The misogynist left

[catduckgoose]

I'm on the left and have been all my life, but I've been thinking a lot recently about the misogynist strand of leftist politics and how it is that their views cluster around so many women-hating beliefs, such as:

1. TWAW and gender ideology - seeing male desires as more important than the needs of women and girls.
2. Glorifying sex work - disregarding the physical and mental harm to women, in favour of what best supports male lechery.
3. Uncritical support of Islam - ignoring the inherent misogyny and violence of men against women, and using oppression narratives to excuse this.

The last one there has been a huge amount of in the past few days in context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, I made the mistake of watching war footage of Hamas' brutality, particularly towards women (Shani Louk video is absolutely horrifying), and then I see people on the left, mostly men, defending all this as a just cause and crying 'Islamophobia' to anyone disagreeing.

The frustrating thing is those who promote these views don't even recognise their misogyny and sometimes even try to twist it to paint anyone criticising these views as misogynist!

Anyway I just wanted to open a conversation about this and was wondering if anyone else feels the same and has other examples of similar beliefs amongst the misogynist left.

I feel that Men can literally say whatever they want, but as women we are constantly being monitored and kept in place.

You could have a PR system where the list is randomised and the selection to the list is controlled by the local parties.

Or have first past the post, but change the weight of their votes in Parliament by PR, and give some extra seats out to smaller parties if they get above a certain percentage.

Oh, I have a nice story about Ed McCurdy who wrote this song.

When I was about 8, he came to my school to talk about folk music, and all the kids in the school learned this song so we could sing it when he came.

I thought the part that says "I dreamed I saw a mighty room, and the room was filled with men" was kind of unfair, and that maybe in stead it would be better to say "filled with women and men," and I suggested this to the music teacher.

When he came to the school, before the presentation, she took me up to see him, and I told him my thoughts, and he said that he thought that sounded like a good plan. And so when he got up on the stage to talk to the assembly, he said what we were going to do, and this kind of modification was a traditional part of folk music, which doesn't really belong to any one person, even the composer. So that's how we sang it.

He was really an incredibly kind and gentle man.

That might be better, for sure.

But I still think it undermines the whole foundational premise which is that a particular individual (not a party) is selected by a group of particular individuals in a particular place, to represent their interests.

If party politics mean that isn't happening than the logical things would be to try and weaken the hold the party has over MPs, not give them more power.

This should be the case, but as we saw from the Corbyn era, people didnt vote Labour because of him, no matter who their MP was. I agree that the hold of the party over MP's has to be weakened. I think it was a mistake by both parties to give party members such a choice over who the party leader was. Its not up to them. The local constituency parties should be electing their local MP, and the local MP should have a say in who is their party leader. Both parties should go back to the old system. The Tories couldn't even trust their party members to choose their last leader, after they chose Liz Truss presumably on the basis that she had blonde hair like Thatcher. Im not sure the unions should have such a say in Labour anymore.

I’m not sure I would change it much at all

The leader has a big influence on policies and direction so it will be a factor for me

I also prefer the MP system so it’s tied to local area

Unelected second chamber moves away from issues with US type system

I’m ok with not changing it, it may not be a perfect set up but alternatives bring other issues

@LongLizStridesAgain banned? Really? Why?

Lab and Con are in full support of NATO and Ukraine, both support Israel, both condemn Russia and Hamas.

The Tories failed to make misogyny a hate crime, they actively shut down the bill.

& all that has happened in regards to TW, self ID, GRC's, loss of single sex spaces, violent men not locked up, all happened under the Tories.

But its Labours fault, as i presume thats what you mean by the "left

The attacks on Jews in both the UK and France have been done by right wing extremists, some in the far right AFD in Germany and RN in France even deny the holocaust.

By the Left, I mean the Hard Left within Labour who are not part of a potential Labour government, as well as other hard Left groups who spout loudly about being on the 'Right Side of History' while bullying women out of jobs. I don't care about Tories, that's why I don't vote for them. Far Right groups obviously are anti Semitic, but so are many on the Left.

The contributions of @LongLizStridesAgain here were some of the most thought-provoking I've ever read on MN. Why banned, MN?

Yes, why?

What was the supposedly offending post - anyone know?

I think LongLiz wrote very informed and interesting posts.

Very odd.......the posts must have been reported by someone in order for the moderators to decide ( and how) that Liz was a previously banned poster.
What was so provocative or offensive?

I can't remember what she said, but I hadn't noticed anything on here that contravened guidelines? I've been enjoying the debate.

I think you've answered your own question there.

TRSOH are very very keen to eliminate precisely those sorts of posters.

Who are TRSOH, please?

The Right Side Of History

Thank you.

The Tories failed to make misogyny a hate crime, they actively shut down the bill.

Yes, but to be fair, I think they were acting on independent advice from the Law Commission.

They did make other recommendations and I think the government is acting on at least one of them:

"A government review of the need for a specific offence to tackle public sexual harassment, which would likely be more effective than adding sex or gender to hate crime laws."

https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/hate-crime/

Obviously you can still disagree with the government's decision, but I think the context does make a difference.

Imo with hate crime laws, I think it's useful in a couple of ways, (1) it sends a message that something is unacceptable in our society, (2) it means we have statistics to track the problem.

On the other hand, if you attack a disabled person because you hate disabled people, or you attack a disabled person because they are an easy target and you just like to bully the vulnerable... why is one a worse crime than the other?

Also there are free speech issues when it comes to "inciting hate".

& all that has happened in regards to TW, self ID, GRC's, loss of single sex spaces, violent men not locked up, all happened under the Tories.

The Tories have to take some of the blame.

But I think GRCs were the European Court of Human Rights and the Labour Party.

I think someone mentioned that self ID was under the Tories, but actually a cross party committee that involved Labour MPs.

And the activism was coming from the left-wing, even if the Tory Party failed to stand up to it.

But its Labours fault, as i presume thats what you mean by the "left

I think you may have missed their point.

The attacks on Jews in both the UK and France have been done by right wing extremists, some in the far right AFD in Germany and RN in France even deny the holocaust.

Attacks are done by the far right, but also Islamist influence causes attacks on Jewish people, and the far left tend to get into bed with that movement over Israel.

One of the numerous reasons to think twice at the moment about adding misogyny to the hate crime bill (other than that the whole hate crime thing has turned out to be a bloody mess exploited by bad actors and really not much use), is that it would be immediately grabbed as a trojan horse by the gender identity movement as another means to bash women and women's equality, and further the male supremacist agenda. It's very obvious if you read around it, and note that in Scotland when it was being considered, several rampant anti-woman activists were immediately put in charge of it to make sure it achieved nothing inconvenient, like enabling women to say no to men, or getting things like 'die in a grease fire' and 'suck my lady dick' made reportable with the police having to actually do some policing.

It's like the whole 'ban conversion therapy' thing - <insert emotive examples here>. Which looks so obviously common sense and right on the surface, but in fact is a whopping great trojan horse for a bad faith political movement with a lot of very worrying agendas, that would be used to do a fuckton of harm once in place. At least the Tories have enough awareness of this that they're not rushing it through shouting whoopee.

We have enough problems with badly thought out, badly written law being exploited to the nth degree by those without morals or conscience, and people in positions of responsibility wittering vaguely about they didn't think/know/their ten year old SPAD wrote it/some bigger boys passed it in to law and ran away. We really don't need any more.

@Angrycat2768

I read an article by Matthew Syed a few months ago, where he made the point that perceived pacifists often end up blaming victims for their own invasion. Because if only they didn't fight back, there would be peace. They are doing the same with Hamas and Israel. And you could say similar when it comes to trans rights, taking a weaker and historically marginalised group (women) and defending trans rights activists' ( mainly middle aged, straight white men) aggression against them. Because if only women shut up about it, there would be ' peace'.

I think in both cases, the far left has made the judgement of who the "oppressors" and "oppressed" are, with twisted or inadequate reasoning, and then they in their minds "stand with the oppressed" to the point of supporting violence, or at least supporting bullying and silencing in the case of women.

@MNHQ where is @LongLizStridesAgain ???

If she was a previously banned poster, she didn't need to do anything offensive or against the rules, just be discovered posting.

Maybe someone recognized her, or possibly the site staff became aware some other way. It might not have been anything on FWR either, but some other part of MN.

Thank you all who have posted on this thread! It's been so interesting reading everyone's insights and perspectives.

On the deleted posts, I asked MNHQ if they would consider restoring them to the thread, but unfortunately they have policy not to do so:

We're really sorry but we don't reinstate previously banned posters, or their posts. Doing this would encourage them to return and it's a blanket policy across the site.

Understandable but disappointing!

However, the first six or so pages of the thread were saved in the Internet Archive before this deletion. So if you pop over to https://web.archive.org and paste "https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4916106-the-misogynist-left" in the search box, you can see most of what was deleted.

Very helpful, thanks.