Women's Place UK: Filia event: the elephant ignored yet again

[pattihews]

I attended the WPUK event at Filia yesterday and came out feeling disturbed by what struck me as a very heavy-handed event designed to avoid talking about the elephant in the room. For what it's worth, I've voted Labour at every election since 1979. I imagine 90% of the audience had a similar track record.

Put briefly, we had 90 minutes of:
Feminism=socialism and if you're not a socialist you can't be a feminist and if you're not a feminist-socialist you're the enemy.
The right is sly and will lie and try to draw you in (illustrated with a video from the US about the right-wing origins of many apparently liberal groups, including the Heritage Foundation) and you must resist any temptation to get involved with them.
The way to do it is to join unions and change them from within, hold socialist women's salons to recruit and inform and get involved at grass roots level.

There were also regular warnings about racism, which seemed odd and extraneous because WPUK is all about gender ideology.

And then the penny dropped. Though her name was never mentioned, I suddenly realised that the whole tightly-managed event (no talking unless you're holding the microphone) was a warning not to fraternise with Posie Parker.

At lunchtime I encountered several other women, all of them furious about what they'd sat through. Furious in particular because of course the elephant in the room was the fact that the Labour Party, to which WPUK is loyal to death, is the biggest threat to women's rights in this country. And they'd used PP to deflect from that.

I'm not a Posie fan. Posie's clear she's not a feminist. She says things that make me cringe. I have doubts about her motivation and we wouldn't be friends in RL. But I went to one of her events when she came to my area and she can mobilise women the left will never reach and for that she's important and valuable. When I go canvassing for Labour I meet working-class as well as middle-class women who vote or have voted Conservative. They include aspirational minority ethnic women. They have their reasons, and some of them I can understand.

A woman I've never seen before and may not see again joined my table for lunch and explained why so many women were feeling really disturbed. These are TRA tactics.
The huge issue that concerns so many of us (should we vote Labour?) was avoided and we were instead lectured on how to be good socialists and feminists.

Was anyone else there? What did you make of it?

And don’t forget the ‘poundshop Marine le Pen’ comment, which both insulted KJK and spoke volumes about the tweeter’s view of women who go to her events - not to mention women who use poundshops.

I wonder what's more "cult" like, holding open mic events where any woman can speak, or holding tightly controlled events where women get to talk to their neighbour for 5 minutes and your supporters come onto MN to express disappointment afterwards for the audience asking the wrong questions, or worse still to call women "cowards"?

Quite.

I'm off to bed now. This is from Andrea Dworkin's speech, Woman Hating - Right and Left from the 1987 conference, The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism. It's the same speech in which she talks about 'all the women who used to be your friends but you want nothing to do with'.

https://www.catwa.org.au/historical-rrecordings/

'Part of having a feminist resistance to male power includes expanding the base of that resistance to other women, to women you have less in common with, to women you have nothing in common with. It means active, proselytizing dialogue with women of many different political viewpoints because their lives are worth what your life is worth. That's why.

'We have to go past the conventional political barriers, the lines that the men have drawn for us. "Our girls are over there; we'll call them Democrats, we'll call them socialists, we'll call them whatever we want to call them. Those girls are over there; that's their girls. The girls on our side aren't allowed to talk to the girls on their side." Well, if the girls on either side talked to the girls on the other side, they just might find out that they're being screwed the same way by the same kinds of men.'

Look up the thread that someone, possible Lang referred to above.

I generally dislike the name calling and speech policing.

KJK isn't relevant to broader feminist organising. That's the position she takes. It resonates with some women and not others, same as any other group or public figure.

It does worry me that she is either naive or unaware about the far rights influence in women's groups in the States, but I'm not expecting anyone to agree with me.

I have been reading and lurking on this thread, and i am now going to make a comment that I frequently make to trans activists.

You cannot control how people perceive you.

I have been to WPUK events before. I don't think I would go again. I'm sure it's no skin off their back, but even if the collective cared about my absence, no-one who attends WPUK meetings and no-one who runs them get to decide how i perceive WPUK.

If you struggle with that, read those lines again, and get over it.

You cannot control how people perceive you.

I generally dislike the name calling and speech policing.

Yes you keep it all general and don't differentiate between insults that describe human behaviour and insults that utterly dehumanise:

Yes, I hate head girl, domesticated zombies and all the other name calling.

It's all an irrelevance anyway

I know that piece of writing Lang.

Dworkin is right. All the divisions, name calling, setting up of different sides are counter productive.

But maintaining a distance from thuggish men is, it seems to me, vital.

I don't believe that I've called anyone a coward, Tinsel. It's utterly tedious having words put into my mouth. I'm not a head girl nor a domesticated zombie, nor one of the wrong wellies troupe that Lang described upthread (charity shop if you must know), I think WPUK have made some mistakes, don't understand half the Twitter references that get made, am scared about the growth of the far-right, find the left depressing beyond belief.

I don't think I'm the enemy of anyone on this thread, but other posters seem to.

Ho, hum. Really enjoyed Fília, not least because there were some really fresh discussions and really helped me put the online spats in perspective. Until that post-panel discussion which seemed such a missed opportunity.

Glad that others found it interesting though, if they did. Not sure, seems possibly not.

maintaining a distance from thuggish men is, it seems to me, vital

You're saying that two people - a man and a woman - attended an open event run by KJK and that is her fault? Or their political inclinations are her fault? What was she supposed to do, check ID and ask for a pledge of allegiance?

Please see the other thread Arabella.

what other thread? Can you not respond here?

What's the point?

I contributed to one thread and have been told this amounts to a six week bashing.

I don't believe that I've called anyone a coward, Tinsel.
I didn't say that you had. It was before you arrived on the thread that that happened.

I contributed to one thread and have been told this amounts to a six week bashing.
I'm reminded of a certain Carly Simon song. Nobody suggested the six weeks of bashing was a solo endeavour, entirely perpetrated by you.

I have yet to see a scrap of evidence that KJK did any of the things some have accused her of.

Why mention it a post directed at me then?

All this lumping together of different women's views and positioning women as 'we' and ' they' is very confusing and seems to do very little to further discussion.

There seems to be alot of Twitter stuff that I don't keep up with underpinning these discussions. I don't understand half of the references on this thread.

I'll bow out now. Filia really helped me put some of this online stuff into perspective, and I don't want to lose that.

Why mention it a post directed at me then?
I refer the honourable lady to the reply I gave some moments ago regarding Carly Simon songs.

Less busy today so I have been reading the Sarah Ditum thread. I had no idea this was what was going on. No wonder the WPUK session felt so weird to the uninitiated. No wonder it was so tightly run, in order to stop anything kicking off. No wonder the content seemed largely irrelevant to most of us actively engaged in resistance to gender ideology.

I can't help thinking that WPUK is now obsolete. Working from within the trades unions and Labour has got them nowhere. I think Louise Perry is right. I don't think the terfs have sealed victory quite yet — but I think it's coming now that Sunak has spoken out. So WPUK remain pure and unsullied on their mountain top while ordinary women — some of them the wrong kind of women (politically apathetic or even Tory) — have done the business.

I thank WPUK for kicking things off with their meetings but I'm not ideologically pure enough for you. I'm off with Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater and the others who really are determined to leave no woman behind.

Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce are both very happy to leave women behind. Because they have no politics beyond "penis is male" they leave behind every woman that needs every other aspect of feminism.

Interesting to me that you made this thread to have a dig at the WPUK panel and misrepresent those who spoke from the audience but not once have you referenced Maya's speech, key phrase in it being "Sex Matters is not a feminist organisation".

And this kind of nonsense is why I never use the feminist boards on Mumsnet. The relationship boards are where the feminist praxis is. Here I am finding is just constant gossip about other women.

Here I am finding is just constant gossip about other women.

Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce are both very happy to leave women behind.

The session is now on YT

🙈

I thank WPUK for kicking things off with their meetings but I'm not ideologically pure enough for you.

WPUK are happy to let you believe that's the case. But they always erase the fact that Venice Allen 'kicked things off' and did a sterling job of getting things 'kicked off' with several meetings that she worked to arrange to allow women to be more aware of what was happening. WPUK started in the aftermath of the 1st meeting Venice held, which was the one where Maria McLachlan was assaulted. Venice also got a meeting held in parliament after Millwall (yes, Millwall!) capitulated to the bullying TRA & cancelled the event.

WPUK 'leave women out' of the historic narrative that doesn't fit their exacting demands for political purity (AGP males are ok though 👍).

@GrumpyMenopausalWombWielder Things kicked off before Venice Allan and some of those women gave a lot of support and money to Venice to support her work starting off.

@GrumpyMenopausalWombWielder Things kicked off before Venice Allan and some of those women gave a lot of support and money to Venice to support her work starting off.