Thanks for this, not a name I’ve ever heard of, which is a shame because it sounds like it was right up my fashion alley 🤣
It takes me a while to process these stories so I might have more thoughts on it later.
We had a thread recently called something like ‘what did you say to get banned from a FB group’ and this story reminds me of the general phenomena that’s been happening in FB groups aimed at women, where the language gets relentlessly policed eg ‘Don’t start posts with Hey Ladies! It’s upsetting for nonbinary members’ to the point where most of the posts are rules regarding what women can and can’t say until anything fun or useful about the group’s origin/purpose is gone.
I suspect anything run by or aimed at women is particularly vulnerable because women as a class are socialised to take care of others and so simple self advocacy is often interpreted as selfishness?
Even the very definition of feminism has been chiselled away at so that it’s no longer a thing for female people, despite well, the clue being in the name (eg ‘Feminism is for everyone! Feminism fights all oppression!)
I’m currently wondering about strategies for defeating the EDI Vampire and it’s notable that those who seem to have weathered the storm best are those that have taken decisive action to fuck it off. Obvs it’s best not to invite it in in the first place but in many cases it’s already got it’s feet under the table before anyone realises that the meal it intends to eat is the lifeblood of the entire organisation.
Coinbase and Basecamp had top bosses who were able to make decisions quickly and decisively whereas most charities are run by boards of trustees - that was the problem Rosie Kay had - left to her own devices she might well have just told the little woke shits to fuck off (although iirc her first instinct was to try to understand them better and her main failure was assuming that they would have a similar level of curiosity and generosity towards an older woman’s viewpoint)
Women’s orgs are obvs specifically targeted by woke activists (look at what’s happened at La Leche League!) but perhaps there is also something in the way that women bosses/leaders tend towards team working/listening to the collective that exacerbates it? And purity spirals are better able to take hold if there is no one at the helm willing to be the bad guy?
So Coinbase tell all the whingers to collect their last pay check and fuck off, whereas ManRepellent try and please everyone, minimise boss involvement and centre the whingers instead but pretty quickly end up closing the whole shebang down, including the business itself (reminiscent of how women will quietly self exclude when a man in a sports bra joins their women only gym).
Rosie Kay is a great example of how a woman with nothing left to lose (the Charity board even owned the right to her NAME) can come out swinging just as hard as the Coinbase/Basecamp chaps, ultimately surviving a purity spiral. She’s a modern day warrior woman and should definitely be recognised as such.
JK Rowling is another extraordinary woman, she has fuck you money and enough legal control over her intellectual property to not fear the mob, but she still had some moments early on where she wobbled when the SJW Vampire looked her way (remember the ‘Middle aged moment’ excuse for having the audacity to LIKE a terfy tweet?)
It’s weird and inconsistent to have to think about women as a class when we are discussing the danger of ID politics but if ID politics is TARGETING women as a class (and that definitely happens) we don’t really have any choice but to think about it this way.
It’s annoying because Crenshaw’s first example of the need for intersectional thinking was really important, but the resulting splinters have made everything shitter for all female people, rather than improving things for black women. The road to hell is paved with good intentions blah.
Perhaps the big difference between women and other EDI ‘identities’ is that the things that uniquely effect women as a class (being on average, smaller, less strong & less fast than men, being 100% responsible for all the pregnancy and child birth, living longer and thus being more likely to spend our last decades infirm) can never be completely solved by societal or political - we can tinker about with mitigating the consenquences but can never fix the cause… why start a project that can never be finished? Perhaps it is just much more satisfying to fight for other causes because the wins are more tangible?
How much of Women’s social behaviour is related to our mammalian biology (required traits for the sole purpose of survival of the species) and how much is crappy ‘Be Kind’ ‘Keep your knees together’ ‘Don’t say anything a man doesn’t want to hear’ socialisation? And how can women as a group help an individual woman tell the EDI Vampire to fuck off?
Obvs when it comes to Mermaids the best thing is to let one mythical beast eat the other (do Vampires like fish suppers? I hope so!) in order that a new sane, sensible org such as Genspect can step into the gap and provide factual information and emotional support for families dealing with gender distressed children and teens without immediately labelling those children as trans THEENDNODEBATE.
But what about the things we don’t want to see eaten by the vampire? Charities, political parties, businesses big and small, arts orgs, community social enterprises, THE FUCKING NHS!
How can the ‘lived experience’ of ‘service users’ and employees be fed back and integrated without taking over and decimating ‘professional experience?’
Absurdly extreme example here, but I don’t want my kid’s cancer treatment to be decided by a now adult survivor of childhood cancer (although I’m sure they have useful tips to share) I want an expert oncologist! One that is paying attention to cutting edge research, research that isn’t commissioned by and dominated by the opinions of adult survivors who have a pre set agenda based on a decades old experience.
Remember the old saying about organ grinders and monkeys? It would be pretty progressive of us to enable that monkey to BECOME his OWN organ grinder, right?
To seize the organ and hand it over to the monkey would be true social justice…
But if the monkey can’t PLAY the organ then there is NO MUSIC, the monkey has nothing to dance to & no one will chuck any coins in the hat on the ground.
It seems to me that at Mermaids, the monkey has been given the organ, but as yet, no one has acknowledged that the monkey can’t play it (and worse still, that the monkey is unwilling to put the work in to learn how to it)
Currently, fans of the monkey are still chucking money in the hat and waiting for the music to start up again.
At some point, they will start to realise that it’s gone awfully, awfully quiet
Perhaps a few will ask for their coins back.