Women's rights general conversations - Thread 8

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of Thread 7.

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 in the supermarket, grr"- that sort of thing).

Meta AI being taught what a woman is.

x.com/rachaelwongaus/status/1798410239647301663?s=61&t=5wM6rrCIVAeqWs6wZl1YCQ

WOAW that's amazing, and scary.

OMG it's exactly like all the Righteous posters we've had the misfortune to interact with over the years, except that the fucking AI had more honesty and maturity to keep working through the contradictions rather than howl "Evil! Unclean! Impure! Unsafety and erasure!" after a few seconds of not being validated.

The difference between "woman" and "man" was also hugely instructive.

Just entirely. I wonder who trained it in the first place?

I must be going soft in my old age, but I'm feeling a glimmer of sympathy for this student researcher who doesn't realise what she's done in stepping outside her TRSOH bubble.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/nonmember_requests/5090718-do-you-have-a-child-who-has-started-their-periods-you-might-be-able-to-help?

More than a glimmer. Sorry, that reads like a real pile-on. Sounds like the OP is beside herself. She's only doing what she's been trained up to do.

It took me months to pass the wording that I have. I'm grateful for the comments, but also sad I've caused so much upset

It's not nice for her to see all the responses that disagree with her because nobody likes being disagreed with, but (so far) nobody has actually abused her, which as we all know wouldn't be the case if the situation was reserved.

Thing is, I am genuinely offended by years of woman-and-girl-erasing language that (see AI above) miraculously doesn't seem to affect men. And I am genuinely offended by years of science-and-reality-denying virtue-signalling pious-frauding utter bollocks. As we all know (the 6 witches of MN and their 9 million sock puppets notwithstanding) there are a lot of women who are equally offended - even if a tiny %age of those posted only one comment on that thread, it will look like a pile-on.

I feel sorry for the poor student and incensed by her ridiculous university policy, they are the ones who exposed her to this situation.

I think it's very telling that her instinctive response is to apologise again and again, in what feels to me like a state of terror. She is treating it as a sort of struggle session, it seems, as one is supposed to on TRSOH.

Hopefully, as she's not a 22 year old, she will actually have the guts to feedback the MN reaction to the ethics team. How can it be ethical to just flat-out lie???

Struggle session is exactly right!

Yes, the repeated apologies struck me. However, I also recall the Jo Phoenix hearing and if the student is in any kind of similar environment then I guess that the fear of giving offence is a big deal. I hope she does join us over here, even if she just lurks and reads and gets a different perspective to think about.

I can't believe the Ethicks Department didn't know what they were doing 😳 She must have pissed them off. Poor woman. I'm imagining them reading the thread and ROTFL, it's almost like sabotage. Ffs, thrown to the vipers.

Blimey, I wonder who is on what passes for an ethics board there? It's evident that they didn't want to cause offence, but to people the study has no relevance towards! No need to name the class of people; I wonder what other bollocks they have forced students to come up with? House person's knee in bricklayers?

She needs to watch her back with the 'ethics' people; I said as much on the thread.

I see the thread has gone now. Shame she panicked and pulled it, it was developing quite nicely into a supportive thread with constructive suggestions.

Looks like it may re-emerge.

Will it cost her another thirty quid? 😃

From her later posts in that thread I think she’s be more concerned about raising the money to extend her course/deadline to deal with the issues raised. I hope it works out for her ok, she seemed quite reactive and if the thread was still active I’d agree with a poster on there who said to take a breath, have a think over the weekend and consider the next steps with a clear mind.

I didn't read the whole thread but didn't she say the Ethics department had held her up for ages in finding an acceptable form of words? Then sent here with wording that couldn't have been better designed to piss off the majority of the users whose cooperation she desperately needed. I'm seriously thinking she was set up to fail. If I were her I'd be fucking angry.

That was pretty much it, yes.

I hadn’t considered that theory, presumably along the lines of punishing her for wanting to study this topic in the first place? But then I tend to favour explanations of cock-up (e.g. badly run EC) rather than conspiracy.

Thing is even if they were setting her up to fail she could always have refused to settle for their shit wording. This isn't a 22 year old, from what I could gather, she is late thirties early forties.

She should have told the ethics committee where to shove it a lot earlier.

What university was it?

Buckingham I think

If you Google the U of Buckingham, one of the questions asked is "Is it prestigious?", to which the response begins: University of Buckingham is one of the top universities in Buckingham, United Kingdom.

(Well, it made me laugh.)

Ooh, prestigious in Buckingham! Fancy.

Iirc from the Aston scraping the Ethics committee can totally bin your research if they don't think you're following their guidelines. Mind, that didn't seem to stop the Aston scrapers and their gobblers.