Kara Dansky Interview - 3 April 2024

[UtopiaPlanitia]

How does Peter Boghossian still not understand women’s rights or anything other than Liberal Feminism?! He’s had lots of different women on his podcast in the last year and he really does not seem to have taken on board much of anything they say. Women’s arguments on lots of issues just seem to bounce off the front of his head. His views are fixed and that’s that for him.

I applaud these women for putting up with his faux naivety in interviews too.

Frankly, I’m rapidly coming to think that Boghossian is just a more polite version of James Lindsay.

Kara, in this interview and others, on the other hand is so clear, consistent and knowledgeable - I always enjoy listening to her break arguments and issues down to the basics for easy communication and comprehension. She is a great advocate for Radical Feminism.

Honestly I've enjoyed so much of his street epistemology but wtf was this interview!!? It's like he has suffered a bout of ignorancistis

I can't take this representation from him seriously, he is a smart man, sharp too, how is he being so dense. And missing the point so spectacularly.
It has to be a deliberate action-he isn't this dim-even if it's that he disagrees he could do so eloquently, but his faux naivety is full of holes that it's seem he purposely dug.

I listened for half an hour. His faux naivety was maddening but Kara was brilliantly clear. In a battle of wits, Peter would have been lying on the floor in a quivering heap. He played his Louis Therouxesque “oh help me understand this” little-boy-lost tactic to the hilt but it only served to make him look increasingly dim, as Kara calmly and eloquently explained the issues in words that even a confused child could understand.

I’ve got to the part where he’s quizzing her about why she doesn’t carry a gun or pepper spray to protect herself if there’s a risk of rape in public bathrooms. It’s gobsmacking to hear such a usually informed, thoughtful man be so fuckwitted. It’s clear he has no clue about women’s lives. We move through life surrounded by larger, stronger males some of whom are a risk to women, girls and children - Schrodinger’s rapist if you like - and the majority of men who are not. It’s the water we swim in. We mostly have to risk assess and hope for the best. Carry a gun or pepper spray and you could be overpowered anyway and have it turned on you. Like Kara says, should she stay home? Even then some women are victimised. PB has gone down in my estimation, seriously.

He's an odd one sometimes. I listen to quite a few of his interviews. The one with Rosie Kay was fascinating as he seemed to not understand what the purpose of dance is as an art form, or how phyiscal it is. He asked Rosie something like wouldn't she rather do something that was a discipline of physical excellence like a martial art. Really quite odd. She handled it well, but the questioning was weird.

The thing is, if you follow his logic, where do you draw the line? Girls use public bathrooms too. At what age do we arm them? Five? Eight? As for his small woman martial arts expert friend - what if it’s two men, not one, or she’s been incapacitated with roofies? Much more effective to keep women’s single sex spaces female only - a blanket mitigation.

Listened to the end bit. Wow. Peter thinks male violence is for women to solve by learning martial arts techniques and carrying weapons. Just so they can use the ladies’ loo without fear of male violence. Better for the women to arm themselves than for the males with feminine gender identities to be excluded from women’s spaces. Oh god, this man is beyond help. He probably thinks women will beat transwomen in sport if only they’d just train a little harder. Clueless.

I listened to this straight after listening to his discussion with Helen Joyce.

It was like listening to two different men. I felt he was completely different with Helen....why?
And it was like his conversation with Helen had never happened.

'Schrodinger’s rapist' - brilliant, BettyFilous!
Somewhere in one of Edna O'Brien's early books, a character, probably Baba, says something like 'Giving us the vote was no good, we should've been armed!'.
I've never been able to find it again, but it still resonates. Not literally of course.

I remember seeing a poster with a photo of a woman with a gun and the caption:
GOD MADE MAN AND WOMAN EQUAL.
SMITH AND WESSON MAKES DAMN SURE IT STAYS THAT WAY.
Again, I am not condoning armed insurrection against the patriarchy, ok?!

I haven't watched this one yet, but I was pretty surprised at what I've read here after seeing Helen Joyce's discussion with him.

Thread.
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4841720-helen-joyce-peter-boghossian-reality-vs-trans-ideology

On women needing to learn martial arts, in Helen's discussion she described the time she realised that her 13 year old son was now stronger than her. He never passed comment at that time.

Of the 3/4 times I've been assaulted I feel in all but one it would have been ott to shoot someone! In all cases what happened was either sneaky and confusing, or sudden, and no strength training would have protected me. It may have helped a little if the training had managed to remove my socialization to 'be nice', or prevented me from going into freeze mode but I think that's a different matter.

After the last instance I realised we have to protect ourselves as the police will not and that has to be by campaigning to keep men, all men out of women's spaces.

Anyway, what about disabled women, older women, younger women, women recovering from an injury or loss of strength due to a bout of illness. Or women that would plain rather be putting their time to another use than beefing up in case a bloke attacked her!

Then let's think about how accessible any male dominated activity is to women when there's the wearing drip drip drip of low level misogyny that a woman has to be prepared to navigate in order to access it.

I've just come from listening to it. Honestly, I think he has respect for her articulacy and is giving her the opportunity to express it by steel manning the arguments. The discourse between them is pleasant and respectful. An honest look at the arena will tell us that there are men who think like this. I suspect that Peter Bogosshian isn't one of them. He is stress testing the arguments. They stand up brilliantly. I am as in awe of Kara's calm discourse as I am Helen Joyce. It can be hard to hear this type of thing, but I think it plays its part.

@OceanicBoundlessness your comment made me think of Germaine Greer saying similar in the recently released podcast with Louis Theroux.

@AReasonablePerson , I was hoping that was the case. Helen structures her arguments so well that the questions are automatically answered so maybe this accounts for the difference in discussion style.

Haven't listened to this one yet, but based on his other work, he says a lot of things that he doesn't actually think. He seems to enjoy playing with the ideas, coming up with possibly silly what-ifs, playing devil's advocate and just trying to understand how people have thought about certain issues to arrive at their conclusions.

Yes it can be annoying to see important issues treated as an intellectual game, but that's really his whole shtick.

His book about having difficult conversations put me right off him. “How to persuade her” “challenge her with”. It felt telling that the person doing the challenging was written from a male PoV and the person who needed to have her thinking checked was not.

Girls in their Married Bliss (1964). Baba: "The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed."

I think it's this (as ever, I may be wrong).

Kara Dansky is fantastic- I hope she has a good support network as the US is nothing like Terf Island for mutual support and grassroots co-ordination!

In his analysis, he is saying that all women have to do is to arm themselves, spend their time doing jujitsu and karate and anything else needed in order to protect themselves.

ALL women? Can you imagine the wokebro mantrums if we stopped doing all the things for men, and all spent all our time at rifle ranges and gyms? Who would do the washing up? How would they ever get clean pants?

They could spend hours making more podcasts about how women have lost the plot and are not facilitating their families like they should be. Can you imagine the rage if a woman actually shot and killed her rapist? Women have gone down a wrong path yet again.

Girls in their Married Bliss(1964). Baba: "The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed."
Thank you RethinkingLife, further proof that MNers know absolutely e v e r y thing😁
And that my memory isn't too bad..

PB is obsessed with Ju-Jitsu!
Weirdly evangelical about it.
He even brought it up with Rosie Kay-(paraphrase): "Why do the arty dance crap when you could be doing ju-jitsu?"
It's like when any conversation comes up about food and there's someone who always says, "but have you tried an airfryer though?" Although, it's as if they kept saying the same thing even when you were just talking about walking your dog!

Re the Kara D interview:
I thought she was excellently clear as always.
That ending was surreal, and deeply uncomfortable though. I felt that Kara was feeling like she had to defend herself. For what? I couldn't make sense of what he was getting at?
Should young girls, and elderly or disabled women all be signing up for ju-jitsu and carrying pepper spray?
Was he saying you can't really think there's a serious issue for women in mixed sex spaces, otherwise you would be doing these things?
It was such a very odd take.
Agreed with pp who saw a difference between this discussion and one with Helen Joyce.
It came across to me as a strange attempt at entrapment that felt quite personal about Kara.
Have they had disagreements on X or something?
Bizarre!

I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s posts 😀

As well as his weird insistence on getting Brazilian JuJitsu into interviews, Boghossian has also started mentioning Mr Menno’s 'Gay of the Year' award in interviews. It just gets plopped in there, sometimes without any relevance to the discussion, and his way of describing Menno often uses gay stereotypes. As did his reference to cargo pants (combat trousers) being something Lesbians would wear. It could be jokes that don’t always land but I find his discussing Menno a bit wince-inducing sometimes.

As for his insistence that it’s rational for women to train to defend ourselves as a way of feeling safe in public - I don’t understand his insistence there. Women aren’t as strong as men, and weapons can be taken off them and used against them, and why can’t we try training men not to attack/rape before we put women and girls through basic assault training 🤷‍♀️

Yes! I noted, and cringed at the cargo pants comment!
Its like his persona is all about critical/rational thinking, but his 'awkward uncle' true self is starting to leak out.
I lost respect for him from this one (haven't listened to more recent ones so I may have done before this otherwise).

‘Awkward uncle' - good description 👍

I think that him having sat through discussions with Helen Joyce, Kellie-Jay Keen, Mr Menno and Andrew Doyle (to name but a few) and him seemingly still not getting the basics of sex-realism v gender identity doesn’t say much for his rational mind. His interview with Sall Grover was very weird in that he asked her something like 'Do you think TRAs are against you because you’re so attractive?' I have no idea why that ridiculous question came into his head and then out of his mouth 🙄 but Sall handled it well and kept the interview on track.

Given he's so good at the street epistemology, is there any way he was being the devils advocate and asking all the shite questions some men think about ?