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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Feminism: chat

OP posts:
Coyoacan · 04/08/2023 03:14

There is a place in hell for the people who have taken over Oxfam and Amnesty and used those once proud charities for their own ends.

The point about domestic work needing to to be considered in macro-economics is a good one but...

Kevinscousin · 04/08/2023 03:51

They are absolute scuzzballs the lot of them. The whole organisation should be disbanded. Wouldn't donate to them if you made me.

TRexTara · 04/08/2023 04:32

Fuck them all. Just fuck them. I will be selling my clothes on Vinted. I'm not interested in these charities any more. They are just virtue signalling and they can fuck right off.

Igmum · 04/08/2023 04:46

It's a reasonable point and one that has been raised by feminist Economists since the 70s/early 80s at least and probably longer. I suspect Oxfam are championing it now in an attempt to recover lost ground. Not sure it will work. I'm certainly not convinced

LoobiJee · 04/08/2023 04:54

They make an important point about GDP. It’s a concept developed by economists; and economics is massively male dominated and very sexist.

Feminists have been arguing for decades that women’s unpaid labour should be recognised as an economic contribution. I think Helen Lewis’ book has a chapter about the first out lesbian MP who campaigned on a similar issue.

What’s depressing here is that the other antics of Oxfam are making them an easy target for a newspaper whose owners absolutely will not want the current economic orthodoxy challenged, as it works very nicely for them, thank you very much.

So this important message about women’s unpaid labour gets tarred by association.

Jujubes5 · 04/08/2023 05:27

I volunteer at Oxfam -the older women volunteers do the cleaning -but it is appreciated by the men!!!!

MrsJamin · 04/08/2023 06:11

Why do you volunteer at an Oxfam shop @Jujubes5? Do you think they do anything of worth anymore? What did you think of their pride video?

Original poster
Hoardasurass · 04/08/2023 07:41

@LoobiJee I agree that it's an important message however the fact that Oxfam has said it, and the way that they've worded it guarantees that noone will take it seriously.
Call me a cynic but I suspect that was intentional and comes with the added bonus of being able to say that they campaign on women's issues when in reality they just don't care about us and actively harm women's rights

OP posts:
Snowypeaks · 04/08/2023 07:44

LoobiJee · 04/08/2023 04:54

They make an important point about GDP. It’s a concept developed by economists; and economics is massively male dominated and very sexist.

Feminists have been arguing for decades that women’s unpaid labour should be recognised as an economic contribution. I think Helen Lewis’ book has a chapter about the first out lesbian MP who campaigned on a similar issue.

What’s depressing here is that the other antics of Oxfam are making them an easy target for a newspaper whose owners absolutely will not want the current economic orthodoxy challenged, as it works very nicely for them, thank you very much.

So this important message about women’s unpaid labour gets tarred by association.

Perfectly put.

Theeyeballsinthesky · 04/08/2023 07:47

If Oxfam don’t know what a woman is, don’t they find it awfully difficult to quantify who exactly is doing the unrecognised economic Labour?

(Rhetorical question because they do of course know exactly what a woman is because really they’re just the usual fuckwitted corporate that likes to pretend men can be women when it suits them)

TodayInahurry · 04/08/2023 08:13

I don’t even put clothes in the Oxfam bin near us, now we have an air ambulance one it is an excellent charity, I also donate to them. Oxfam are supposed to be a third world charity, not a rabid politician group with aid workers who abuse women and children. Agree they should be shut down

Jujubes5 · 04/08/2023 08:37

It’s good exercise and different people to chat to!

Snowypeaks · 04/08/2023 08:44

Hoardasurass · 04/08/2023 07:41

@LoobiJee I agree that it's an important message however the fact that Oxfam has said it, and the way that they've worded it guarantees that noone will take it seriously.
Call me a cynic but I suspect that was intentional and comes with the added bonus of being able to say that they campaign on women's issues when in reality they just don't care about us and actively harm women's rights

This, too.

GenieGenealogy · 16/08/2023 07:52

I am a former Oxfam volunteer. I quit over two issues - firstly our manager was a useless numpty who couldn't manage a raffle, and then there was the whole not knowing what a woman was thing.

I do take issue with the "aid workers who abuse women" though, clearly it was very wrong and should never have happened, but people in here write as if it was a deliberate policy. It was sloppy recruitment and poor reference checking which was common across the sector at the time.

What I do agree with is a place in hell for the people who have taken over Oxfam and Amnesty and used those once proud charities for their own ends. Oxfam is/was probably the most famous UK charity with a presence on the high street. It has been around 80 years and most of us associate it with disaster response after earthquakes, famine, floods. But all the amazing work which has been done over the years and all the money raised in shops by people donating their things is being corrupted by a small number of people at head office who are pursuing their own agendas. Buying a wide range of rainbow merchandise which is sent into stores (stores do not order this stuff in, it is just allocated and sent by head office) and in the store I used to volunteer in, doesn't sell. All the money spent on inclusive language policies and posters for the windows and training and encouraging volunteers to put their pronouns on a lanyard badge.

They surveyed volunteers at the tail end of last year before the latest round of nonsense and the survey found that there was a massive disconnect between what store volunteers thought they were doing (raising money for the world's poorest people) and what Head Office goals were (political campaigning and wokeness). Their response was that clearly head office just needs to try harder to get all the volunteers engaged with their political aims. 🙄

I now volunteer at Save the Children, I'm sure someone will be along to tell me why that's wrong too, but there is none of the wokeness, none of the too expensive new product Moomins and Pride stuff, and not even a paid manager, our shop is entirely volunteer run and is quite democratic.

Jujubes5 · 16/08/2023 09:21

Dr Barnardo's was v supportive of support for chidren changing gender. I don't give to them.

YetAnotherSpartacus · 16/08/2023 11:17

It's a reasonable point and one that has been raised by feminist Economists since the 70s/early 80s at least and probably longer. I suspect Oxfam are championing it now in an attempt to recover lost ground. Not sure it will work. I'm certainly not convinced

Marilyn Waring in New Zealand was one of the first to champion this.

It is a very reasonable point.

IcakethereforeIam · 16/08/2023 11:29

GenieGenealogy · 16/08/2023 07:52

I am a former Oxfam volunteer. I quit over two issues - firstly our manager was a useless numpty who couldn't manage a raffle, and then there was the whole not knowing what a woman was thing.

I do take issue with the "aid workers who abuse women" though, clearly it was very wrong and should never have happened, but people in here write as if it was a deliberate policy. It was sloppy recruitment and poor reference checking which was common across the sector at the time.

What I do agree with is a place in hell for the people who have taken over Oxfam and Amnesty and used those once proud charities for their own ends. Oxfam is/was probably the most famous UK charity with a presence on the high street. It has been around 80 years and most of us associate it with disaster response after earthquakes, famine, floods. But all the amazing work which has been done over the years and all the money raised in shops by people donating their things is being corrupted by a small number of people at head office who are pursuing their own agendas. Buying a wide range of rainbow merchandise which is sent into stores (stores do not order this stuff in, it is just allocated and sent by head office) and in the store I used to volunteer in, doesn't sell. All the money spent on inclusive language policies and posters for the windows and training and encouraging volunteers to put their pronouns on a lanyard badge.

They surveyed volunteers at the tail end of last year before the latest round of nonsense and the survey found that there was a massive disconnect between what store volunteers thought they were doing (raising money for the world's poorest people) and what Head Office goals were (political campaigning and wokeness). Their response was that clearly head office just needs to try harder to get all the volunteers engaged with their political aims. 🙄

I now volunteer at Save the Children, I'm sure someone will be along to tell me why that's wrong too, but there is none of the wokeness, none of the too expensive new product Moomins and Pride stuff, and not even a paid manager, our shop is entirely volunteer run and is quite democratic.

What have the moomins done? My, very 'woke', youngest has gone mad for them.

Incidentally, I bear no grudges to the people who work in charity shops, even Oxfam. You have negligible power to change what head office does and some, most(?), of the money you raise isn't staffed away on hollow, luxury, vanity projects.

IcakethereforeIam · 16/08/2023 11:30

*spaffed

GenieGenealogy · 16/08/2023 12:09

My issue with the Moomins is that Oxfam have paid £££ to be the licence holder, or distributor or whatever of this brand. We had so much Moomin merch in the shops and it really didn't sell - so much so that whenever someone did buy a mug or book or whatever, we'd ring a special bell. This is not what Oxfam are about - leave the merch to Next or M&S or whoever.

Over the time I was a store volunteer the range of "new product" expanded enormously - we always had FairTrade coffee and Faith in Nature toiletries, and then cards/calendars at Christmas along with some handmade things like tote bags from recycled saris. But then it was all the Pride merchandise, and the Zambian honey and Palestinian olive oil, and the wee wooden tree decorations, and the woven rugs, and the Tony Chocolonley chocoate, and the Pride stuff, and seed packets, and bunting etc etc etc.

It's another example of getting away from the core purpose of the shop which is second hand. Buying up new stock to resell. They also did a deal with Duo boots about a year ago to buy up excess stock from them (rather than Duo donating it like M&S, Zara, Speedo etc) and the edict came out from Head Office that these boots had to be sold at £69.99 a pair, we could reduce but definitely not less than £50. Funnily enough the 5 boxes of size 8 pink snakeskin ankle boots we were allocated didn't sell.

IcakethereforeIam · 16/08/2023 12:21

@GenieGenealogy thanks for taking the time to reply. Phew! Moomins are only 'woke' adjacent. I've not been in an oxfam for ages. I knew they sold stuff made by people in developing countries, I've seen the oxfam logo on coffee, etc., in supermarkets. I thought it was another way of creating support for these communities. From what you're saying they seem to have gone a bit ham on it though. If it's not selling they should just stick it in landfill in the countries where it's created, save the airmiles.

NitroNine · 16/08/2023 14:29

Ugh. Oxfam.

If you no longer donate to them but would like to send money to Haiti, which still desperately needs disaster relief, the FOKAL disaster relief fund is the best way to do it (I’m linking to the charity not the donation page just in case that gets the post deleted).

One of the groups FOKAL specifically target as a [historically] marginalised population is women. The female sort, I mean. Zero indication of any ID-ing as business.

If you want to donate to benefit people in the Global South without funding nonsense ideologies; realistically it means researching [grassroots] charities based in those countries & the inconvenience of sending money abroad. Can’t trust a charity working on menstrual hygiene to know who menstruates? Give to a project like Sanitary Aid for Nigerian Girls or Zana Africa.

Home - FOKAL

Fondation Connaissance et Liberté / Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (Foundation for Knowledge and Liberty), OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION HAITI

https://www.fokal.org/index.php/en/

nepeta · 16/08/2023 16:36

LoobiJee · 04/08/2023 04:54

They make an important point about GDP. It’s a concept developed by economists; and economics is massively male dominated and very sexist.

Feminists have been arguing for decades that women’s unpaid labour should be recognised as an economic contribution. I think Helen Lewis’ book has a chapter about the first out lesbian MP who campaigned on a similar issue.

What’s depressing here is that the other antics of Oxfam are making them an easy target for a newspaper whose owners absolutely will not want the current economic orthodoxy challenged, as it works very nicely for them, thank you very much.

So this important message about women’s unpaid labour gets tarred by association.

Yes, a point which has been made repeatedly in the past by others, including female economists. Marilyn Waring wrote a book about it (If Women Counted) around 1989-1990.

If two women caring for small children or an elderly family member decided to hire each other so that they would swap their work loads and if they then paid each other exactly the same amount, the GDP would go up. Even though the actual amount of unpaid work would not go up at all.

There are attempts to measure the value of unpaid work, but the powerful people are not that interested in the question.

LoobiJee · 16/08/2023 16:54

nepeta · 16/08/2023 16:36

Yes, a point which has been made repeatedly in the past by others, including female economists. Marilyn Waring wrote a book about it (If Women Counted) around 1989-1990.

If two women caring for small children or an elderly family member decided to hire each other so that they would swap their work loads and if they then paid each other exactly the same amount, the GDP would go up. Even though the actual amount of unpaid work would not go up at all.

There are attempts to measure the value of unpaid work, but the powerful people are not that interested in the question.

Show quote history

Have you read “Why Women Are Poorer Than Men” by Annabelle Williams? It’s got a chapter on “malestream economics”. She explains that what is included in GDP formulas varies over time and between countries. She gives an example of Nigeria changing its GDP formula in 2014 to include things it had previously disregarded (eg music downloads) and then, as a result, announcing it had overtaken South Africa as the largest economy in Africa. Then she described how in that same year the UK economy grew by £5bn overnight when economists included estimates of the value of ‘the sex industry’ into their GDP calculations. She uses that example to make the point that a big failing of GDP estimates is that they don’t take in to consideration well being, it just attaches a number to some activities.

She’s also got a section on unpaid labour but it’s quite short.

Linda Scott’s book The Cost of Sexism is about how male-centric economics as a discipline and the financial sector is, and the barriers to women’s economic inclusion, particularly in developing countries.

nepeta · 16/08/2023 17:48

LoobiJee · 16/08/2023 16:54

Have you read “Why Women Are Poorer Than Men” by Annabelle Williams? It’s got a chapter on “malestream economics”. She explains that what is included in GDP formulas varies over time and between countries. She gives an example of Nigeria changing its GDP formula in 2014 to include things it had previously disregarded (eg music downloads) and then, as a result, announcing it had overtaken South Africa as the largest economy in Africa. Then she described how in that same year the UK economy grew by £5bn overnight when economists included estimates of the value of ‘the sex industry’ into their GDP calculations. She uses that example to make the point that a big failing of GDP estimates is that they don’t take in to consideration well being, it just attaches a number to some activities.

She’s also got a section on unpaid labour but it’s quite short.

Linda Scott’s book The Cost of Sexism is about how male-centric economics as a discipline and the financial sector is, and the barriers to women’s economic inclusion, particularly in developing countries.

Show quote history

I haven't read Williams' book. Will now. Thanks for the recommendation.