Women's rights general conversations - Thread 10

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of Thread 9.

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).

Thing that happened a couple of weekends ago (bear with me, a bit stream of consciousness so feel free to skip).

FamilyKuc had been out doing stuff in the city centre and stayed for an early-ish dinner. We went to the bus stop on the main high street to catch the bus home. It was around 8:30pm, so not late, but late enough for early Saturday night "revellers" to have started arriving in the city centre.

Above the row of shops behind the bus stop, there's some sort of (self-billed) Hong Kong style massage and spa establishment.

As we were standing at the bus stop, we became aware of a disturbance: clattering, crashing sounds, galumphing down the stairs sounds, and that general incoherent whopping vocalisation which will be familiar to anyone who's encountered an exuberant gathering of young men. We turned to see 4-5 young men bursting out of the massage shop's narrow stairway entrance and whooping triumphantly as they ran off along the high street, the last man pushing over the pair of floral planters on either side of the door, flinging plants and soil all over the public pavement. We could see the stairwell too was covered in broken pots, soil and pulled-up plants. Three Chinese women (looked mid-30s in age) came down the stairs looking shell-shocked.

We and several passers-by came over to check they were OK and helped to tidy up the mess on the pavement. The women said something about the group having come upstairs, made enquiries (not clear whether this was a pretext to enter the premises, or whether a genuine enquiry had led to some sort of disagreement), then started acting up and trashing their extensive collection of plants. The women were all in tears and it was awful to watch them sweeping up their broken pots and having to throw away destroyed plants.

I commented furiously on the clearly racist and sexist nature of this attack. DD1 looked stunned and exclaimed, "I don't think [the victims'] gender had anything to do with it!" and for a moment I was speechless. Then DD2 quietly said, "Well, I doubt if those men would have done it if there'd been a male staff member present." So DD2 at least seemed to get it, on some level.

Anyway, TL:DR.

What I've been dwelling on is: I'm so thankful that my teenage DDs seem to have escaped any direct experience of male-on-female "misbehaviour" such that they can go around blissfully unaware. Long may it continue, preferably forever! But perhaps it's precisely this sort of {sheltered (not sure if that's the right word?) in a fortunate bubble of nice friends and loving family, also an enormous element of good luck, plus a big dose of middle-class confident selective blindness} thing that is the underpinning of so many BeKind hand-maidens?

i am gob-smacked that your DDs have avoided male misbehaviour if they live and study in a large English city, Kuc. But agree that's a big class and income factor in hand-maidening.

Yes, I'm happily gob-smacked too. It is entirely possible that they have experienced things but haven't told me. I reckon I hardly told my parents anything about all the times I was harassed, molested, etc - although that was a different time, culture, etc and I like to think as "modern" parents we're far more communicative with our DDs.

They can't not have done, surely. But you obviously have a great relationship with them.

How awful for those women in the spa Kuc, and I’m glad you were all there to help. Shame that word “gender” cropped up but good that one of your DDs called it what it was - sex.

Today's random thought!

Yesterday we watched, as dictated by FamilyKuc tradition must happed between Halloween and Christmas, The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Listening to Jack Skellington's Obsession song, I suddenly had a weird insight. The people of Halloween Town have no real clue what Christmas is actually about. Jack Skellington himself, despite his mid-life-crisis dissatisfaction with his real day-to-day life, and resulting obsession with reinventing himself as Christmas King, has no real clue what Christmas is actually about - he can only see the external manifestations of Christmassy-ness. Jack, like all the residents of Halloween Town, is completely unable to really grasp Christmas... because they are creatures of Halloween, not creatures of Christmas.

And yet, Jack believes that Christmas can be his for the taking (or rather, stealing from the people of Christmas Town and the human world itself). He even believes he's better qualified to improve Christmas!

It's simple really, very clear
Like music drifting in the air
Invisible, but everywhere
Just because I cannot see it
Doesn't mean I can't believe it!
You know, I think this Christmas thing
Is not as tricky as it seems
And why should they have all the fun?
It should belong to anyone
Not anyone, in fact, but me
Why, I could make a Christmas tree
And there's no reason I can find
I couldn't handle Christmas time
I bet I could improve it too
And that's exactly what I'll do
Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee!
Eureka! I've got it! This year Christmas will be ours!

That makes a great deal of sense, Kuc.

Jack is rather a navel-gazing arse who can't see how privileged he is, yet everybody looks up to him, and he's so dismissive of Sally for most of the film, and it's only that he means well and realises his mistakes at the end that redeems him. Just that little extra thing that only occurred to me on my umpty-umpth watching of a film so familiar that I can recite most of the songs and dialogue!

I've never cared for that film <sniff>

That's a really good observation Kuc.

So... a film I need to watch, at some point!

Wonder if anyone can help here. A while back I saw a clip about women in the labour unions in the US in, I think, about 1980. There was a big union gathering and a couple of women got up on stage to speak, whereupon the men in the audience flew into a rage and started shouting very angrily for them to shut up. It was quite shocking to see how furious the men were.

I've been trying to find out more but can't find anything at all about what happened. Does anyone know?

Rings a bell, but I can't remember exactly either!

Damn, wish I could find it, it's driving me daft!

I asked ChatGPT and then searched its results and Google's AI told me that the specific event where male delegates erupted with shouting and jeering at women delegates demanding action on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) occurred at the 1973 AFL-CIO convention in Miami, Florida.

ChatGPT then was asked to find a YouTube clip, but couldn't and suggested this:

"Here’s what’s solid:

• The 1973 AFL-CIO convention did take place in Bal Harbour/Miami Beach in October.
• The AFL-CIO formally endorsed the ERA in 1973 (so the issue was live in that period).
• There are contemporaneous archives and proceedings from that Miami week (including women’s auxiliaries), but I can’t locate filmed footage online of the shouting scene.

If you want to chase the primary footage, these are the most promising holdings:

• George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archives (UMD Special Collections) — they hold convention films/reels for the 1970s; request Miami Beach 1973 convention coverage.
• Walter P. Reuther Library (Wayne State) — CLUW, Olga Madar and Addie Wyatt papers often reference women’s interventions at conventions around 1973–74. Ask for any audiovisual tied to AFL-CIO ’73.
• Texas Southern University / Barbara Jordan Papers — file entries for the AFL-CIO Miami 1973 convention week (helpful for dates/participants while you place a film request elsewhere). "

Hope this helps.

@FlowerUser thanks so much for this, it give me some good stuff to start on and helps massively.

What I remember is a vid where two of the women who spoke at the meeting were discussing the reaction of the men, and then a short clip was played of the men shouting and gesticulating. Being there must have felt surreal and, even all those years later, the women still thought it bizarre.

Audrey Ludwig has written an interesting piece suggesting that DEI should fall under the Risk&Compliance department, rather than HR.

https://audreyludwig.com/why-equality-law-compliance-belongs-in-risk-management-not-human-resources/

IIJM, but seems to me that, scanning through the top few threads in this folder, more and more have been 'invaded'? I've joked before about them being paid for their efforts, but it does make you wonder. it's dispiriting and annoying, but I suppose there's not much that can be done. It does seem to me me to be getting worse and worse, though.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of Righteousness must wank on about it to as many Unenlightened ears as possible, an an exercise of clever-clever slippery pseudo-intellectual knob halo-polishing which provides that heady high of their own Righteous farts.

As a JTT exile, you know exactly what I mean

Twas different there, though. And back then, there was a sense that some people at least were #bekind-ers. I think that is dead in the water now. There's really no sense in which these people are posting and debating in good faith. It's trolling, pure and simple.

Spot on, @Kucinghitam - tedious sea-lioning is, well, tedious.

It's also a live demonstration that this sort of intrusive, performative, pseudo-intellectual self-pleasuring at an unwilling audience is a behaviour that will have to keep escalating in order to keep achieving the same "hit."

Guess we need to be ready for more eye-rolling then. Gods what a bore.

I was just reading the latest mail-out from Sex Matters. They are doing such good work, talked about the 199 Days Later and the GLP case, etc. But it does my head in: none of this should be necessary! 99% of what they are campaigning for is just asking people to do their bloody jobs! But mutton-headed inaction seems to rule.

Tom Daley's knitting programme has seriously pissed off the knitters of Shetland. Misappropriation and misrepresentation of a precious culture, taking their time, kindness and and even their language. Sound familiar?

https://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/news/letter-you-ve-misrepresented-an-entire-culture-open-let-418907/