Women's rights general conversations

[Kucingsparkles]

This is an experimental thread, all input much appreciated!

There is so much excellent information and so many active discussions on FWR that I wondered if it would be useful to have a thread to sort of "cross-fertilise" between them - airing little thoughts or vignettes that wouldn't themselves merit their own thread, to highlight other posts/threads of particular interest or to point to notable developments on fast-moving threads so that casual observers know where to look.

(For example, "the X thread has meandered onto a fascinating discussion of Y" or "Poster P's amazing analysis on thread Z might have relevance to the scenario in thread W" or even "Random bloke asked me to smile while I was choosing onions, grr"- that sort of thing).

Right, bring on the flames or flowers! <cowers>

The Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers QC, at the trial in 1981 said of Peter Sutcliffe's victims in his opening statement: "Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women"

It's an object lesson.

I'm sure there is an interview or article where he discusses having been someone who didn't give credence to what feminists said before, and only because of following this one issue has it become clear how misogyny actually works in action.

I think Brendan O'Neill may have had a similar process or realisation, for similar reasons.

Oh. In Googling, I found this, from 2013:

brendanoneill.co.uk/post/57546822125/thoughts-on-feminism

More recently:

www.spiked-online.com/2022/03/17/stop-blaming-women-for-mens-crimes/

It’s hard reading those remarks from Michael Havers QC, and thinking that that’s an attitude that still exists. One of those moments in history where someone says something out loud and you see that things like the 60s and 70s changed so much about women’s lives, in terms of property, divorce, work, and so on but not what men were thinking.

I hope you can find a way to be free of it soon, it’s such a heavy weight to carry

www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/marilyn-monroe-film-blonde-sounds-like-shallow-guff-based-on-director-andrew-dominiks-talk-of-well-dressed-whores-and-more-laura-waddell-3944996

Laura Waddell talks about the filmmaker not really seeing Monroe as a full person.

Here is a thread from Elly Arrow about the physical realities of being in the sex trade, performing sex acts you don't want to do, on men who want their money's worth.

Caution: contains reference to factual reality and physics.
twitter.com/EllyArrow/status/1431531246283329544?

Someone mentioned "The Five" by Hallie Rubenhold. She has a podcast, Bad Women, the first series was basically the book with added stuff. Some of the added stuff was the abuse she's had from "Ripperologists" who take offence at her refusal to "accept" that all the women murdered were working as prostitutes. She's had threats from them and of course, they all know best despite her being an actual historian and them being men who get off on trying to find out who some serial killer is. It is very, very important to them that the women remain cardboard cutout prostitutes and do not become fully formed women with lives that make them more interesting and their ends all the more tragic. Nope, only "Jack" matters.

The second series is about women being murdered in WWII, part of it based on a man known as the Blitz Ripper but also other women meeting their ends at the hands of other "nice" men. There's an added episode about Black GIs and the women they had relationships with.

I remember watching a documentary about this years ago and being so shocked about this. It was a first seed of awakening that's come to full fruition in more recent years.
Reading those awful words again now. There's that mysterious anger!

Article here on, among other things, the commoditisation of women's bodies. From the estimable Karen Ingala Smith.

thecritic.co.uk/the-sex-trade-is-inherently-unsafe/

The ‘Green River Killer’ was another one where prostitutes weren’t people. Here’s an article from 1984:

www.newspapers.com/image/16617851

Possible link fail, try this one www.newspapers.com/image/16617851/?clipping_id=43647&fcfToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjE2NjE3ODUxLCJpYXQiOjE2NzA0NTA1OTIsImV4cCI6MTY3MDUzNjk5Mn0.aP5dECEP-cYfm9B_P5AA11WW4xLtkKh4URSHC6ToQVY

Just read the thread from Elly Arrow. Yeah, it's a great line of work, so many benefits to be had. Hellzapoppin, my views on prostitution have changed over the years, I never thought it was some great thing but I thought if legalised, etc it could be safe and okay. How foolish I was.

Right, who here remembers Comrade Delta, rapist at the Socialist Workers' Party? The one who was allowed to get away with it because the other party member didn't want to involve the police, because it would be a bit bourgeois? Naturally, if someone had murdered Comrade Delta, they'd have thought that was important enough to involve the state.

Tonight, an interesting motion has allegedly been passed by the Cardiff Students' Union. Nominally it's about showing support to black victims of police violence. But let's check some paragraphs that have sneaked in, down the bottom.

1. Cardiff SU will publicly condemn police violence by South Wales Police, especially their brutality towards Black people and people of colour.

2. Cardiff SU will audit where it engages with the police, and following this audit, cut down on engagement with the police to the minimum without violating legal requirements and interfering with strictly essential operations of the SU, such as the operation of its trading venues and important large-scale events. Cardiff SU will work towards non-engagement with the police in the future, and work towards a position where our operation and income are not reliant on engagement with South Wales Police or any other policing organisations.

3. Cardiff SU will actively promote alternatives to policing and transformative justice practices, steering away from promoting the police and the carceral justice system as the only channel that survivors could pursue, while raising awareness of the police’s complicity in violence and sexual violence. Cardiff SU will broaden its definition of safety in its campaigns to acknowledge how policing perpetuates violence, and that students can feel unsafe around the police.

<SNIP>

Remind you of anything? Can you see the agenda? Victims of violence and sexual violence are going to be guilt-tripped for wanting to report the people who attacked them. They are going to be "steered away" from involving the police. Heaven forfend that a student rapist might have his future jeopardised by his actions.

@SqueakyDinosaur
Re the Filia conference, I'm sure there are lots of posters who could tell you better, but my experience:
it was the first time, and I went on my own not knowing anyone else who was going, so was nervous about the whole thing to be honest.
Only went to the main conference sessions as was too disorganised (and unsure) to book the smaller sessions in time.

It was fascinating. The session with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and others talking about Iran was eye-opening. You got a real sense of the dangers and reality of living as a woman in Iran, from people who knew and were given space to talk about it. The session on woman's sports including Sharron Davies and the mother of one of the swimmers who had to swim against Lia Thomas similar - you got a much better feel for what it was really like, lots of specific details and an understanding of how incredibly personally unfair it was.

I sat in on other sessions that I had no expectations of, and learnt a lot about all kinds of aspects of feminism, both historical and geographically diverse.

The conversations - you couldn't sit down without someone talking to you. I got used to sitting down at a table to eat/drink - any table - and to almost immediately get into honest, personal conversations with all kinds of people. There were a lot of older women who had been fighting as feminists for decades. For me it was like another world, full of people you didn't know existed, who had been bothered by and engaged with these issues for such a long time. (And you ended up casually standing next to people like Julie Bindel / Maya Forstater / etc.)

I learnt a lot, and had my eyes opened to lots of different things including the fact that this large, concerned and engaged community existed, how fundamental the impact our patriarchal society has had/has on the lived experiences of women, and how skewed that is. The conference made me feel angry and despairing and hopeful all at the same time.

steering away from promoting the police and the carceral justice system as the only channel that survivors could pursue, while raising awareness of the police’s complicity in violence and sexual violence.

'Survivors' does rather imply they are talking about the very serious end of crime.

Directly followed by "raising awareness of the police's complicity in violence and sexual violence". This isn't about bike theft, is it.

So they're going to pressure rape victims to participate in "transformative justice" alternatives, while reminding them of all the rapists in the police.

Do I believe the police forces of the UK contain far too many unconvicted rapists and perpetrators of domestic violence? Yes. Do I believe the answer to that is to let student rapists get away with their rapes too? Absolutely not.

That older Brenda's O'Neil piece is hilariously incoherent, but I was particularly tickled by:

modern feminism [...] seems far more concerned with certain working men’s hanging of Page 3 calendars on their workplace walls, for example, than with the exploitation of those men within their workplaces.

Well. Yes.

Oddly enough, it often seems 'men's rights activists' are more concerned about criticising whatever feminists are concerned about, rather than with the exploitation of those men within their workplaces.

😆

Why don't men's rights activists care more about children growing up in poverty due to absent fathers who don't pay child support?

50% of those children are boys.

Oh, it's because they're adult men's rights activists. They don't care about their sons or little boys.

That's terrifying @NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision

What form do we think this so called transformative justice will take?

I wonder if they'll make an exception and call (or at least tweet) the police if there's an act of Literal Violence such as a sticker they don't like?

Similar here. I don't like that prostitution exists but thought that legalisation, regulation etc would greatly reduce the dangers.

The more I read the more it would feel like blessing a horror.

You're all too bloody interesting, nearly 400 posts I've missed and won't be able to read till tomorrow!

Place marking ...

Article in the Times this morning about a woman who goes undercover on a night out:

I was followed to my hotel room after a night out. No one intervened

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/74c22ecc-762c-11ed-be91-363346a310de?shareToken=548617feb89ef9f64207572fd0e09838