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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

It's just so sad

122 replies

Zerogravity · 22/05/2022 12:48

Can't say this in real life so am writing it here....a friend of mine's daughter started identitying as a boy a few years ago now. This morning he posted mastectomy photos. (And yes, I am saying he now). It just makes me feel so sad that he didn't feel it was possible to transition without surgery but I also hope that he won't regret it iyswim? I don't really understand how this surgery can have become so acceptable in such a short space of time. It's brutal.😥

OP posts:
MagnoliaTaint · 22/05/2022 20:36

The earliest figurines in existence are of naked big breasted women

Oh, dear.

nightwakingmoon · 22/05/2022 20:36

Discovereads · 22/05/2022 20:10

‘The consumption of porn has never been as widespread as it is now, and that includes the consumption of misogynistic porn’

Well they didn’t have video or photographic porn. But they had it painted on their vases, their walls at home, in scrolls/books. Sex slaves in brothels were very cheap and accessible to all economic classes of men and it was socially acceptable, even encouraged to abuse them.

The earliest figurines in existence are of naked big breasted women and date from the Neolithic so 24,000 to 26,000 years ago. For so many to have survived that long, it had to have been common.

Just because it wasn’t digital doesn’t mean it wasn’t widespread.

Neolithic images are actually thought to be religious/fertility images, now increasingly understood to have been mostly made or drawn by women as part of puberty and fertility rituals. They weren’t pornography!

And in classical civilisations most people definitely did not have scrolls, wall paintings or vases at home. Those were the preserve of the very rich - it’s the equivalent of imagining that if the Beckhams and Russian oligarchs have yachts that everyone had one. The vast majority of people in premodern societies did not own artworks nor have many writing or drawing implements. These were the preserve of the administrative classes, largely as clerks or priests. Have you seen sexually explicit artefacts from classical civilisations? Do they look anything like actual pornography? Much of them had religious or allegorical significance, or were made only for consumption by very specific classes of men. Who do you imagine saw them? Your average teenage girl in a hamlet in lowland Egypt? A labourer in a Greek village? A conscript in the Roman Imperial army?

Or a few rich men/priests in Athens or Rome maybe?

MagnoliaTaint · 22/05/2022 20:37

You are more patient than I am, nightwaking.

'look, tits' is not an argument that fertility symbols were in any way pornographic. As anyone who gives it more than a fleeting moment's thought would understand.

nightwakingmoon · 22/05/2022 20:45

MagnoliaTaint · 22/05/2022 20:37

You are more patient than I am, nightwaking.

'look, tits' is not an argument that fertility symbols were in any way pornographic. As anyone who gives it more than a fleeting moment's thought would understand.

I’m just on the sofa right now with my Sunday night post-kid-bedtime glass of wine — imagining a Neolithic bloke with a fertility statue in one hand, thinking “wooar!” and having a furtive wank at the big clay boobies, before the missus gets back to the cave from an exhausting day’s hunter-gathering…. 😂🤣

MagnoliaTaint · 22/05/2022 20:51

Grin The Willyendorf Venus, amirite?

Discovereads · 22/05/2022 21:00

@nightwakingmoon
The poster I was responding did not limit her comment to digital pornography. So you are trying to dodge the historical record by making it all about web/video/photo pornography. The media of porn has changed with technology, but porn as a whole is not, in my opinion, more widespread than it was in the past. I haven’t pretended otherwise at all. It is you that is stupidly pretending that it’s only porn if it’s a video/photograph and calling everything else “erotic art”.

It is not true that there were no public spaces for pornography in Ancient Greece, and Rome there were brothels, agora/forum and theatres. For example, in Ancient Greece theatres didn’t just do religious plays, they also had popular plays with sex acts in them and sex with the actresses were for sale to any audience member at fairly cheap rates. These men wouldn’t necessarily be high class/elites as the tradition was that the rich political leaders would fund plays for the entire community to attend for free in order to garner votes (to vote you only needed to be a free citizen of the city, you didn’t need to be a landowner or prosperous as was the case in the modern history of European suffrage).

Id post pictures of some of the ancient porn, but not sure that is allowed or appropriate. If you’re interested in seeing artefacts depicting sex in ancient times, do a few searches on the brothel paintings in Pompeii, and sex scenes on Greek pottery.

Discovereads · 22/05/2022 21:02

MagnoliaTaint · 22/05/2022 20:37

You are more patient than I am, nightwaking.

'look, tits' is not an argument that fertility symbols were in any way pornographic. As anyone who gives it more than a fleeting moment's thought would understand.

There’s no evidence they were goddesses or fertility symbols as the culture of the Neolithic tribes from 24,000yrs ago is long lost. It is equally likely they were simply pornographic in nature.

Discovereads · 22/05/2022 21:07

Neolithic images are actually thought to be religious/fertility images, now increasingly understood to have been mostly made or drawn by women as part of puberty and fertility rituals.

This is ridiculous, there is no possible way to look at a figurine made 24,000yrs ago and determine whether its sculptor was a man or a woman much less that it had any religious significance to them. And given the subjugation and oppression of women is a common thread in known history, it is unlikely imho that the female form was ever deemed worthy of worship. To speculate and say that before known history there was some Stone Age Eden where womens bodies were revered instead of possessed is wishful thinking caused by our own socialisation to view the distant past as somehow morally superior to the current day.

Discovereads · 22/05/2022 21:10

And in classical civilisations most people definitely did not have scrolls, wall paintings or vases at home.

I know, I never said that everyone had access to everything. The poor painted graffiti. They went to brothels. They attended free plays with sex acts in them.

Discovereads · 22/05/2022 21:13

Have you seen sexually explicit artefacts from classical civilisations? Do they look anything like actual pornography?

Yes I have and yes they are. They show various sexual positions, with penis penetration on display. Of course you won’t see these in a public museum because such artefacts are deemed by our society to be inappropriate for children to see. And the most frequent users of public museums are troops of young school children on primary school trips.

nepeta · 22/05/2022 22:08

There’s no evidence they were goddesses or fertility symbols as the culture of the Neolithic tribes from 24,000yrs ago is long lost. It is equally likely they were simply pornographic in nature.

This is not my field, but it seems that many experts believe them to be fertility figurines, some argue that they may have been amulets for the kind of weight that would be desirable for women in order to survive during an era of food shortage, and some think they are x-rated figurines as you suggest.

The Wikipedia page, fwiw, on the prehistoric 'Venus' figurines says this:

The original cultural meaning and purpose of these artefacts is not known. It has frequently been suggested that they may have served a ritual or symbolic function. There are widely varying and speculative interpretations of their use or meaning: they have been seen as religious figures,[5] an expression of health and fertility, grandmother goddesses, or as self-depictions by female artists.[6]

TopKnotch · 22/05/2022 22:12

Bodily autonomy and deciding what to do with your body has limits and boundaries. When it involves serious and significant risks and side effects. When it involves general anesthetics, medical professionals, inpatient stays, wounds, dressings, post op care, drugs...

We don't have a health care system where bodily autonomy is the same thing as choosing to have a completely unnecessary major surgical procedure.

People can't have their kidneys removed because bodily autonomy, can they?

People don't have external fixators screwed into bones at will? Or lung lobectomies, or PEG tubes fitted because they want one?

We have restrictions and boundaries and check and balances.

That's not denying bodily autonomy, that's keeping people safe.

nightwakingmoon · 22/05/2022 22:14

Discovereads · 22/05/2022 21:13

Have you seen sexually explicit artefacts from classical civilisations? Do they look anything like actual pornography?

Yes I have and yes they are. They show various sexual positions, with penis penetration on display. Of course you won’t see these in a public museum because such artefacts are deemed by our society to be inappropriate for children to see. And the most frequent users of public museums are troops of young school children on primary school trips.

Oh god of course you see them in public museums. There are a ton of them on exhibit at the BM (which is full of people who aren’t schoolchildren, by the way - when did you last go to a museum?!) My great uncle used to have replicas up on his walls for fun.

You do realise they are FIGURATIVE artworks though? Not images of actual people! Penetration is also not by definition pornographic. Please look up the dictionary definitions of erotic art and pornography. You are conflating the two, and moreover, adding any kind of representation of sex as well. These are not all the same thing.

You’re also conflating other things, too - you mention theatres in Greece, for example. Bawdy Greek drama was crude, but not pornographic. It was funny and coarse, but the parts were played by men and there was no literal pornography involved - Lysistrata for example is full of sexual jokes and innuendo, but it was a staged play, not pornographic at all. Please do go and read the texts you are claiming are pornography. They really aren’t - you are confusing a great many different forms. And who was in the audience for them, do you think?

You’re also making hugely sweeping statements about classical cultures which in reality were very different, and historically varied. Your idea of Greece and Rome makes them sound like a jolly, sexy YouTube video, but in reality they were very different cultures, each spanning many centuries, and the number of people owning or even viewing explicit art was very limited, especially outside the (very tiny) cities. Athens and Rome were not the same, and didn’t represent all of their cultures by any means. And again, some phalloi on a plate kept in a rich man’s villa is nothing like the mass commercial culture of contemporary filmed pornography. It’s also nothing like the coterie cultures of written pornography in, say, Victorian London.

As for your claims on the Neolithic - there’s in fact a huge amount of scholarship on paleolithic and Neolithic artefacts. Large numbers of these are thought to have been made by women, precisely because other similar clay and bone artefacts found in those cultures were often likely to have been made by women - eg. feeding and teething spoons for babies, which sometimes even have the imprint of babies’ teeth still in them.

I don’t really know what to say about your idea that no-one could possibly have ever worshipped the female form. First, it goes completely counter to your ideas about pornography. (There was mass pornography everywhere in everyone’s home, but no-one ever worshipped the female form? Eh?) Second, you don’t think we can know what Neolithic artefacts meant, BUT you can confidently assert that women were always oppressed and so couldn’t have made fertility figurines?!? Women could never possibly have been the figures of veneration in religious art? WTF. This all sounds like schoolboy rubbish from Tumblr so honestly, apart from recommending that you actually read some actual books on and from the cultures you’re taking about, I really am out.

nightwakingmoon · 22/05/2022 22:19

Discovereads · 22/05/2022 21:10

And in classical civilisations most people definitely did not have scrolls, wall paintings or vases at home.

I know, I never said that everyone had access to everything. The poor painted graffiti. They went to brothels. They attended free plays with sex acts in them.

They really didn’t 😂

Lynnthesearesexnotgenderpeople · 22/05/2022 22:25

I have a question:

If the massive rise amongst teenage girls and young women to get double mastectomies is purely down to transgederism being more acceptable (the 'left handed' analogy is used a lot to back up this argument), then how come we aren't seeing a similar rise in older women getting their breasts removed? If transmen of all ages can finally be their 'authentic self' why is it overwhelmingly teenagers and young women doing this?

nepeta · 22/05/2022 22:31

Lynnthesearesexnotgenderpeople · 22/05/2022 22:25

I have a question:

If the massive rise amongst teenage girls and young women to get double mastectomies is purely down to transgederism being more acceptable (the 'left handed' analogy is used a lot to back up this argument), then how come we aren't seeing a similar rise in older women getting their breasts removed? If transmen of all ages can finally be their 'authentic self' why is it overwhelmingly teenagers and young women doing this?

I wish I had saved the graph where someone superimposed the data on teens considering transition on the same graph as that left-handedness one.

The former data, when graphed, looked like the almost-vertical path of a rocket, compared to the slow incline of the left-handedness trend over time. So the former increased more and more rapidly than the latter.

And yes, I have noticed that transitioning from 35 up in age is very much a male thing. There are a few cases of older women transitioning, but the sexes distribute quite differently in the teen population and the middle-aged plus population.

It's young girls and older men, the two largest groupings amongst transitioners.

Athenajm80 · 22/05/2022 22:31

Also, some fertility statues are known to be such as it is possible to trace their evolution over time to a period when we know that is what they were (if that makes sense) My Ancient History and Archaeology degree was a long time ago, so my memory is not great on details, but an example of the kind of evolution I mean is that of the kore and kouros. They themselves are not fertility statues, but the change can be traced from from a period we know less about to a period we know more of.

Fertility goddesses and therefore statues, often a woman depicted with large breasts and hips, were definitely a "thing" in many ancient cultures. To state they were pornographic not religious is ridiculous.

Have you really never heard of any matriarchal societies, or female worship? Most (all?) polytheistic religions have female goddesses, and some were often depicted naked or semi-clothed. I doubt Athenian ruling classes would be wanking over a sculpture of Aphrodite for example.

MrsOvertonsWindow · 22/05/2022 22:39

God I love Mumsnet! so many intelligent, insightful women.
The AB threads are full of qualified lawyers, the children / education threads are full of teachers, psychologists etc, there are political analysts all over political threads, feminist theory is analysed in amazing detail and on this thread when someone posts sweeping generalisations about history, porn and women up pops an actual historian of sexuality and feminism, visual culture and screen media.
Every day's a school day on here

Cailleach1 · 22/05/2022 22:40

FrancescaContini · 22/05/2022 15:53

It’s absolutely fucking tragic. This young woman has been failed by those closest to her. Presumably nobody pointed her in the direction of Keira Bell’s story.

It is tragic. I remember when people used to decry girls being put under the knife (or razor blade) in certain parts of the world. People in the west used to be so superior that we didn't have such practices, or cultural pressure to do, or allow such things to be done to children.

I know complications are less with western surgical conditions. However the element of removing body parts seems to now also be celebrated in the west. Parents are not the protective shield one would hope. Whether that is because they are cheering on such a thing, or helpless to intervene to stop it from happening. Your acquaintance is slightly older, but still quite young.

Society as a whole is obviously paying if it is on the NHS. The principle of removing or sewing up body parts (not for a medical problem) on the NHS seems to have be ceded. Would it now be regarded as discrimination if others wanted it for likewise cultural reasons?

nightwakingmoon · 22/05/2022 22:43

@MrsOvertonsWindow (I love your name)! I’m always on here 😂

SlightlyGeordieJohn · 22/05/2022 22:46

snekkes · 22/05/2022 15:15

Many trans guys find sex much more satisfying post top surgery, as beforehand it may be too dysphoric and distressing to even have their chest visible, much less touched.

That sounds like something beat dealt with via therapy, not major surgery.

SlightlyGeordieJohn · 22/05/2022 22:48

GoodJanetBadJanet · 22/05/2022 17:28

think no one should have elective breast removal until at least 25
You're a grown adult at 25! Sorry, we're going to have to disagree as no way should anyone be telling you what you can and can't do with your body at the age of 24 or 25.
Just no.

To take an extreme example, should the NHS be willing to amputate the legs of someone who feels dysphoria about them?

ThinkingaboutLangClegosaurus · 22/05/2022 22:49

nightwakingmoon · 22/05/2022 13:51

Such a brutal surgery - when you think of how women who have to have it done for serious medical reasons, to be parading it as a great thing is borderline offensive.

I am firmly convinced that the widespread pervasiveness of contemporary porn is a big contributor to this. None of it suggests that women might find their breasts joyful, and a source of great sexual pleasure, instead of just (often artificially inflated) flesh lumps, to be grabbed by men while being banged. Just look at the porn which depicts women having fake “squirting” orgasms over things that we all know rarely provide actual enjoyable sexual experiences for women.

As a young woman I was dismayed by my DD breasts, especially when the fashion was all for being anorexically thin, no bra, spaghetti strap tops, and so on. I even considered breast reduction; but what stopped me (much more than the thought of future breastfeeding);was the fact that my breasts were very sexually sensitive, and I could not bear to risk losing my own pleasure just for the sake of how I looked. (And ten years later fashions had changed anyway. and big breasts were suddenly all the rage.)

I am sure that for many of these girls there are complicated reasons here, around the denial of sexuality and sexual pleasure, or even simply being unaware that their bodies can and should be for their own feelings of pleasure, not for how they merely appear or “pass” to others.

Gender ideology is a movement that, despite its obsessions with how people “feel”, is actually all about looks, performances and appearances, and visually “passing”, to the detriment of how the body might feel or experience pleasure for itself - all shaped by a culturally deeply misogynist way of thinking of women’s bodies, which are still thought of as undeserving of sexual pleasure in themselves, so cutting off the sources of it is something to be ignored, or at worst, celebrated. 😞

I agree 100%. I was about 13 when I started wearing baggy clothes to hide my breasts, because even then (decades ago) I got unwanted attention from men. I hate to think what girls of that age go through now, with misogynist porn all over the internet and in their faces. Certainly it would feel safer not to have breasts and indeed not to be a woman.

MrsOvertonsWindow · 22/05/2022 22:50

nightwakingmoon · 22/05/2022 22:43

@MrsOvertonsWindow (I love your name)! I’m always on here 😂

Me too. There have been some amazing threads recently. The women scolders so often bring out the erudite insightful comments. The Allison Bailey threads have been so informative (and horrifying at what's been disclosed in court).
This is the latest of my name changes. Been on here for some time. .

ThinkingaboutLangClegosaurus · 22/05/2022 22:52

SlightlyGeordieJohn · 22/05/2022 22:46

That sounds like something beat dealt with via therapy, not major surgery.

Abolutely. But therapy is apparently 'transphobic'.