Helen Joyce & Julie Bindel: Should TERFs unite with the Right?

[ILikeDungs]

By Unherd, a debate-style response to the purity spiral after Brighton. I do admire Helen Joyce and her ability to calmly and logically discuss the issues. Unherd have made it age restricted (because of all the fucks, I suppose!):

I think the comparator was more that controversial fringe groups with small a membership base don’t have the mainstream clout of feminism.

Yes, both women touched on this 'working with' question, which is an important one.

As this and many other threads have shown, one woman's pragmatism is another woman's compromise too far.

Leaving aside which are the small, fringe groups and which are the main because that's surely a matter of perspective, which feminist groups have oppressive power over others?

Which groups would be compromising their politics and using their resources counter productively by working with another, more powerful group which fundamentally have completely different ends in mind?

I don’t think that is what the other poster was talking about - oppressive power.

I can't see that feminists have power over any of those groups tbh.

I think this is a bit of a weird formulation, to say 'power over' - when the original discussion was about which group has more power in society.

WPUK has more power than the BNP. It has more power than Hearts of Oak, and the ADF in the UK.

You seem to be changing the terms of the discussion to something else. You can do that, but please acknowledge it, otherwise it's changing the goalposts.

Yes, exactly.

which feminist groups have oppressive power over others?

????????

What?

One factor in this might be JB's attitude to motherhood.

unherd.com/2022/07/why-i-didnt-want-children/

I don't think she's selfish for not wanting children and I agree that all of us who have chosen to have children have done so for basically selfish reasons.

I don't think she hates children and I think deliberately deciding not to have children is a brilliant choice that opens up a lot of freedom in life, especially for women.

But she's only interested in mothers and children if they are victims in some way and she has some really mean attitudes towards middle class mothers:

As a campaigner against all forms of violence against women and girls, my work affects more children than you can cram into a four-bedroom Georgian terrace.

I think she just doesn't understand motherhood.

She doesn't understand the timescale of 'MY child has ONE childhood and ONE adolescence and they're happening NOW and there's no going back later to fix things.'

Mine are late 20's and I'm so glad they just missed this shit but for mothers with children now, yes the house is on fire and their children are inside.

She doesn't understand the lengths mothers will go to, to protect our children, or how fiercely we will fight for them.

She doesn't understand that left-wing feminist approval will not likely be a priority for most mothers in this fight.

According to unicef there are 14,357,470 children in the UK. The vast majority of them have mothers who will do whatever they can to keep them safe.

That's a lot of mothers.

That's a POV, but one that I think has very little to do with the realities of childbirth or childcare for many women.

That's how this part of the discussion started. A discussion about women working with groups with more power, including the power to oppress them. That's what social power is.

Should TERFS unite with the right?

In what ways do WPUK, a group of volunteer women, have more power than either the BNP, Hearts of Oak or ADF international UK?

This seems to be part of the larger pseudo-marxist thinking that can only envisage relations in terms of oppressive power structures.

Which is the background of gender ideology.

Which is possibly why JB and others like her find themselves in a conundrum - a movement that tackles GI in a holistic way challenges that paradigm, which they depend upon for their worldview.

Hearts of Oak is a tiny fringe group with little credibility, and most people have never heard of them. They have no real access to the government or party system.

I would say that WPUK is likely far more influential, has more access to people with political power, and far more social credibility.

I hope not (don't think she is).

What a nasty, unproductive little backwater they have made for themselves there.

Setting aside differences isn't an equitable thing though, if one party has more power than the other. It's using the resources of the less powerful party to shore up the resources of the more powerful, who are the ultimate winners.

It doesn't need to be equitable it just needs to be beneficial for both parties.

Kara Dansky and KJK have both appeared on Tucker Carlson. In terms of who used whose resources I think they won.

In what ways do WPUK, a group of volunteer women, have more power than either the BNP, Hearts of Oak or ADF international UK?

Well the BNP have 26 members and zero legitimacy. Hearts of Oak - not sure they even have members? No one ever heard of them until they turned up at Posie's event, so clearly Standing for Women have more power than they do. ADF likewise, no one hear ever heard of them until feminists started speaking about them.

In what way do you think these groups have more power than WPUK @Shinyredbicycle?

Yeah, I think you might have hit the nail on the head there.

I think it's clear that leftist feminists regard all relations as power relations and have no concept of equal exchange. It's all about who has power in the situation, who's oppressing who. The idea that a situation could arise where no one is being oppressed just does not compute.

Plus, I've said this before, but I don't think Julie Bindel is all that smart. She's like a dog with a bone when it comes to VAWG - and I say that with admiration - but she's not much of a thinker.

LangClegsInSpace I find that article on motherhood odd. A glaring blind spot about what it actually entails - it comes across as immature and a bit embarrassing. Stick to talking about what you know and understand JB.

I think JB is very smart and she has done some exceptional research especially on the sex industry. But goodness me she has some blind spots.

Does she know she's middle class, by the way? This whole column was written around people she has pissed off at North London dinner parties

BNP run by white men, the most powerful social group. Have won seats in elections before.

Hearts of Oak also run by men, see above.

ADF international UK. Funded and supported by ADF, a powerful lobby group with global links.

MN's usual line on WPUK is that they're ineffective and haven't achieved anything. Surprising to see them positioned as more powerful than one of the leading Christian rights organisations in the world tbh.

And actual lol that no-one had ever heard of ADF until recently.

They're hugely powerful in the States and, I believe, over 100 countries in the world if you keep an eye on such things.

HoO more niche agreed (although I'd come across them in articles about the grooming gangs), but by the same token how many people outside of women's rights and/or feminism have heard of WPUK?

Just because some white men run the BNP, it doesn’t follow that all white men run the BNP.

Just because all white men as a class together hold disproportionate social power, it doesn’t follow that every individual white man holds disproportionate social power, or that the small number of white men running the BNP are able to access and wield the power of the entire white male class.

The BNP have 26 members.

How many members does WPUK have? I've no idea, but I've been to meetings put on by them where there's been more than 100 people there, maybe closer to 200.

So let's say WPUK have 200 supporters minimum (I'm sure it's way, way more than that).

That already makes them nearly 10 times as influential as the BNP, just on numbers alone.

Unless you think that a white man is worth 10 of a woman? But surely you don't think that?

Why do the actual proper actual left wing proper feminists keep giving free publicity to small, irrelevant far right groups?

I'd never heard of HoO until the real feminists started banging on about them, and hadn't heard of ADF until the other day, when some purported feminist started banging on about them on a thread.

Definitely heard of WPUK, though. And been to some meetings.

I mean, it's also issues like media reach. Supporters of WPUK can get onto mainstream media. They lobby the labour party. They just have more mainstream reach.

I'm certainly not suggesting that WPUK work with any of these groups, but if they did, I think it's clear which group would have the resources and reach and which group would be needing the resources and reach. One of the reasons why WPUK wouldn't work with such groups is because they don't have anything to offer in that respect. You say the ADF has funding - well, I guess that makes them more useful.

This idea that man = powerful and woman = weak, the idea that this is some kind of static and eternal relationship, is one that I think does not stand up to any scrutiny. Just because a group is made up of men, doesn't mean it's automatically more powerful than a group of women. I just don't get that way of thinking. It's not like they're going into unarmed combat, or a game of rugby. When it comes to political strategising, women can certainly hold their own.

Look at KJK. She's a genius tactician. That's why groups like HoO want to cover what she's doing.

white men, the most powerful social group.

Bit off topic, but I'm not sure that white men are the most powerful social group in the UK these days. Status is conferred through victimhood nowadays. The most powerful group is surely the one whose members can avoid going to prison, or go to a prison of their choice, who are not subject to safeguarding or other rules, who are given preferential treatment and opportunities to be funded and supported, who cannot be mocked or insulted, who can get you out of a job simply by pointing a finger and calling you a name, who get favourable press coverage and can suppress media coverage they don't like, who can change the definitions of words, who have captured every institution to propagate their ideology...

Some of that group are white males, for sure. But white males who don't have a special identity are no longer high status and they can be easily silenced simply by pointing out that they're white men.