Misogyny seems to have changed, and not for the better

[PopstarPoppy]

When I was young (last century!), casual sexism was the norm, as were things like wolf-whistling, cars hooting at women/girls in skimpy outfits and men copping a feel in bars and clubs. None of it particularly bothered me, although I can understand why it bothered others, and I don’t believe it was right. But it seems that as attitudes that were almost unconscious have been stamped out, a much more sinister, deliberate form of misogyny has taken hold. I don’t know whether the two are related, because the latter is tangled up with gender identity politics, in particular the trans debate.

In the past, as glass ceilings were broken and women branched out into careers that were previously the preserve of men, I thought the years ahead would be better ones for women. Instead, it seems that the harder women have fought to be heard and treated fairly, the more they have been bullied and undermined, by companies, by the public sector, by media personalities – and even by a subset of (mostly young) biological women.

This has been underlined by the responses of so many to the recent SC ruling – with companies and public bodies finding every way to delay obeying the law and falling over themselves to publicise their support for those who have intimidated women. And the fact that, even now, women are repeatedly told to ‘be kind’ and asked ‘how we think transwomen feel’ about issues that have a huge impact on so many biological women makes it seem as nothing has really changed since the year dot. Women are still seen as ‘lesser’. And worst of all, fewer people now seem to view that as a problem.

Trans women aren't responsible for the epidemic of domestic violence, men are so the EWA efforts are feckless.

So loos are irrelevant now are they? Might want let all thos on MN yammering on incessantly about them.

Lol. Three days later and you're still displaying your obsession about "loo policing". It's always a giveaway about motivation when you claim that men MUST have access to girls and women undressing.

And NO is still a complete sentence

"There's this thing called 'reality'."

@Howseitgoin

Oh the irony...😑🙄

A lot of what has got worse is to do with online porn. Sex has never really been properly dealt with by feminism. I think so many of us have sexual trauma that we don't have the toolkit to deal with it ourselves.

Im not sure how many of us (heterosexual) women will ever know our own sexuality as it is so stifled by male sexuality.

Male disdain for women is worse than ever. Many men who are aggressive, suspicious and negative about women will tell you that they 'love women', by which they mean they want to have sex with them. They love women in the way that you might say 'oh, I love dogs!' They never think 'how would I feel if that happened to me?' The most you might get is 'what if that was my daughter/sister/mother'.

Men are human and women are a subsection of human, subhuman. Any complaint we make is due to selfishness, sour grapes and ingratitude. Bodily autonomy is frigidness or ugliness rather than humanity.

Which feminism has argued for boundaries and protections for women to be removed? It might be dressed up as feminism but I am not sure it’s actually a feminist argument. It’s a way of dismissing women’s concerns.

Do doors need to be as heavily sprung as they are, does anyone know?

A business I was involved with had to put in sprung doors as ordered by the fire service. To stop doors being accidentally left open and potentially contributing to the spreading of a fire should one occur. However that does seem to imply that anyone caught in the fire would be strong enough to push them open in stressful circumstances.

I dont really care about loos
Tho I can understand why it may cause concern.

My worry is the uncontrollable spew of violent porn that's in our homes seen by young men and boys that are too young to deal with it.
That's got to have harms towards women far beyond what was previously known in the 70s with the odd top shelf magazines a boy may see

I'm Glad I'm not a young women now.

DashyZap’s post brought the Aurora song ‘Queendom’ to mind.
That apart, this thread is a microcosm of the way in which all women’s issues have been subsumed into the need to be able to define who it is women’s issues effect. There was a reasoned post on page 1 about the way in which the SC ruling is being fought against (despite being in my opinion, a model of legal clarity) within the broader context of inequality and it was immediately minimised to being about loos and the thread was hijacked by that for a while. But it is not just about loos.

As most people on here accept, it is about who is a woman (and that question never gets asked of men), but the issue is also more fundamental - the entire premise of being trans or non-binary depends on a binary, it constructs women and men as distinct and different, whilst ignoring and/or writing out the actual physical and biological differences which mean women need additional protections to move freely in civil society.

Therefore, the entire premise of being trans or non-binary depends on othering and ignoring women as a distinct group of people. To me, this could only come about in a context where women’s rights were already seen not to matter or were being actively undermined. So to that extent, yes, it’s worse than the 1980s because at that point, women’s rights were being enshrined in law and continued to be so up to the Equalities Act 2010. The only way to unpick these if you think about it is to create confusion about who a woman is.

To come back to the question of equality meaning eroding difference, and to focus on women, this is where I think the distinction between sex and gender is important, and I mean gender in the second wave sense as sex-role norms, so I will use that expression. Second wave feminists argued that sex role norms were socially constructed and limiting. They did not, to my knowledge, argue that biological difference did not matter. I think, although I may be wrong, that in this country, there has been an attempt to balance the need to provide for and protect women as women with the need to also provide and protect equality of opportunity, in law at least. Here I am thinking of maternity leave, abortion access, equality legislation, domestic abuse law and so on. Legally the frameworks exist.

The problem comes with the disconnect between the law and experience, which makes it easy for people to think, well, women have equality, what are they complaining about? Well, statistically women do more childcare and domestic work, even if they work outside the home and earn more. So at the very basic level, women do not have equality in the home and that is before we get to domestic abuse and coercive control. This statistic means that, at a population level, men (and maybe also some women) see women’s free time as less valuable. And without this basic respect for time, and who has it, or the valuing of traditionally female tasks, there is and can be no equality.

That partly explains why younger generations think that we have equality (because it is there in law) and it partly explains why people in unequal marriages or relationships internalise this and think it’s them that is failing because women have equality, don’t you know?

But it goes deeper than that, because women without children are not on a level playing field either for all the reasons posters have already outlined.

I remember marking a student essay about fifteen or twenty years ago about women’s rights. And the student made the argument that what we might see as progress was a historical anomaly because there was a much longer period where women were seen as inferior in different ways and that progress should not be taken for granted. The much longer historical situation is that women did not have equality of opportunity, they were seen as property and existed to support men and raise children. That is also the reality for a far greater number of women geographically speaking. The rights we have as women here are the anomaly, and have always been the anomaly. And they need to be protected and fought for, which I don’t need to tell most people reading this board.

Shelters are female-only to keep the women from being retraumatised by a male presence, not just to keep perps out. You show the contempt with which you view women by calling EWA "feckless".

So loos are irrelevant now are they?

Go back to school until you've learned the function of the word "just" in "Defending single-sex spaces is not, and never has been, just about loos". I'm sick of you deliberately misrepresenting what people have said. You don't argue in good faith.

You missed my point, which was that certain strands of feminist thought have sought to remove any suggestion that there are any essential differences between the sexes - that all is socially conditioned. Which then plays into trans ideology - by suggesting that it is only the physical vehicle which is different....that 'Sex' itself is a social construction and as such anyone can be a 'man' or a woman' depending on their personal inclination.

And I said I am not sure that is actually a feminist argument even though it may be dressed up as such, because if works against women’s interests as women. I would see that argument as foundational to queer theory.

I do think Queer Theory morphed out of both feminist theory and gay liberation theories, though. To an un-nuanced mind, feminists saying that "women should not be reduced to their biology" is almost the same as saying "women are not their biology".

Isn’t that the way the ‘biology is not destiny’ quote has been misinterpreted though and weaponised against women?
It was initially intended by second wave feminists to convey that women should not be constrained by sex-based stereotypes but has been used by queer and transgender theory to erase biology. I am not sure where gay liberation fits, to be honest, but somewhere along the way there’s Judith Butler and gender being performative and then the whole postmodern thing that materiality does not matter and it’s all language and symbols (it’s a long time since I did this so I am summarising very badly). That’s maybe third wave feminism, which I confess never made sense to me, because I always thought material factors, be they biology or economic circumstances, did matter. I think there are other ways which third wave feminism basically leaned into patriarchy rather than sought to address it, that’s just one of them.

So I don’t think it’s entirely that I missed your point but I don’t think it’s a feminism I ascribe to and I think calling it feminism is disingenuous (not saying you are disingenuous, but that calling the erasure of female biology feminism is disingenuous).

You say that 'women are repeatedly told to ‘be kind'. However, it's usually other women that are spouting this type of nonsense. Hardly any straight men give a shite about trans stuff. So really it's on us to sort this, just like how it's men's job to sort out male violence.

Firstly, I'd like to introduce you to the paragraph lol.

Secondly, I speculate that the reason for the dynamic you describe is likely evolution. It's almost always the male animal chasing the female and that's how we've evolved. It's likely ingrained on a subconscious level.

Gay liberation "fits in" because it was about trying to liberate gay men and lesbians from sex based associations, prejudices and sterotypes. About how a man or woman should be, who they should be attracted to etc

Yet there are many women who were brought up with the idea that female biology was oppression, and as such have foocused more on rejecting and seeking to be free of any association with any role or function associated with it.

So rejecting motherhood; focusing entirely on access to abortion; seeking to eliminate menstruation; suggesting, even, that women are just as strong as men ( that it is insulting, almost, to suggest, that women are not as strong as men); advocating for 'sex positivity' whereby women are 'free' to assume male patterns of sexual behaviour; engage in prostitution or sex work as liberating activities etc

seeking to eliminate menstruation

Having passed out from the cramps, I did everything I could to eliminate menstruation and very consider that aspect of female biology to be oppressive. I also rejected motherhood. That I was motivated to do these things is because I am female. The steps I had to take to avoid children and monthly agony, that a man doesn't have to, are because I am female.

The desire to opt out of as much of female biology's implications as possible ought to reinforce to a woman that her sex makes her female. Men don't quadruple their risk of a stroke to control their fertility with the Pill, that's a risk that only a woman can take.

I have been thinking about this, and I probably won’t express what I think very well, but I don’t think that female biology itself is oppressive, it just is. However, the fact that centuries of legal and social structures have sought to control women because of their biology is oppressive and the fact that men have sought access to women’s bodies in various ways is oppressive. So women were considered property passed from father to husband because they were the sex that bore children. They only had a legal existence in relation to their husbands (unless they remained single). So it is these structures and social expectations which oppressed women.
Rejecting motherhood - again, if you think about the fact that there did not used to be proper childcare, that there was a marriage bar on women in the workplace, that women were (are) seen as the main carers of children with all the limitations that implies, financial and social, again, these are structural inequalities which women face on becoming mothers. Abortion - one fifth of maternal mortality was from illegal abortions and maternal mortality was itself high, childbirth itself was more dangerous than going down a mine. These are good reasons for seeking to limit motherhood or rejecting it outright.
So behind what you say there are multiple reasons why women fought against social norms which denied them legal personhood, against repeated pregnancies which could be life-threatening (maternal mortality only really began to fall in the last seventy years), and perpetrated inequality.
At the same time, there have always been groups and organisations and individuals who have fought for women’s rights as mothers and women - otherwise we would not have maternity care, maternity leave, child benefit, equal pay, NI paid through child benefit (I think).
Sex positivity- I happen to think the beneficiaries here are men. And I question how far that has actually empowered women when you look at the rise of porn culture. I also happen to think in some ways that abortion benefits men because they don’t need to change their behaviour.

I take your point about gay liberation, though.

Rejecting motherhood - again, if you think about the fact that there did not used to be proper childcare, that there was a marriage bar on women in the workplace, that women were (are) seen as the main carers of children with all the limitations that implies, financial and social, again, these are structural inequalities which women face on becoming mothers.

I just don't like kids.

Kinda feel the same way tbh. In this overpopulated world it doesn't really appeal to me to sacrifice years of my relative youth looking after a little screaming thing that repeatedly shits itself and will quite possibly hate me for some unfathomable reason by its teens, especially if it's female.

That’s fine in a context where you can support yourself and there is no social and familial expectation that you will get married (because work opportunities and limited and poorly paid) and no expectation that you will have children, and there is of course reliable contraception to avoid having them. These are all recent developments was my point.

They always focus on toilets because of the optics to the general population:

I think a man who really wants to be a woman should be allowed in the ladies public toilets to pee - OK, probably not really going to bother anyone, all kinds of women are in and out of them quickly

Move to:

I think a man who really wants to be a woman and has committed a crime serious enough to warrant a prison sentence should be allowed in a women's prison - a lot fewer people agree with that, including many men who would suspect he was faking it for a softer sentence. (And if it worked, would probably do it themselves or recommend it to any banged-up bloke.)

The most misogynistic thing of trans ideology is to suggest that a man can "become" a woman. It's so insulting. My femaleness is not just my biology, although that provides the defining path and trajectory of my life - childhood, menstruation, adulthood, motherhood, menopause, elder woman status.

My femaleness is not just my socialisation not to be as intelligent, ambitious, competitive and aggressive as I actually am. Doubt I would ever have been told to tone it down if I was a boy. It's also not that people see a short, scruffy woman and dismiss me.

My femaleness is not just my connection to the female history of being ignored, overlooked, oppressed but continuing anyway. My heroes aren't Lionel Messi - they're the Suffragettes and Rosa Parks.

My femaleness, my womanhood, is all of these things. How could any man ever replicate that and how dare he try to claim it? It incenses me.

I am so femally conditioned that I feel sorry for the men who actually think they can get some spandex clothes and become the lady they have always masturbated about.

some of these deluded fools would have had better lives if anyone around them, including health care, said “no, sorry, that can’t happen”.

instead of that we have endless little car videos of cross men tantrumming because they did everything RIGHT and the meanies like me refuse to accept that he is a woman!

mate. You’re a bloke. Everyone was lying to you, and they shouldn’t have.