MN in the Guardian

[theDudesmummy]

This whole article is rather grating me and I can't put my finger on exactly why. Sneering at FWR while saying she steers clear of it? The "damning with faint praise" tone of it? The silliness and missing the point of calling out an "obsession with public toilets"? I got a real anti-feminist, "little women's problems" vibe from the article.
Or am I wrong?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/11/mumsnet-flaws-experience-parenting?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Boiledbeetle · Today 10:06

Either she does read them and that's, rightly or wrongly, her view or she doesn't read them and is just repeating someone else's prejudiced view of certain parts of the forum without proper investigation.

Another nail hit firmly on the head.

It smacks of privilege, Lucy. Sorry.

I know (because I have read your words for years) that you didn't grow up especially privileged.

But a privileged woman is paid to write her opinion in a broadsheet. A privileged woman casually slurs as bigots the women speaking in one of the few places anywhere online they can speak with relative freedom. A privileged woman says she barely reads those women but publishes her unresearched opinion on them nevertheless.

A privileged woman can occupy spaces in public life without the fear of their nervous system throwing them a freeze/ appease trauma reaction when they suddenly find themselves with an unexpected male body.

A privileged woman does not expect to be incarcerated.

You're not alone at the Guardian. But fuck I thought you were better than that! But perhaps if you were, you'd have been hounded out too. And I get the need to be employed.

I dare you to read, understand, challenge us, challenge your bias.

@WomenStuff a hundred times what you said

'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it' - Upton Sinclair

The general sentiment seems apposite.

It's interesting but not for the reasons she might think. Coslett has always given off "I'm not an ordinary girl. I'm a cool girl vibes". Now she's not and ordinary 'mum'. She's a cool mum.
She's getting there though. She acknowledges the misogyny around dismissing women around 'mumsniness', but hasn't quite realised yet that it's exactly the same thing she's doing to the other women on here.
I've seen women mention so many times on here that becoming a mother really opened their eyes to misogyny in society. It sounds like Cosslett is beginning to see it but there's a huge amount of cognitive dissonance in it.
I see 'hubby' said on here very rarely. Its certainly not part of MN culture, so that's an interesting projection on her part. She's definitely dismissing women on here based on her own idea of what mums are.
I'd be interested to see her write another article in a year and see if her opinions have changed.
If she's still avoiding listening to 'bad' mums so she can play a cool mum, then perhaps not.

Did you take drugs during your time at Cambridge University?

Smoked some pot but I never inhaled.

You used MUMSNET?

Oh, I just look from time to time I've clearly been active on there for years as I refer to current and past threads with the familiarity of a regular poster in multiple boards but I've never been to FWR.

I may have been to Mumsnet, but I've never been to Me.

Some of this resistance is good old-fashioned misogyny, but some is valid. Mumsnet has, in the past decade, become a meeting place of choice for feminists with gender critical views. Some will argue that it has provided a forum for women to air opinions in a safe space, and raise concerns about issues such as puberty blockers and – an obsession on Mumsnet – public toilets. I personally steer away from reading these discussions, which seem to often descend into toxicity and bigotry.

So, hold on. She steers away from reading these discussions, so how does she know they descend into toxicity and bigotry? How does she even know they're frequently about toilets (note: they're not) when she doesn't even read them? She must be one clever cookie.

It's easy to not be concerned about public toilets when you are young, healthy and able-bodied and you only go from the Guardian office (toilets available) to the wine bar (toilets available) to home.

What she doesn't get is that it's real people speaking to one another without much filtering. It's messy, argumentative and eye popping at times. But it's the total opposite of an echo chamber. People come on MN and rip and get ripped. The politics cover the whole mainstream spectrum, left to right. I agree with posters up thread who have said the RLC is a lightweight columnist. I come on here because I challenge, and get challenged and I've learnt so much from others in consequence. So RLC can jog back to her safe space if it's just too much for her to stomach (I hear there's a meeting of the St Corbyn of North Islington allotment holders on Sunday. Perhaps that would be more up her street. 😎

Yeah, she wants to make it clear to the menz that she understands that the silly lady site is something to take lightly - she is a cool girl really!

Fuck off.

The stupidity leaps off the page. She might read it (although people don't really use hubby here) but she doesn't think about what she's reading. Agree she's one of their most uninteresting writers (understatement).

I think she wrote an article saying she was a cool girl when she was younger and now she has a child and isn't as attractive she isn't anymore, it was odd.

She utilises such small, apologetic thinking. It would be far more interesting to examine why she was societally approved to be a ‘cool girl’ when young but has to eschew it now - and what it might mean to reclaim self respect and self approval post motherhood.

The best thing I can say about that article is that at least she left the Nazi comparison until the last paragraph.

'small, apologetic thinking' - that's an excellent description.

I can't speak for others but to me 'dh' no longer reads as a term of affection but just as an all-purpose informal abbreviation for 'my husband' - it's much more neutral and purely descriptive. Technically the d originally meant 'dear' or 'darling' but that's not how it's actually always used these days.

I never take any notice of ‘writers ‘ who split the infinitive. Don’t they ever read it back to themselves , and hear how clunky it sounds (and in this case, the possible confusion between ‘to often’ or ‘too often’ ?

I suppose The Graun can’t afford sub editors anymore. Or maybe correction would hurt writers’ feelings, can’t have that, feelings being so much more important than facts.

edited stray comma😅

Any of these lib fem women who constantly get annoyed at the toilet issue show such a breathtaking stupidity that it's hard to take them seriously about anything else.

Using “hubby” on here in your OP usually derails the thread as everyone piles in to tell you that Netmums is that way ⏩️⏩️

Exactly that.

A privileged woman can occupy spaces in public life without the fear of their nervous system throwing them a freeze/ appease trauma reaction when they suddenly find themselves with an unexpected male body.

Normally I'd say yes. But actually she has been the victim of male assault, a very serious one, by the sounds of it:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/10/my-attacker-was-jailed-do-i-have-be-grateful

And she still doesn't get it. So what can you do?

Exactly. I can't understand how anyone could read the heartbreaking stories of DV, coercive control and emotional and financial abuse, the same experiences again and again being written over so many years by so many different women, and still believe that being female doesn't matter enough to even need a name that excludes male, or that there's no justification for the female-only spaces that give us respite and the female-only opportunities that give us hope and autonomy in a world that still assumes our default role is to support and applaud men.

There are some people it's just impossible to reason with.

Lib fem/TRA: You're always going on about toilets.

GC fem: It's not just toilets. It's changing rooms, hospital wards, prisons, rape crisis centres, domestic violence refuges, mammograms and cervical smears, intimate care for disabled women, women's sports.

Lib fem/TRA: You're always going on about toilets.

Perhaps they can't hear us because our voices are too shrill.

I agree with your first paragraph, but I definitely don’t think Cosslett is getting there. At the end of the article, she drops the pretence and reveals what she really thinks of us.

Like any social network, it has its extremists and cranks. I still use X, despite the fact that I saw someone on there the other day lauding Joseph Goebbels as an example of fatherly sacrifice, so why not Mumsnet? It’s not a monolith. And if you want a snapshot of what mothering in the UK looks like, there is no better place.