obfuscation to hide nonsense arguments.

If she wasn't arguing that, she'd be arguing that bottle feeding is white supremacy.

I'm sure you could construct equally convincing arguments for both propositions.

This sort of stuff is all very fun and amusing for debate club, or maybe a comedy venue, where there's pleasure to be had in watching bizarre castles of "logic" being built and followed through, but it's not what I'm looking for in academia.

@InvisibleDragon

For people saying that this kind of writing is over your heads, I just want to highlight this comment by Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel prize in physics:

There was this sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on the list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly so I can figure out what the hell it means.”

So I stopped-at random-and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

Then I went over the next sentence, and realised that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.

These excerpts are an example of that. They are written using specialist jargon and flowery, complicated language. When you translate it into plain language it says nothing.

Please don't feel intimidated by people who wrote and speak like this. It's deliberate obfuscation to hide nonsense arguments.

Yeah, it's a long tradition of deliberate obscurity. I went to a Terry Eagleton lecture once and literally had no fucking clue what he was talking about. About five minutes into it, I realised it's not me, it's him.

These excerpts are an example of that. They are written using specialist jargon and flowery, complicated language. When you translate it into plain language it says nothing.

Hard agree. I once had a conversation with a relative who quietly admitted to me, "I just don't understand all this gender stuff" and I remember replying, "Of course, you don't. That's because none of it makes sense."

Judith Butler is a perfect example of this. The problem with understanding her work isn't that you need a clever academic mind to be able to read it easily.
The problem is that it doesn't actually make sense. All the endless word vomit does is disguise that there is a complete lack of substance.

Some of Butler does actually make sense: the thing is that she is a very specific kind of thinker in a way that makes sense when she is writing (for example) about obscure limit-cases of Greek etymology and materiality (for example, in Bodies That Matter); but these aren’t actually generalisable in a wider sense so they remain interesting limit cases. Her work on gender and speech is her thinnest, most speculative and least philosophically interesting work, and it’s that stuff that got turned into some kind of word of god of gender studies, when it’s actually pretty weak.

I’m certainly not defending her though: her writing is turgid and can be specious, and she herself is pompous and disingenuous about the impact of her work. But some of it is of interest; though only if you are a Hegelian/Foucauldian with an interest in limit cases of poststructuralist thought. (Poststructuralism is not postmodernism and shouldn’t be thought of as the same thing.)

The Nussbaum critique of Butler is pretty spot on.

newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody

I can appreciate the stance taken in that writing.

It's often bemused me on these boards the prevailing view about lesbian erasure, and the policing, the gatekeeping that goes into preservation of the terminology - I find it quite paradoxical in that these efforts are in fact more likely to lead to lesbian erasure in and of themselves...an increasingly small number of women who can fit into that category because of the gatekeeping...what if you've slept with a man in the past...what if you've had an attraction to a transwoman? You're at risk of being told you should identify as something else, not a lesbian - those women are being erased from the category.

The militant gatekeeping efforts also create a large number of women who are unwilling to identify with the descriptor, because of the negative associations they now have for it...they slip out of identifying as lesbians not because they technically aren't, but because psychologically they can not reconcile themselves with what the word now means to them. So they say they're gay women, or women who sleep with women etc etc. They erase themselves from being lesbians.

The gatekeeping, the groups like 'Get the L out' are also taking space away from young teenagers who might otherwise fit it. People who are uncertain of their gender identity and sexuality, who conflate the two, and then see the hostility and division coming from some quarters and think 'Well, but I certainly don't want to be associated with them' and are of course naturally drawn to the 'be kind' philosophy and more welcoming, open attitudes and broader spaces to inhabit whilst they find their way. More potential lesbian erasure as some, in the confusion, complexity and stress of adolescence, may come to feel that actually they are in the wrong body, rather than that their sexuality is directed towards women.

The reductionist, easy definitions promoted by some streams of feminist thinking do not encapsulate the complexity that exists, and are paradoxically in danger of actually subverting their own ends.

I can see the parallels made in that piece to other styles of thinking and control that have existed throughout history and I get that. To my mind what underlies a lot of this is a fear mindset.

Hoff Sommers is someone I'm a bit aware of. She appears to be quite separate from modern wokeness, devoid of class analysis, and very much of the view that it's the poor young mens that are really harmed by feminism. She seems to have a specific focus on how young men are the real victims of a culture of rampant sexual assaults on campus, in that the problem is they might be accused of these acts.

It’s not in GC feminism that the term lesbian gets policed, though: instead that’s actually a major feature of liberal feminism, which is where how people “identify” is a recurring obsession. I use a lot of youth social media, and it’s very much the genderist obsession with putting labels on people and then policing how they are “allowed” to identify. On discord and tumblr there is a “lesbian checklist” circulating where girls are told this will tell them whether they are lesbian, queer, asexual, pansexual, bisexual, blah blah blah - and there’s a lot of obsession about “true” lesbianism vs “comphet” (a term egregiously misused once extracted from second wave lesbian feminist Adrienne Rick’s original article, which is a generous and expansive understanding of a “lesbian continuum” of social relations between women).

Second wave and GC understanding of female sexuality is much more complex and expansionary than third wave and gender-ideological understandings of it.

In fact current genderism is almost incapable of understanding sexuality as more free-floating and choice-based, despite wanting to think of gender as such. It’s revived the dead inversion theory of the early twentieth century as an essential part of gender theory - an incredibly limiting and essentialist understanding of sexuality. This is one of the reasons why it’s the young people desperate to attach labels to themselves who are policing terms like “lesbian”; and not us older GC types who keep banging on about fluidity.

*Adrienne Rich not Rick!

I’ve attended a few lectures of Phipps and the fawning is embarrassing.
Phipps is just another white privileged women who somehow has positioned herself as different from all the others ….
Lecturing on how white women need to stop talking for black women ~except her~ she also openly uses the term terf and bigot to those who disagree with her.

Breastfeeding.

I live in a fairly run down part of Yorkshire. High rates of teenage pregnancy, high rates of permanent exclusions, low wages, lots of people on benefits. Various economic issues.

Breastfeeding take up is low. There have been schemes to offer financial incentive to breastfeed in towns and cities near by.

Now, I mix fed as between me and my child we were pretty rubbish at it but I kept at it until she was 2 and I’m not policing anyone’s choice to bf or not but in an area where there are LOADS of impoverished mums spending money on formula when your body produces milk doesn’t make sense. It saved us money and would have saved even more if I hadn’t needed to top up with formula.

To accuse bf women of white supremacy is ridiculous. The alternative is women with little money to give their cash to big corporations (hang on, aren’t they considered bad?) and have even less money (to spend on food/clothes/activities for older children as single child families are not common here) and that is feminist? Progressive? It’s the height of never seeing past your own nose for this over privileged twats, quite frankly.

Oh and if anyone wants to know why young women don’t like the term “lesbian”, there’s a huge amount of gender ideology policing of it as being “exclusionary” and uncool, compared to being “queer” or “genderfluid”/“genderqueer” which are the fashionable terms. Kids who experience a variety of attractions to men and women are encouraged to understand themselves as “genderqueer” rather than bisexual (the label “bisexual” is also uncool and engaged in a turf war with “pansexual” and “queer”, with young people in tumblr shouting at each other that being “pan” is “biphobic” and vice versa, and they all call each others’ labels “transphobic” when it suits.) “Queer” is the most fashionable label, primarily because straight kids can identify into it as a style.

Being a boring old “lesbian” is considered very uncool and the young person’s equivalent of borrowing your mum’s Birkenstocks, as well as being “queerphobic”, “transphobic”, yadda yadda.
It is definitely not middle-aged GC feminists who are doing all of this policing!