Mumsnet invented a feminism that is rooted in female experience. Honest.

[FloralBunting]

So, I know you are all hyper-privileged white middle class women who really only know suffering through what to say when the Au Pair doesn't load the dishwasher correctly etc. But I thought you might be amused by this dillock writing a thread on the potted history of how Mumsnet managed to warp all your brains into thinking feminism wasn't about promoting porn and being a #BossBabe.

twitter.com/RodentWild/status/1434087672105025538

I particularly enjoy the tweet at the end of the thread pointing out that some of us used to be in patriarchal 'submissive wife' cults ( That'll be me, duckies, owned it, speak out against it at every opportunity, what are you doing to counter the abuse of women, tweeter? Oh, you're attacking women for being mothers and getting retweeted by Roz Kaveney. )

Still, I did enjoy being called an 'Mn prominent t*rf'

@Aparallaxia
Pictish was a non-Indo-European language, so certainly those who spoke it were there before the Indo-European Celtic invaders

Not the case. Pictish was one of several Celtic languages. It doesn’t predate the Celts. Again, the Romans called all Briton Celts, Pictii, and as they did not conquer and colonise Scotland, that is where the “Picts” continued to live until early Middle Ages (because the Anglo Saxons also did not conquer Scotland and the Vikings/Danes only got as far as the lowlands/border region).

Funnily enough, it was having conversations with the terrible feminists on here that gave me the space and opportunity to see what a crock of utter shite it all was and escape.

A recent guest post was similarly interesting about the impact of MN on MNers living in an orthodox community and how it changed their perspective on marriage.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/guest_posts/4186416-Guest-Post-Mumsnet-was-the-first-safe-place-I-had-to-realise-my-own-agency-now-I-am-campaigning-to-end-forced-marriage

[quote EmbarrassingAdmissions]Funnily enough, it was having conversations with the terrible feminists on here that gave me the space and opportunity to see what a crock of utter shite it all was and escape.

A recent guest post was similarly interesting about the impact of MN on MNers living in an orthodox community and how it changed their perspective on marriage.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/guest_posts/4186416-Guest-Post-Mumsnet-was-the-first-safe-place-I-had-to-realise-my-own-agency-now-I-am-campaigning-to-end-forced-marriage[/quote]
Consciousness-raising, innit. I seem to recall that being part of a feminist praxis, but maybe I ain't read the right books.

P & Q Celtic
• Early Celtic lost the letter p Hence Latin pisc-is, Gaelic iasg ‘fish’ or Latin pater, Gaelic athair ‘father’
• Later in some Celtic languages kw- > p
These are the P-Celtic languages.
In other Celtic languages kw- > c
These are the Q-Celtic languages.

Puts a whole new spin on mind your Ps and Qs if it's come from different languages in use!

I found that in a search, can't share the document

@Fitt

P & Q Celtic • Early Celtic lost the letter p Hence Latin pisc-is, Gaelic iasg ‘fish’ or Latin pater, Gaelic athair ‘father’ • Later in some Celtic languages kw- > p These are the P-Celtic languages. In other Celtic languages kw- > c These are the Q-Celtic languages.

Puts a whole new spin on mind your Ps and Qs if it's come from different languages in use!

I found that in a search, can't share the document

Irish is a Q language. Afaik all Irish words starting with P are loan words from other languages. Welsh is a P language. But which came first is a mystery. Anyway , after reading this thread I feel quite indigenous and a bit full of myself! I will be insufferable for the rest of the day.

I've had experience of the BIPOC mismatch recently, a company I work for arranged separate discussion groups for each letter. I was tempted to sign up as I am indigenous to these islands.

Surely they can figure out who they are addressing with these activities. There was no explanation forthcoming.

Apparently people from Orkney (obvs not recent incomers) have the highest percentage of Ancient Briton DNA (can't remember where i read that) so maybe we should nominate them to be the indigenous people?
I have Orcadian on both sides of my family trees so i claim Indigenous status!

I read Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center by bell hooks before I joined here. Back in the homeless hostel. (I didn't have internet to waste time on and it was in the town centre, so near a library.)

Very strong on the importance of political separatism for marginalised groups (women, black people, black women) so they could engage in consciousness raising. Wrong kind of feminist theory these days, that.

I've always thought of MN as an online drop in, drop out consciousness-raising group for women. That's why MRAs hate it!

[quote PlanDeRaccordement]@Aparallaxia
Pictish was a non-Indo-European language, so certainly those who spoke it were there before the Indo-European Celtic invaders

Not the case. Pictish was one of several Celtic languages. It doesn’t predate the Celts. Again, the Romans called all Briton Celts, Pictii, and as they did not conquer and colonise Scotland, that is where the “Picts” continued to live until early Middle Ages (because the Anglo Saxons also did not conquer Scotland and the Vikings/Danes only got as far as the lowlands/border region).[/quote]
The Romans only used the name Picti for the various peoples who lived North of Hadrian's Wall. It is entirely possible that these were simply the same peoples as those further South, who after being cut off from the rest of Roman Britain by Hadrian's Wall then developed a distinct culture. But the Romans used different names for the peoples they encountered further South.

In written records surviving today, Eumenius is the first to mention the Picts in 297 AD. And in doing so, he is unequivocally only referring to peoples of Northern Britain (specifically he's complaining about them constantly attacking Hadrian's Wall).

That's why the Picts are considered peoples of Scotland rather than the whole of Britain.

Vikings/Danes only got as far as the lowlands/border region

There were quite a few Norwegian Vikings in Shetland and Orkney (Sutherland in the north of Scotland was their 'southern lands'), they settled down the west coast and established Dublin. The genetic analysis shows the settlers were predominantly male who married indigenous women.

Actually married is the wrong word, you can't tell that from genetics. They had sex with indigenous women. Same as invaders everywhere.

@JaninaDuszejko The genetic analysis shows the settlers were predominantly male who married indigenous women.

Bringing the topic back to feminism - I rather suspect that the word "married" there might not be accurate. It could equally be "raped" but we probably can't know and will have to settle for "impregnated". What did marriage mean then anyway though?

Sorry @JaninaDuszejko that was a cross-post i got distracted and you made my point already

I think the ancient languages of the British Isles are split into the following:

P/Brittonic
Irish
Scots/Gaelic
Manx (now being taught again on the island)

Q/Goidelic
Welsh
Cornish (last native speaker died in the 1700s)
Breton (last of this kind of language still spoken in mainland Europe)

I would love to be a scholar poring over dusty manuscripts all day and arguing about this stuff.

On a vaguely related note, the Normans did away with many of the protections and rights Anglo-Saxon women had in law. The concept of a wife being the property of the husband is a Norman imposition. It can be argued that a lot of what's wrong with this country currently can be traced back to the Norman conquest, especially the imbalance of land ownership, and the high number of toffs in power.

Can I just say I'm delighted this managed to produce one of those intensely intriguing derails that is worth far more than the inane crap that inspired it?

I love the snobby inference that women who haven’t read the right books can’t possibly understand (or even know whether they have experienced) sexism .

‘BIPOC’ in this context is priceless, but has led to an interesting and informative discussion!!

I have listened to a couple of podcasts on history/Gods this week and I understand that if you can trace your ancestry back to King Alfred ( probably anyone with any bog standard British ancestors as we are all related if you go back far enough) you are deffo related to the God Odin.

Look, I can't say I am always down with some of the views discussed here, but I very much dislike the tone of various people, often young men and women who have never been on the site. It's kind of 'Stupid, nappy-headed, pearl clutching mums, what do they know about anything and MN should be shut down because it's full of nasty right wing people saying nasty things about trans people'

A tiny % of this site concerns discussions about sex/gender, and a tiny% of posters are concerned in it, whether you agree with them or not, but the site, if people bother to fucking look at it, is clearly a massively important support mechanism for thousands of women - week-in-week-out there are threads of women desperately needing help to leave abusive relationships, or with work problems, helping one another.

So it does piss me off when smug little hipsters sneer at us stupid, litle transphobic Mail-Reading white middle class mums that apparently we all are because we're on MN, without actually looking at what the site does for women.

goodness you people are interesting, well informed, and argumentative. I love it

oh yes @Echobelly

the part of the site where most of the feminist heavy lifting is done is relationships

no wonder men hate it so much

the part of the site where most of the feminist heavy lifting is done is relationships

Agree.

“What I did notice was v few had any background in feminist activism, history, theory, etc. For most, their first proper experience of sexism they...“

So we being women.. natal born women need to now have taken a gender studies class and basically be Gloria Steinem level activits in order to be able to speak about womanhood and experiences as women. Got it.. thank god a man(?) with long hair and who is an expert on feminism is here to tell us ladies on MN how to be women and the correct, appropriate and acceptable way to be feminists!

So we being women.. natal born women need to now have taken a gender studies class and basically be Gloria Steinem

If only Tesco had known about this line of argument before they lost that law suit.

“Well yes the women were paid less, but can this really fall into the category of sex discrimination if they hadn’t read Dworkin?”.

I found the first feminist book I read to be far too middle class to relate to, The Women's Room. It was all posh doctors wives and dinner parties, not something I had any experience of in a working class family with two full time working parents and a mother on night shift leaving dad to feed and clean and put babies to bed.

I got a more worldly view from Germaine Greer and later, Alice Walker, The Color Purple was probably the most profoundly informative.

@MarshmallowSwede

“What I did notice was v few had any background in feminist activism, history, theory, etc. For most, their first proper experience of sexism they...“

So we being women.. natal born women need to now have taken a gender studies class and basically be Gloria Steinem level activits in order to be able to speak about womanhood and experiences as women. Got it.. thank god a man(?) with long hair and who is an expert on feminism is here to tell us ladies on MN how to be women and the correct, appropriate and acceptable way to be feminists!

Yep, a non-binary Observed Male At Birth (OMAB) feels entitled to speak over our lived experiences, and dismiss our lived experiences if we don't having sufficient academic qualifications.

As a ocean fish is unaware of the water it swims in, this person is unaware of their raging classism.