Women's rights general conversations - Thread 9

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of Thread 8.

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).

Cackle cackle, stir, stir, happy dance at moonlight.

Yayy! Break out the champagne & fireworks!

It shouldn't have come down to him resigning, he should have been bloody fired.

The most recent Blocked and reported podcast has Katie Herzog interviewing Hadley Freeman. It crashed 30 minutes short of the end so I'll have to go back and listen to the rest later (probably tomorrow) but so far, so thought provoking. Various topics but including her comparisons of gender identity motivated self-harm and anorexia motivated self-harm.

podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/blocked-and-reported/id1504298199

I’m months behind with B&R - will listen before Christmas no doubt!

I’ve no idea who these people are, but I post this because it truly captures the authoritarian/inquisitorial nature of the movement towards women. It has been retweeted widely but I went back to the original and was dismayed to see how much support Joe McCarthy is getting. OK it’s Canada, but still.

https://x.com/thebreakdownab/status/1835789503459692738?

Found this article in the Telegraph about the current artwork on the 4th plinth

https://archive.ph/ieTDu

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/fourth-plinth-trafalgar-square/

I don't think I've cared much for any of the artworks that have been on the 4th plinth. As for this one, reducing the people who crowd under the trans umbrella to fragile masks, and inward looking too, seems a little on the nose.

I liked Ecce Homo.

Was there an enormous chicken at one point, or am I imaging it?

Entirely possible - it's well over a decade since I was in London so I've missed many aesthetic delights.

Alison Lapper, the pregnant artist who had no arms and almost no legs, was my favourite. It captured the spirit of the fourth plinth. Especially moving now that we know that the son in her womb at the time has since died.

There was a giant blue cockerel a few years ago.

Giant blue cock. Coincidentally(?) wasn't it when Boris was the London mayor?

Ecce homo wasn't too bad.

Maybe it looks better in real life but in the picture it looks like a boring concrete block. Perhaps appropriate that they think the materials wont withstand British weather and it may soon be in tatters.

I had a haircut today from a hairdresser whose client I have been for quite a long time now - at least five or six years, maybe longer. He's a great guy - Boston Irish, and spent several years in the 90s working with the Miss Universe pageant when Trump was in charge, and loathes Trump - generally speaking he and I see eye to eye politically. We talk about books and movies and politics but we've never discussed the whole trans issue before. However, it came up today in our conversation about things that are labelled right wing, and I cited the GC view.

He was taken aback - his viewpoint is that he knows a lot of transwomen and likes them and thinks they're good people, and he's never really looked into the other possible points of view. I put it to him that this was like me saying that I liked the vast majority of the men I know and believe them to be good people, but it doesn't mean I'd let any old bloke into a space where I was vulnerable. He acknowledged from his pageant experience how easy it was for men to make women uncomfortable (and he himself is very respectful of boundaries), and though I cited a few things he hadn't thought about (male people in women's prisons, which he didn't think was a good idea, male counsellors in rape crisis centres) and we had a good conversation, it ended with him saying that we would agree to differ because he doesn't know anything about those things and he liked his friends.

My closest friend over here has the same point of view - she doesn't think men belong in women's sports or women's prisons, but she knows and likes some transwomen and prefers not to even discuss the rest of the issues. I honestly don't get the logical disconnect with either of these two lovely people. If you seriously think transwomen are women then you logically can't object to them being in women's sports or prisons or other single-sex spaces. It's as if there's a switch in their brains that allows them to hold two conflicting systems of thought simultaneously.

It’s quite fascinating isn’t it @Britinme?!

I think perhaps the attitude you describe is a variation of “Not My Nigel”

I wonder if your friend knows about AGPs? Could that be a good peaking strategy?

She probably doesn't, but she has asked me very seriously to just not talk about this whole issue with her, and I feel I have to respect her request. If it's even mentioned she just shuts the discussion down immediately, and this is a friendship I really value over every other issue, so I don't want to risk spoiling it.

How sad. Sorry this is the situation.

I wonder how many healthy friendships have forbidden topics.

I don’t mean that in a snarky way, but it doesn’t make me cross that believers shut down debate like this.

Of course, the reason they do is because their belief system doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny.

Yes that's undoubtedly right, and subconsciously she probably realises it, but it's not a point of view she wants to find acceptable so she just shuts it out.

I've just fallen down a YouTube rabbit hole

I'm not a gamer but has anyone heard of a new game called Dustborn? Taxpayer funded by Norway and the EU to the the of $2m, it features a character with the powers including bullying, gaslighting, triggering and canceling. The games hero. A woke black woman with a queer, diverse group of friends. Apparently, it's been an utter failure because, of course, of hate. Not because the game is shite. Although I have to give credit to the developers for nailing the qualities of your average TA in their leading character.

Oh, and everyone has vitiligo.

@Snowypeaks I had no idea about Alison Lapper's son. How absolutely dreadful for her.

I've liked all the Fourth Plinth pieces in different ways except for the second one, which was sort of interlocking pieces of brightly coloured perspex, like an architectural model. I think Nelson's Ship in a Bottle was my favourite. https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/arts-and-culture/current-culture-projects/fourth-plinth-trafalgar-square/fourth-plinth-past-commissions

Meanwhile, Chris Mason, the BBC's political editor, who earns over £260k a year, is shocked - SHOCKED - at Sue Gray's £170k salary. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0w4xqlwr1ro Do you remember all those articles about how terrible it was that Dominic Cummings was paid so much? No, nor do I. Funny, that.

What an odd piece that was from Mason on Sue Grey. Seems to claim some higher moral ground with "why it matters", but doesn't explain how it's more newsworthy than the salaries of Cummings, Campbell, etc.

Just wondering if we have to wait for him to be dead to have Larry the Cat on the 4th plinth?

You know what cats are like. If they put him up there now he'll just push all those masks onto the floor.

The Sue Grey pay thing is such a bollocks. I'd like them to go back and examine the pay of all the people who've held her position, I'm sure we'd see that most of them were on a par with her earnings either close to or more than the PM. The whole point of parliamentary wages, including the PMs is that they are high but not the highest in the land. Clearly there are people in the PLP who want her out and that's what this is all about. Also, Chris Mason is being an arsehole.

I like the idea of the fourth plinth as a contemporary art space and have liked a lot of the works. Nelson’s ship in a bottle was great as was the big blue cockerel (especially in the context of us having a giant cock as mayor then) and I loved how confused the pigeons were by Rachel Whiteread’s inverted plinth. I still blame Antony Gormley for a summer of rain though.

If the plinth were to be occupied by a permanent piece of statuary then it would need to be a figure on horseback. No reason why that figure couldn’t be Larry the cat once he’s no longer with us.