Maya’s response to Radical Notion’s GC divisions

[HiccupHorrendousHaddock]

I thought this was a very interesting answer to the recent issue of RN.

Shout out to the vipers and their Mumsnet Feminism within!

mforstater.medium.com/on-gender-critical-disputes-db2e456ad9cd

I know the thread has moved on a bit, but I wanted to second what @teawamutu said about this:

For me it is the word that is never used in academic discussion which is love. Caring for somebody else more than yourself. A hugely powerful thing that can only work to the benefit of societies.

@EndlessTea that was me 😁

Yes. It was beautifully put.

@pattihews no 100% no. I do not to be careful. I choose to relate, there is a difference. As I have said above if you choose to adopt a paradigm of all men are like this, you are on a losing streak from the beginning. If you only adopt an us and them attitude where is the coming together? Most women and men want to come together.

*choose - typed too fast and missed that word! @EndlessTea thank you

I am a feminist within a happy marriage. There are many many of us who stand for women in all sorts of circumstances that are different, who donate, who write emails, who care, many of us came from working class backgrounds. Many of us do not choose to trash our relationships through derogatory language towards the people we also care about. I get the anger, I really do get it. But I'm not walking out on the men in my life in order to be a "feminist" One of the saddest things I witnessed was a boy of around 10 years old listening to his mother talking generally about him "like all men". He said "mum, please don't keep telling everyone I'm a bad person". That broke me. How does that help? Honestly?

Good on you. What's so derogatory about the word patriarchy that you can't mention it to your partner for fear of offending him? Do you think your self-censorship is a key element to keeping it a happy relationship.

I think there's a difference between porn culture and rape culture although they are closely linked. And we should absolutely call it rape culture because otherwise how will men understand the gravity of their pushing boundaries – as that study shows. I don’t think our culture understands rape well at all and I wonder if it is poorly defined. I think “bad sex” can be extremely close to rape and sometimes the boundary is blurry. And the cases at the boundary are violating and distressing but different to a violent stranger rape. So I don’t know whether there should be a different category or not but I don’t think there’s enough public discourse around it yet. The concept of “bad sex” means different things to men and women so is an unhelpful term in public discourse. And there's a lot of talk about communication and consent when it comes to sex, but you can't communicate your way out of a situation where your partner is ultimately acting in their own interest and not yours. It comes back to the idea of sex having a deeper connective meaning and how love (that again @JoodyBlue !) is actually quite central to sex being an emotionally and spiritually fulfilling experience. The sex industry and porn culture strips love and depth of meaning out of sex in and sells it as a physical transaction.

But most men know that porn is bad for men as well as for women, they know it destroys erectile function and that porn use makes relationships with sexual and romantic partners strained, that porn is a direct contributor to relationship breakdown.

I don’t know if this is due to my age (29) but I disagree with this; I think these men are a small minority. Admittedly my anecdotal sample size is small, but I do discuss porn with men I come across. A lot of men defend it, minimise its harms, tell me I’m unrealistic for not wanting porn in a relationship/not wanting porn to exist/wanting regulation. When they refuse to engage I know there is some cognitive dissonance going on but they want their vice. Porn is considered as normal as netflix. I met one man who avoided it because of its effects on the brain, similar to a drug, and he was quite into natural lifestyle health and fitness etc. There are religious men who don't use porn. I'm yet to meet a man who recognises how it hurts women, and the relationship between men and women.

On the topic of the word ‘patriarchy’ did anyone see KJK’s latest where she was saying that she doesn’t see it as a helpful term?

I agree that it pisses men off, but I have happily pissed off pretty much every man I know using it. To me it is really important that they learn to not get defensive about it, so they can see that women’s lower worth and social status is a global pattern, and the fact that women are needing to fight for something as basic as to keep our own name, is symptomatic of that lower worth and status. The pattern, is that in or species, males dominate, females submit to that domination, and if we resist we are punished.

People often need to have it explained that it doesn’t mean a conspiracy of men going for regular plotting meetings at the ‘patriarchal oppressors strategy club’. Also, that many women are heavily invested in patriarchy too - they may favour their sons over their daughters, fight hard to stop women in the clergy, smear a victim of male violence and lionise the perpetrator, etc, etc.

You also don’t need to claim that ‘patriarchy hurts men as much too’. Men aren’t stupid. They know their own sex and what they are like. Many men trust women more that they trust their own sex, especially when it comes to showing any vulnerability or weakness. Also, an awful lot of men have a clear soft spot for women, in the way women (and they) have for children. They can see that we are smaller, weaker and more vulnerable than them, they feel it instinctively on an animal level, and it makes them feel protective of us.

@pattihews I don't feel it is self censorship. For example my household has had many discussions around the protection of women's rights and safeguarding recently. I don't not talk, as if probably obvious from this thread 😂But I don't think it is a helpful term in the west because most people read Patriarchy as "men". I am trying to say that in our current culture we need decent people, men and women, to work together in support of women's rights.

So by asserting that men are outside the women framework we are shooting ourselves in the foot. I suspect I will not convince you. Moreover I am bringing personal experience onto a public web forum more than I want to. So this is the last post I will contribute on the use of the term patriarchy. Like KJK, I don't think it is useful. But I do not self censor any more than she does.

You also don’t need to claim that ‘patriarchy hurts men as much too’. Men aren’t stupid. They know their own sex and what they are like.

Yes. I have a number of men who work for me on a sub-contractual basis. They go into peoples' homes and I've chosen them not just for their skills but for their woman-friendliness. I was up some scaffolding checking a roof recently with my roofer and electrician and they spontaneously started talking about men going into women's loos with the site foreman who was with us. All three were really clear that a lot of men were dangerous and couldn't be trusted around women. There was disapproval of porn, too. They have wives, they have daughters, they know.

Something anecdotal from my life, to support the idea of women upholding patriarchy.

I have two close relatives who did jury service. Both oversaw cases of violence against women. One is a man, the other is a woman.

The man relative, believed the defendant was guilty, but noticed that they jury went against the victim when she said something they construed as racist - ‘just because they do that sort of thing in his country’. The jury was a majority of women. He fought and fought for a guilty verdict, but the women insisted not guilty (the extremely unlikely possibility she was motivated by racial prejudice was considered ‘reasonable doubt’) and he finally relented.

In the other case, the woman relative, fought hard that the defendant was not guilty. She said she didn’t budge, and outlasted everyone on the jury, so they conceded and gave the not guilty verdict. She was overjoyed to see him collapse with relief. I asked her how she was so sure. She said “I saw that beautiful young man, with everything ahead of him, I just knew in my heart, straight away that he couldn’t be guilty”. Basically, for her, young good looks + male + looking sad and frightened at the possibility of prison = innocent.

I fucking despair. Really I do.

Yes @pattihews !

I don’t mean to rile you @JoodyBlue . I’m just expressing my opinion.

My DH is fine with words like patriarchy and recognises rape culture, and as a result our relationship is very strong. I don’t have to censor a single one of my feminist opinions!

Not sure what you mean by “equivalently sexist” either - that’s not a thing…

All three were really clear that a lot of men were dangerous and couldn't be trusted around women.

This is so true. I’ve also chatted with men who are a bit weirded out by their own instincts and impulses, so they understand why sexually deviant men do what they do. This one chap was so insistent that I never ever hitchhike. Even though he would never act on the impulse, he was aware of the fleeting thought, upon passing a female hitchhiker, that ‘it would be so easy’ in his mind- I suppose it was his sexual instincts talking to him.
I think it is in the Symposium, someone looks into the eyes of Socrates and tells him he is utterly corrupt, the other men jump to his defence, but Socrates admits it’s true, but he uses his own reason and willpower to control himself.

Lots of men are aware of this internal battle to control their own impulses.

I have lost track of this one and so apologise if already posted. Not sure it's worthy of its own thread but here's KJK on the Radical Notion that...(!!)

twitter.com/theposieparker/status/1623951872213090304?s=46&t=2DaXX6tZd08GhIvdVOaAVQ

"The Radical Notion that I’m right. SHORT - Happy Anniversary to me #letwomenspeak #freespeech #TERFTok youtube.com/shorts/v_sLZGM… via @YouTube"

if my OH spoke to me in an equivalently sexist fashion about Women who can't cope with words like xxxx (take your pick) our relationship wouldn't last 2 minutes.

But that isn’t sexist.

The statement isn't sexist, and nor is the word patriarchy. The latter is a description of a particular type of social system; and the former is a reasonable assumption. If they can't cope with a word describing the problem, they probably won't be very helpful in trying to change it.

Something anecdotal from my life, to support the idea of women upholding patriarchy.

The thing that horrifies me most about the gender wars is the adult women on the other side - there are a handful of transmen activists who amassed a truly astonishing amount of political influence in the UK and USA (who have then gleefully signed the rights of women away), and then there are the munchiemoms and the female gender doctors like Webberly and Gallagher.

I find them really hard to get my head around.

Yes. It is insane that they are so invested in female inferiority.

I'm in and mix with a slightly older demographic than @thedankness but share the experience of men's views of porn. Hardly any are aware of the possibility of any physical harm to themselves from using it, and very few give a moment's thought to the societal harms.

She said “I saw that beautiful young man, with everything ahead of him, I just knew in my heart, straight away that he couldn’t be guilty”. Basically, for her, young good looks + male + looking sad and frightened at the possibility of prison = innocent.

This reminds of the women who sent love letters to Ted Bundy in prison. There's some women who will never, ever get it.

I don't think much research exists in this area, but one researcher proposed a hypothesis that porn is addictive, because it takes a basic human drive and presents it more extreme versions of the kinds of signals that might exist in real-life sex, and there is nothing in human evolution that would stop that from having an effect on that part of the brain which responds to sexual cues.

It's like porn is giving you the female sexualised body on steroids while removing all the humanity of the woman and sharp elbows and the need to consider your partner's pleasure. So it is not that unrealistic that many men would ultimately find it more arousing than real bodies, and if this, indeed, is an addiction, it is not at all impossible that the addicted would find tooth and nail for the source of their drug to remain legal.

Also, because of the addictive aspect, more and more boundary-violating porn is needed later for the viewer to orgasm. This means more violent and dehumanising porn about women.

And I agree that most men I have discussed porn with do think they have a right to it (you can take it off my dead hands..), and those who are aware of the harm of porn focus on the harm it does on young men who suffer from erectile dysfunction and can't get aroused with real women etc.

My online experience is that it makes no difference here if the man is left or right politically speaking.

I find that older men often think about porn more in the mode of old videos and magazines. They don't always consider the implications of the technological change. But if they do, they can usually see that it could have a differernt effect.

Younger men not so much.

I find a lot of men have a purely pragmatic approach, they think that wanking is inevitable, and they just see porn as a kind of adjunct to that which will always be in demand. People who think that way also tend to see many other potentially socially damaging things similarly, gambling, illegal cigarettes, party drugs, and so on. All of which have a human cost in the end.

My online experience is that it makes no difference here if the man is left or right politically speaking.

Given that oxfam workers used desperate girls as prostitutes, I can't say I'm surprised. The left just think they are more moral than the right.

Has anyone seen @gappytales tweets, basically rubbishing Maya for having ideas the official radfems didn't endorse. It's really shocking and telling to me.
Honestly it's like a cult. Maya, Helen Joyce, Kellie-Jay Keen, Julia Long and many others are wonderful wonderful women whom I admire and respect so!

I saw that Queen. It really showed how narrow their viewpoint is.