Woman's hour now...!

[WarriorN]

Eerr what now?

They want our views! Go vipers go!!!!

Ah ok good point.

That was the 3rd thing I thought she fucked up. She talked about the transitioning child in order I imagine to move away from the general issues.

She did not answer when asked how old.

And transitioning could mean anything from hair and name to blockers and more depending on age.

That was avoidance I really noticed.

But yes. Dd14 is in a group of about 7 girls at school really good mates.

Every single one of them has a gender identity which is not 'cis' and some of them a complicated term for their sexuality as well.

A couple have changed their names to other ones generally for girls that can be shortened to something usually male / neutral.

The others have neutral names or can already be shortened to a more typically masculine name.

A couple have short hair.

No suggestion of clinics or anything.

For them it is about group identity. Same as I was alternative and signalled that with clothes etc.

Those who deny that for many young people esp the ones who would have been goths indie etc back in the day, this is the current iteration of it.

Of course children and adults have all sorts of issues and some have dysphoria. Girls in particular often find growing breasts to be an incredibly difficult thing for all sorts of reasons.

The total refusal to even think for a second about this is really poor.

On the emotional side and why is works (does it for those who don't know the people, or already want to agree?).

Thing is we have news story after news story about male VAWG. Murders by all sorts of horrific means. Pics of them smiling with their kids in the papers. Schoolgirls being attacked. Grooming including incredibly brave victims being interviewed. Reports of sexual assaults in school being very widespread and not being dealt with. Not here but still, Simone biles recently on news giving testimony to I think it was senate. Men who have committed terrible crimes against women turning out to have a long record of sex offences and police sat on their hands. Men imprisoned long ago for notorious murders of girls, in the news as being released.

And on and on.

No impact though.

If the brief meeting mentions that this LD person plucks at heart strings and all that other stuff doesn't (if it did they would support single sex spaces). Then that doesn't add up does it. There's a reason for feeling for the first but not the second. Or at least not in the same way.

@BattyOrange

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000zsdl

For those wanting to catch up/listen again

Hank you

@NiceGerbil

Why are you policing and making demands on what is spoken about on this thread?

The conversation evolves, as it does on most threads, and branches off into other areas that are linked and relevant.

You may not see that relevance, you may disagree with what is being said, but to attempt to shut down women talking about male violence on a feminism thread is just not on.

@NiceGerbil yes it's on every day; I've slightly warmed to Emma (even before this) miss Jane and Jenni terribly but there's still many of theirs on bbc sounds.

It is interesting stuff even the occasional fluffy shit.

All, I think nice has apologised? A few crossed wires. I found the discussion interesting on all sides. We all reach a few limits after a load of events, happens to the best of us!

When I tried to discuss "all this" with a friend in Bristol (trans central as far as I can tell) she immediately talked about her trans colleague. (Both at that point hospital nurses. I'm yet to have the obvious discussion around that; pandemic came and I've not seen her for 18 months.) and so the conversation stopped as it was personal. She also can so far only see parallels with other "minority groups." Despite being extremely feminist and anti sex stereotypes.

It's a methodology many have adopted, unfortunately via the Guardian.

@WarriorN

I was responding to a direct comment to me where I was being demanded to divert my conversation towards a direction which another poster would prefer. I don’t appreciate it. I am entitled to respond that I do not appreciate it.

I am tired of being conciliatory and expected to be nice because I’m a woman
Societal and cultural expectation of meekness,conciliatory behaviours to not offend anyone else
Emma Barnett nailed it in the interview, I particularly liked that she didn’t allow transient points and asserted herself as interviewer (it is her show btw)
She challenged the waffly as a mutha nonesense

Emma Barnett is so competent with Woman Hour
Woman Hour was moribund middle class tosh previously now it feels relevant again

When Caroline Hogg, a child, was murdered in Edinburgh near a fair many years ago the police found over 70 men known to be potential or actual paedophiles within about half of a mile or so of her death at the time of her death. This is similar in other Western countries.
Abbot 30 years ago a girl was murdered in Sweden. Helen? Again, 29 men in this category in the vicinity of her home who the police could have, and did, investigate. Go anywhere near you to a public park, area where children play, and you will see many single men sitting watching. Most of them probably completely innocent but some of concern. It's a harsh fact most adults don't want to know. When a pop up brothel appeared near me recently we watched the men come and go every 15 mins. All organised online. They were so clean, wholesome and normal looking. Anyone's sons, partners or brothers. I haven't been the same since!

Woman Hour was moribund middle class tosh previously now it feels relevant again

I wish I’d said that in my email.

Anyone who knows anything at all about safeguarding knows that predatory men absolutely do choose careers and jobs/voluntary roles to access their chosen prey. They will go to extraordinary lengths such as training to be priests, teachers, sports coaches, counsellors, nurses, doctors. They will volunteer for years in various capacities. Those years of investment are worthwhile because these men will continue to abuse their victims for decades. The more respected the role they are in, the more untouchable they are, or the more vulnerable /harmless they appear to be, the more they can get away with.
The interesting thing about JS was that the middle aged female nurses at Stoke Mandeville clocked him very early on, but they were ignored, while the politicians and celebrities fawned over him.

The creature in dunblane tried to run kids clubs didn’t he.

'I have been involved with the organisation of Boys Sports Clubs for over 20 years and the rumours circulated by officials of the Scout Association have now reached epidemic proportions across Central Region. As well as my personal distress and loss of public standing, this situation has also resulted in loss of my business and ability to earn a living. Indeed, I cannot even walk the streets for fear of embarrassing ridicule. ”

— Paragraph of a typed letter/manifesto sent to the Queen of England by Thomas Hamilton (Dunblane killer).

Various documents relating to the case were sealed, leading to accusations of a cover up.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-46721297

There was that man who bought an entire school in order to abuse the pupils, recently. The police officer who embarked on a police career purely to meet young female victims.

There is no doubt men go to extraordinary lengths, over decades, to access females.

But I completely agree that it's equally clear that many men don't go out of their way to assault women, but absolutely feel entitled to do so if the opportunity arises. Sexual harassment is massively prevalent for example.

Any man emboldened to enter a female space against the consent of the women in there, is already demonstrating his entitlement to harm women. He doesn't have to attack them.

Just being there does it.

Or the raise of an eyebrow, a deliberately lascivious look. It's easy to make many women afraid.

And I bet many men simply have not given it even the slightest headroom. Claiming that a man looking at you funny can be very unsettling, would be a completely a novel concept.

I agree. I think there are some men who go to extraordinary lengths to abuse. They then create cultures and environments where it is encouraged, normalised or at least ignored which in turn other men, who wouldn’t in other circumstances necessarily commit those crimes, feel comfortable in joining in.

I live in an area which is heavily affected by CSE. The culture that those men created has meant that generations of men think it’s perfectly fine to sexually abuse and exploit young girls. It’s all they’ve ever seen and, furthermore, they’ve seen authorities turn a blind eye to (or blame the young girls for) it for decades.

What I'm increasingly interested in is women's strategies for self preservation and how they share these, particularly with children.

I think this is an area that can be quite fraught, treading a tricky line between what could easily slide into victim blaming and a healthy sense of how to be aware and alert to red flags and how to avoid, navigate, de-escalate difficult and dangerous situations.

It's not helpful to women or children to say, for example, 'you should be free to walk wherever you like at night'. While this is morally no doubt unarguable, it's not practical, and risks again (I think) putting an emphasis on what women should and shouldn't do and even on encouraging women to think that because it is their right to walk down any dark alley anywhere at night, they should do so to prove how 'strong' they are.

As a young woman, I found myself in many such dangerous situations, partly from a desire to be fearless. I really wish now that someone had spent a bit less time telling me abstract feel-good slogans about how I was able to do anything I wanted to do, and a little bit more time teaching me strategies for navigating the world as it is, rather than how we wish it would be.

What I'm increasingly interested in is women's strategies for self preservation and how they share these, particularly with children.

There need to be substantial shifts. When I was a child, the Church dominated, so if women and girls were assaulted/raped/beaten etc. it was because we were the 'gateway to Original Sin' and it was definitely our fault.

Of course, in my neighbourhood we were at greater risk of being grabbed/assaulted etc. because there were a lot of brothels (3 within a span of 10 houses on the section of the road where we lived) as well as sex workers who waited outside the pubs or congregated by traffic lights to climb into cars. This seem to embolden the men to literally grab women and girls and then claim it was a reasonable assumption and they didn't have to pay for it etc.

My parents and school gave us no strategies. It was entirely left to us to navigate. For various reasons, if somebody mistakenly knocked at our door when looking for a brothel, I was the one that my mother sent to the window to alert them to their mistake and call down directions to them.

Society, the Church, and our own families wilfully put us in the path of danger and also so circumscribed our behaviour that it was wrong to literally fight back or name the abuse that we endured.

We put women and children in danger. We still hobble defensive strategies albeit in other ways.

That sounds so frightening, Embarrassing. Children should not be exposed to that.

Somebody pointed out to me recently that women have always been told to be quiet when they talk about danger/their boundaries/consent/defense. The message might change but the end result always seem to be to undermine women's ability to protect themselves.

@ArabellaScott

That sounds so frightening, Embarrassing. Children should not be exposed to that.

Somebody pointed out to me recently that women have always been told to be quiet when they talk about danger/their boundaries/consent/defense. The message might change but the end result always seem to be to undermine women's ability to protect themselves.

Which links to the rules of misogyny and that good old message that the worst thing about male violence is female people talking about it and making male people look bad and feel bad about it.

We know that Men will go to extraordinary lengths to abuse women and children. We also know that men will also be opportunistic. These facts aren't really a debate.

But - Women have lost all rights to complain, or from protection. Any man can say they are a women. It doesn't matter what they look like. If they have had surgery. Drugs. They can just say they identify as a woman. If we walk in to a toilet or changing room - and a man walks in behind us, we can do nothing.

We will be bigots if we challenge. Transphobes if we object. And acceptable collateral damage if we are harmed.

Right now - we are screwed.

@ArabellaScott

That sounds so frightening, Embarrassing. Children should not be exposed to that.

Somebody pointed out to me recently that women have always been told to be quiet when they talk about danger/their boundaries/consent/defense. The message might change but the end result always seem to be to undermine women's ability to protect themselves.

This is going to sound ridiculous but…Reading your response is the first time that I've wondered if this is partly behind my hypervigilance and insomnia.

It was an area with a high crime rate and break-ins were frequent. It wasn't that unusual for a woman to have the purse stolen from underneath her pillow while she was sleeping (and her husband in the same bed).

Maybe, just maybe, this has been a habit that has been very hard to break.

Sometimes it feels we spend our lifetimes recovering from our lives.

The somatic impact of trauma is a very interesting area. Sounds quite reasonable to me that childhood spent vigilant will encourage someone to form various habits of the same.

Re opportunism - I'm sure I read a thing a few years back where they asked male students on a US campus if they would rape someone if they believed they would get away with it - and 31% said they would. Well, actually 31% agreed they would have sex without consent - if the word "rape" was used, it dropped to 13%. That's still 1 in 8 young males who would knowingly rape someone if they thought they would get away with it, and 1 in 3 who would have sex without consent if they thought they could do so with impunity. archive.thinkprogress.org/1-in-3-college-men-in-survey-say-they-would-rape-a-woman-if-they-could-get-away-with-it-ffa7406b9778/

No reason to imagine that number has dropped, given the pathetic rate of conviction that rape and sexual assault attracts these days!

The creature in dunblane tried to run kids clubs didn’t he.

Yes. I worked with a young man who was a survivor. He carried many emotional scars. He found solace as an adult in helping traumatised youngsters. And through running.

There's a book by Bessel van Der kolk (?) “the body keeps the score” which looks at the impact of trauma on long term physical / emotional health.

Yes, and a whole field of 'somatic' and 'body centred' therapy.