Women's rights general conversations - Thread 4

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of Thread 3.

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 "Has anybody noticed this recurring theme that keeps coming up??" or even "Random bloke asked me to smile while I was choosing onions, grr"- that sort of thing).

All photos of me as a child in the 50s show me with short hair, wearing either trousers or shorts, except of course for the school/Brownie uniform ones. By the mid-60s I was making my own clothes (those needlework classes were actually useful!), so am mostly in mini-skirts/dresses or jeans. The hair was usually long and straight, though I did once get a hairdresser in Richmond, Yorks to produce a very decent approximation of a Vidal Sassoon asymmetrical bob!

I don't know where this idea came from that clothes were "gendered" (hateful word!) until whatever year it was that they made everything so free and wonderful for us. Was there some period in the 70s/80s that time has erased from my memory when children's clothing was policed?

My mother being the eldest child herself, I was the first child of my generation within my extended family, and so I did have the benefit of at least some new clothes. Even so, these consisted mainly of shorts/trousers and T-shirts, in the expectation that they would be handed down to future siblings or cousins. Ditto toys, baby equipment, furniture etc (again mostly hand-me-downs or bought secondhand).

It would have been unthinkable to waste precious family resources on gendered anything.

The one thing my parents had for me that was "girly" was the pink wrapping paper with delicate drawings of floral babies, that they covered my first photo album with (I still have it on my bookshelf and it's uncanny how much I look like my mum and my brother looks like my dad).

Society, of course, was very sexist back then. Amazingly, despite the lack of pink frills and pillow fights, society knew exactly who to discriminate against in favour of whom. Oh wait, society still knows.

On a vaguely related topic, I just diacovered this extract from a talk given by Dr Mary Hemingway Rees, of the Institute of Medical Psychology, to the Parents’ Circle of my old school in March 1936. The bit about women as not just 'a' but 'the' wage earner caught my eye.

“There were, the lecturer said, many new factors affecting the attitude of the younger generation to the family – the tempo of modern life (a four-year-old now was much more sophisticated than fifty years ago), the taking for granted of miracles like the wireless and the cinema. It seemed as if there was nothing left to wonder at. Achievement nowadays demanded less effort than before: consider Woolworths, where a child could get for a few pence what its parents would have laboured months to buy. There had been a loosening of the family fabric as a result of the emotional strain of the war years. There were the additional problems of the divided home, and the economic factor (the woman was now often the wage earner, and the child lost the old sense of security given by the mother who was always at home). There was now much greater freedom in dress and manners; the cinema had made family life public, too often as a series of crises and conflicts. Cheap newspapers, dealing with the intimate life of film stars, and cheap cosmetics, promising the art of ‘allure’, were added difficulties. Children’s minds were more critical, and the doctrine of parental infallibility no longer held.”

While there was definitely a lot of gender stereotyping in the 70s it was different to what it is now because I felt we were working through it and attempting to go a different way. Also, we weren't all pink for girls and blue for boys beyond layettes for babies and often those were yellow because nobody knew if a boy or a girl was coming. I got to wear lots of pretty dresses but also lots of shorts and trousers and t-shirts and very little of any of them were pink. We weren't confronted by Playboy stuff for little girls - which is just so fucking wrong - yes, we had gendered toys but if you had a brother then your Barbie or Sindy played with Action Man, went camping and she used his weapons to fuck things up. Well, I did.

I think we're more obsessed with gender stereotypes now than we were then. Back then and until things went all genderism we were aware that gender was a construct, that what women were in the 50s was not what we were anymore. That we could, if we wanted, rewrite what it meant to be either a man or a woman. In the 80s we had "gender benders" like Boy George who could be a full-on man and dress in a way that was neither male nor female, just the right sort of man for who he was. If he had been young now they'd be trying to get him to a gender reassignment clinic and telling him that he was obviously a woman. Anyone who wants to play with "the rules" can no longer be a feminine man or a masculine woman. They have to play by the rules and "change" gender. We've gone from insisting that a man was a man and a woman was a woman, to trying to change what that meant, to going right back to insisting that gender rules must be obeyed and if that means cutting things off, demanding that others call you man/woman because that's what you're feeling, then so be it.

God knows if any of that makes sense and apologies if it doesn't. tl;dr: Gender be a bit mental.

Good post @NotDrowningJustCrowing.

I see there's a few familiar usernames on this thread already, but looks like it will be an interesting conversation:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4794991-how-gender-believers-sabotage-conversation-and-debate-so-their-views-wont-be-challenged?

Great post, Crows, fully agree with that. The current climate is just so regressive, despite the claims of 'equality' and 'inclusion'.

Is it possible, anywhere but twitter, to have an honest discussion about TWAW? I think a sensitive matter even here.

And AGP?

Kiwifarms, Datalounge, Tattlelife, LipstickAlley, Pistonheads?

Not necessarily recommending any of them btw, they all have their own audiences and unique cultures and you may (especially in KF) encounter some seriously uncivil language but all are places that as far as I can tell, prioritise speaking freely and frankly over avoiding offence.

For now, anyways.

And Ovarit, obvs!

(which I never use because I absolutely hate the font and find it impossible to concentrate on!)

I love reading lipstick alley. The women there are so blunt and direct, I find it incredibly refreshing. They're very bright and funny, too. Obviously I would never join in because its not for me and I'm frankly what they don't want in that space, but I think they're brilliant.

I got onto Ovarit but it's so hard to read!

I just went and looked at Ovarit for the first time in ages and the layout/font isn’t quite as bad as I remember it! Perhaps it looks better on the phone I have now than my old one?

Ovarit is slightly different because it was born out of the banning of the GC subreddit, but I think it’s interesting to note that free (or at least free-er) speech has been maintained on older style chat forums (inc mumsnet) whilst being whittled away on bigger social media style platforms.

Elon Musk’s Twitter intervention seems important because the appetite for speaking one’s mind (and making bad and tasteless jokes!) has never really gone away, despite it being impossible on social media.

There are a few closed Facebook groups that get pretty wild, including one called ‘That’s a strange hill to die on but at least you’re dead’ that seemed to have a sort of mass peakening event year or two ago (there is almost no moderation beyond adding new members) and the Radio 4 Facebook group split into two factions, after a long-absent founding admin returned and started censoring topics, those who wanted to continue talking about trans themed radio 4 programming became a new group.

Not looked at those recently though as I’ve more or less quit all social media in favour of more anon old style forums, mostly because I can see that living your life ‘for The Gram’ or deleting your Great Uncle off FB for voting Brexit is destroying people’s mental health and I want little to do with it.

Absolutely!

I occasionally pop over for a read (especially when a news event from transactivist land has specifically effected an African American org or individual woman) and I frequently share links or screenshots from LA to push back against the racist forceteaming of TRA bollox such as ‘If black women are women then men can be women’ because the women of Lipstick Alley do not put up with that shit AT ALL (and are usually very witty in their commentary!)

It’s always nice to see LA linking, sharing and screenshotting from MN too.

Datalounge is hilariously funny and I sometimes lurk there for commentary on trans encroachment of gay male spaces. There is a thread on Juno Dawson’s comments re: gay is a consolation prize for not being born a straight woman that is one of the funniest things I have ever read.

and Tattlelife has all the Jack Munroe receipts that MN deletes as ‘not in the spirit’.

Never heard of Lipstick Alley, so just checked it out now. Love the no nonsense rules, e.g.

General Behavior Rules
^^
No backseat moderating -- don't try to tell other members what they can and cannot post. Don't tell us who should or shouldn't be banned. Don't tell us who should or shouldn't be allowed to join or post on LSA. If you see behavior that violates the forum rules report it instead of taking matters into your own hands.
^^
Don't whine and complain to us about "trolls." From past experience we know that "troll" usually means someone who disagrees with you philosophically or on certain topics. Disagreeing with you is not against the rules. If the "troll" is actually breaking a rule, report them. Otherwise place that member on your ignore list.

’That’s a strange hill to die on but at least you’re dead’

Stolen for stash of phrases to use as my own.

It’s an interesting group as well as phrase!

The premise is that a member makes a post featuring one of their personal opinions, an opinion that they are prepared to defend until (metaphorical!) death.

eg:

Hill: Transwomen are men, humans cannot a change sex.

and then the group members post in the comments as to whether they agree (and will join the initial proposer in dying on their ‘hill’)

So the comments read stuff like

‘Dead’
’So dead I’m dust’
’Deader than flares’
or the ever popular ‘Facts aren’t Hills’.

People who comment ‘Alive’ can either present their own counter argument or be questioned on why they don’t agree

Some people will go with ‘comatose’ if they mostly agree but have a small point of difference.

You can also start a ‘Side Hill’ (eg ‘Side Hill: Labour cannot expect to win the next GE with a leader who thinks some women have penises’)

It’s a proper weird group because it brings together the kind of blue haired teens who bang tambourines at KJK, Manosphere MGTOW Andrew Tate fans, proper old school middle aged liberals who believe in full debate and loads of terves of all ages and nationalities.

There are quite a few posters in various African and Middle Eastern countries who debate BLM style antiracist activists from the US.

There are a handful of posters who cosplay multiple identities, sock puppet style.

It’s fun because there is almost no moderation, which means the blue haired kids can’t just report and censor stuff they don’t like and the Manosphere MRAs melt down into puddles when terves get higher like/love reacts than their sexist opponents do.

Because it’s FB you can block any posters that post repetitive hills on a topic that doesn’t interest you, but it’s better if you block as few people as possible because it’s interesting to realise that while you vehemently disagree with Poster A on topic Y, you end up ‘fighting on a hill’ beside them on topic X.
Because Facebook doesn’t function in the way twitter does you don’t get the same ‘pile on’ effect (twitter works like a snowball gathering size but closed FB groups are only visible to group members and unless you go into the group on purpose you only see occasional posts from it on your news feed, selected by the algorithm).

I use my real name on FB but have my profile locked right down (and won’t lose my job over internet stuff anyway) but it’s probably safest to use an alt account.

Some threads are about pizza toppings, some are about mass shooters. It’s wild.

Sounds so much better than the tiny bit of Facebook I’ve seen!

Cracking paper here:

https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/1/236

Merit in science (esp) under threat from non-science.

it's a real page-turner! 😀

But yeah...

This, for example:

CSJ is not an empirical theory, because its tenets are maintained despite their being either demonstrably false or unfalsifiable The existence of objective reality, for example, which CSJ denies, is attested to by every successful engineering project, from bridges to satellites, from cell phones to electric cars, ever conducted.

An obvious point, but one that bears re-stating.

In Defense of Merit in Science is a top title, particularly in the context of the name of the journal! Downloaded to read while avoiding all the stuff I need to be doing - thanks for that.

I found this, don't know that it deserves its own thread, if anyone feels differently, please go wild!

https://twitter.com/ewansomerville/status/1651179742928723975?s=20

The bank Monzo, reprimanded for calling a man a horrible terf.

Pineapple has no place on a pizza!

Female steward attacked at Let Women Speak.
(The one who is dragged up by her collar/hood by the Police Officer is the one who was attacked).

twitter.com/TPointUK/status/1652671825757732865?s=20

That's shameful of the Met, no wonder no one trusts them!

That was a woman police officer (of the female variety) too.