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>

Bloody hell

Link to Cyan's thread

Doctors fitting contraceptive devices without consent www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4694046-doctors-fitting-contraceptive-devices-without-consent

I saw that earlier. It never ceases to amaze me what supposedly "progressive" countries do, even into the modern age.

... women being fitted with contraceptive devices without their knowledge or consent.

I have a personal story about something similar in the UK in the 80s but will post in on that thread rather than here.

I knew that sort of thing was common in developing countries (often by Western organisations or by pharma companies doing cheap testing) and for indigenous populations (by their own governments) in developed countries up until the 90s, but didn't know it was still going on that recently.

Topic escapes from FWR into the wider MN:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4694060-told-i-was-phobic-for-not-using-pronouns?

I was just reading that thread. It's creepy the way this unhelpful and unscientific nonsense is spreading.

This is great:

JennyMule · Today 17:51
My response when asked in previous (public sector) role - I no longer work there - was to ask what other legally protected characteristics the organisation would like me to declare in meetings/emails etc. Answer, there was none 😎

I'm just catching up on everything but yes @CyanCyan I loved that response too!

I've seen this before and I know it's Huffington Post who were heavily promoting the gender ideology but this is another good piece linked by this poster. It's not anything new, we all know women are treated terribly in comparison to their male counterparts.

SixCharactersinSearchofanAuthor · Today 18:20
www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/what-happened-when-a-man-signed-work-emails-using-a-female-name-for-a-week_n_58c2ce53e4b054a0ea6a4066

Back in the day I was a heavy, heavy drinker. Is there a difference between alcoholism and alcohol dependency? I don't know. I know I can drink now and the most I'll have in a night is three glasses of wine and that's unusual. I go for weeks and sometimes months without having a drink. I can drink and stop, the thought of being drunk makes me shudder and the last time I was drunk was accidental and about 15 years ago. Anyway! Big preamble. When I was drinking heavily I started to become quite nasty. Most nights I'd be fine but first once a week and then twice and so on I'd be an unpleasant drunk and that was when I really looked at my drinking and started to cut down. In fact, I stopped for Lent - the Catholic in me never quite goes away - and I never got back into it as heavily again. Not so say that I didn't tear it up ever again, but the rest of my twenties and my thirties saw some outrageous nights, but I wasn't drinking all the time and I was never nasty again. I think the nastiness came about because I was deeply unhappy and wanted to lash out and I was drinking to self-medicate but the drug was "allowing" me to act out the nastiness.

From a medical perspective, alcohol/drug dependent generally means physically dependent, ie you have withdrawal symptoms if you try and stop drinking. For alcohol thats shaking, nausea, sickness, sweating, ie delirium tremens. If you get to that stage, then you are in need of medical help because the DTs can be fatal. Just stopping is very difficult and very dangerous. People in this situation physically need to drink every day, even when they don't want to.

Psychological dependency (aka addiction) is generally the description of the psychological drivers of problem drinkers, such as self-medication, binge drinking, social pressures etc etc.

You can be addicted but not dependent, and you can be dependent but not addicted. You can be both addicted and dependent. All of these can fall under the umbrella of "alcoholism".

Anyone who has truly overcome problem drinking has my admiration - it's one of the hardest drugs to quit, not least because of societal attitudes to drink in the UK.

@CyanCyan , I started having blackouts too and that was scary. It's amazing that we can go through that for a while before thinking that maybe it might be time to do something about it. I'm glad you're in a better place too although I wish it was lacking migraines, they are bloody horrible.

Thank you for that, @funnelfanjo . Definitely not physical dependence then.

What I love about where I am now is what a friend and I used to call the golden moment. It's when I've had a couple of drinks and there's this feeling of happy content, everything feels more gentle. It's knowing you're not sober but neither are you drunk. Your emotions are imbued with a golden halo. Back in the bad old days we'd get there and think we needed to keep drinking to stay there. No matter how many times that didn't work - every time - we kept doing it. Now, when I get there, once in a blue moon because although I can go to three drinks I mostly just have a small beer over dinner with a friend, I just enjoy it, stop drinking and live in the moment for as long as it lasts. The clue was always in the name we gave it, golden moment. Moments are just that, a brief period. Trying to make it last longer destroys it.

Two stories caught my eye this morning. One for the amusement value of terrible arguments:

Transphobes Are Becoming Armchair Archaeologists To Justify Their Bigotry

www.themarysue.com/the-anti-trans-rhetoric-about-theoretical-archaeologists-is-still-wrong/

and the UK government may challenge Scottish GRA reform (good!)

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63909309

The latter has its own thread already

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4694086-bbc-uk-govt-may-not-recognise-a-proposed-new-system-in-scotland-to-allow-people-to-legally-change-their-gender-and-hasnt-ruled-out-a-legal-challenge

Prof Stock follows up on Hadley Freeman about the Grauniad, starting as she means to go on:

When you look at the state of some ostensibly progressive media organisations these days, it’s hard to understand how their more talented employees find the energy to get up in the morning. Imagine starting your career inspired by visions of Woodward and Bernstein and Pulitzer Prizes, and ending up having to capitulate to a rapist’s preferred pronouns.

unherd.com/2022/12/is-the-guardian-sowing-disinformation/

Excoriating from Stock - and although the context is different this is the level of misplaced superiority that we have left behind at the old place:

Moral sophisticates as they are bound to try to be, it seems likely that many of those pushing for an “inclusive” editorial line on trans issues, to the exclusion of other viewpoints, would admit in private that they at least understood gender-critical reservations. Yet it appears that they won’t allow untrammelled voice to be given to those reservations because they fear that if they did, stupid people might be influenced to do bad things because of it.

Yes, that felt so familiar.

Brilliant piece by Stock. Thanks for posting.

Yes, very good and well-argued piece. I take no pleasure in slagging off the Graun, but increasingly it just doesn't do what it says on the tin; treat its readers with respect. If the Guardian is supposed to be for 'clever' people, OK, let's have a bit (a lot!) more solid logic in the arguments, rather than hand-wavey bollocks about gender and respect. The Mail is still SAFC, though, however correct they be on certain topics.

Can't work out what SAFC stands for?

Shit and for cunts

There's also WTTTH (worse than ten thousand hitlers) but I haven't seen that one used for a while.

Ah right.

I don't like the word "cunt" being used as an insult. This is I prefer the word be used:

www.goodreads.com/quotes/9147193-i-got-the-idea-of-loving-from-a-manservant-in