Louise Perry seems unecessarily unpleasant about WASPI women

[Carla786]

I understand disagreeing for one reason or another, but I think her tone is rather unpleasant. Is the issue really as clear-cut as she seems to think?

I agree with this esp re the millionaires comment. I think Waspi overall is more complex but I don't like Perry's tone about it.

Great post. I agree that kind of attitude is dispiriting. The lady who wrote that blog has some good points but does seem rather blinkered about several things ... (eg. A post saying Gen Z TV shows wrongly show the 80s as very homophobic - OK, in the arts London circles she seems to have moved in, no, but the wider AIDS era culture surely was often?)

I'll reply more fully to your post tomorrow- for now I'll link to this thread which tackles the issues with point about 'farming out childcare '

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5483801-to-disagree-with-the-argument-from-some-recent-feminists-that-having-a-nanny-is-automatically-exploiting-a-poor-womans-labour?reply=150216038

I'm posting only on the waspi thing, as I'm unable to read some of the links posted.

The increase In age when women would get their pension was publicised. I'm 75 now, but I knew that my pension would be caught in this when I was 57 or so.

If the waspi women didn't know, that's on them.

It comes from a place where "oh, I'm not interested in politics" comes from. Like political decisions will not affect you?

Get real. Politics will always affect you. You can choose to ignore politics, but politics will not be ignoring you.

@user1471453601, when you were 57 it was only three years to your expected retirement date.

You must have been quite comfortably situated to have sailed through the imminent experience of six unplanned years.

The real point is that they were supposed to send out letters. They didn't. Parliament and the High Court have examined this and found the pensions service derelict (and dishonest) here.

The women could continue to work. It wasn’t that difficult to plan. I am Waspi age but I knew. I agree with the post that said women buried their heads. Just made assumptions.

My mum is not particularly interested in the world around her. However she knew about this. I recall her bemoanng that she just fell into the group it would impact. We had that conversation in a house she moved out of in 1994!

It beggars belief that these women expect additional money when our young people need helping out. The young should not be funding people who are either not very bright, or rather greedy.

These 'reactionary feminists' are very annoying. I've been trying to give up feminism to focus more on elderly rights - turns out I can't, though, because old women get the short end of every stick. The sticks that hit old men hit old women twice as hard.

this resonates so much. I'm a 2nd waver, but one of the younger ones who fall into that category. I can recognise that my life, my opportunities, have been very very different to those of my mother (also a 2nd waver, but an older one) and i can appreciate that they shouldn't be just abandoned.

The ageism and misogyny of the "progressive left" is noted.

what i can't grasp is the utter failure to understand that even if it was news, there is a cohort of women -i think the government has estimated about 100k ? - who even if they did know were already so compromised by The System, had to give up work when married, never had a chance really of getting back to the workforce in a "career" but a low paid, difficult job, who didn't have the spare money to invest in a pension or save, who were then divorced and thrown into even more difficulties (that we KNOW existed then because they exist now) and have not been able to keep on working because of health.

A quantum of understanding and empathy instead of "yes but LOADS of them are rich" would not go amiss.

I have always known because my mum told me to constantly check things like this. My mum? trailing army spouse meant employment was patchy, told she could pay "half stamp" but not lose state pension benefits... is very bloody lucky that she can get my dad's army pension now he is no longer with us. Otherwise she would get about a hundred quid a week.

For me? I am too young to get a pension, am currently looking for work but am too old to be employable at a realistic wage. When i started work at 18 my pension age was 60, it has crept up to 67 over the years and i have been lucky to be able to prepare. Other women? not so much.

But yeah - feminist solidarity.

I think that tone is going to start to creep into lots of debates
I partly blame the way social media (especially X) operates and also the rather toxic politics seeping from over the Atlantic. To summarise it's "I'm alright Jack, screw everyone else" combined with "my group are the most unjustly treated and also the only ones to contribute anything but no-one appreciates that so they deserve to be punished".

Public spending does work like pie to an extent. Agreeing how to split that pie is always going to involve compromise/some people losing out even if you make it as fair as possible. So I can understand that (for example) WASPI women might not be able to get the payout they want/deserve. What's unpleasant is the tone of almost gleeful satisfaction that comes with it. Serves you all right etc

It's not just older women this affects though. (I agree there is ageism and mysogyny.)
You see it about other groups too. Eg I agree we can't give everyone who wants asylum in the UK asylum. We don't have the space or money. But there is a gleeful element to some on the rights fantasies about how they would deal with it. Or the constant references to "3 meals a day" (how many meals should families be given?. Or the fraught issues of welfare cuts. It's not enough to reduce funding because the money isn't there. It has to be accompanied by diatribes about how feckless layabouts claim that their feral kids have ADHD to scrounge from working families. When anyone who has had to be a career/try to get support for children with health problems knows the reality is different. But they are SCUM and deserve to be punished. If you ever try to push back on this demonisation, there is then a retreat to the Bailey of "the simple fact is we can't afford it".

The cruelty is the point basically. Add it's supposed to leave people isolated into silos and building up their own personal grievances. It's a really bad way of doing politics practiced by people who claim to be politically astute. And its done by people across the political spectrum but it benefits the far right in the long term.

But empathy is toxic now! So it might be my real problem is my toxic femininity of course.

It is NOTHING like asylum.

The government have already admitted that there is a cohort of women who have been absolutely shafted and some are living in abject poverty in old age. They are identifiable if anyone actually took the time to work out who they are.

But because they are old women, who have spent their entire lives being shafted by society for being female, we don't care. And are subject to people saying things like "well some old people are rich so tough tits."

They have been treated appallingly, they are identifiable and ... they are old ladies. So nobody gives a flying fuck.

It is disgraceful.

I’m not going to mess up my algorithm output and click on the links but if this person’s X tweets are a source of income then they need to state a strong opinion to maximise revenue and be in a chance of more lucrative side hustles like tv and podcast interviews or a column. Right wing opinions are fashionable at the moment as they are loudest and amplified by Trump being in power and as most adults are online, the tone of SM content from the US affects the UK too even if the politics are different. We know that we have been manipulated by bot content since at least the Brexit referendum. Discussing comments made by people like this increases their employability for a certain audience and are designed to rage bait. Engaging with them expands their reach and helps pay their bills so beware.

I didn't mean the two causes were morally equivalent. Or even that the same issues were in play
I was more talking about the attitudes towards them/the way people argue

It's not possible to say "this really sucks but the fact is I don't think there is the money available to pay the women what they say they are owed." You might respond that the resources are available if you take from X,YZ and that WASPIs are in this case more deserving than XYZ (because they were promised, because many are poor, etc etc) Then we are in a discussion about how to split resources and about what is fair and what it means to be owed something and what qe all owe each other.

That's not enough. It has to be hah hah fuck you, you are old and some old people are rich/mean and as part of the old people group you decide to be punished for that fact.

I am 67 so waited 6 years longer than expected. I had no letters but had checked my pension forecast periodically so knew what to expect. Many genuinely didn't, and the tone of comments on this is nasty. Likely the poorest women have been most affected.
Many of these women will have been in very low paid work and may have been less well educated than the posters pouring scorn. You have to remember there was no internet in the 90s and not everyone followed the news.

I did know about it but not in the 90s. I had my children in the 90s so was in the trenches with babies and not focused on pensions. I remember talking about it at work and one of my staff members was expecting to retire at 60. It had completely passed her by that she was not a year away from retirement but 7 years. She was devastated. Her health was poor and she had been struggling on in the mistaken belief that it wouldn't be for much longer.

Nevertheless I still don't think the government should take money from more urgent causes.

Yes it's one thing to keep going if you have a job like Louise Perry for example. Unless you experience premature cognitive decline a lot of white collar jobs are still very doable (so long as ageism allows it). But if you have spent your entire working life on your feet as a nursing assistant, or a cleaner, or in a launderette you likely have a lot of physical wear and tear. And it's hard to keep going in those jobs. Especially if the time you took away from work to have babies has also had a physical impact. It's ironic that Perry is part of the cohort that thinks women should be having more children but seems naive to the fact this can affect women's future health. Even down to their bones.

It's the lack of empathy/understanding for the fact other women have had different life experiences that gets me.

I think the waspi women campaigners are the opposite of feminist. Their argument seems to boil down to - because they are women they can't possibly have been expected to pay attention to the news or their own pension forecast or take any responsibility. 60 is a ridiculously low retirement age and it was right to raise it.

I think we can all agree it was right to equalise the retirement ages. The question we're debating is whether women who had carried out financial planning on the not unreasonable assumption that they were going to retire at 60 should have some form of compensation.

I'm slightly on the fence about it. I think it's weird that when the Waspi campaigners wheel out examples, they are really not very sympathetic ones. Like that woman who retired at 55 thinking she was going to pick up a state pension at 60. But as Brefugee points out, there are women who are genuinely hard up who have been adversely affected by this. And I think we should all remember that women tend to be worse off anyway, in pension terms, because many stopped working and therefore paying into a pension in order to bring up children.

Nevertheless I still don't think the government should take money from more urgent causes.

how are old women living in dire poverty not near, or at, the top of the urgent causes list?

then you have completely misunderstood what the original campaign was about.

But you'Re ok because the women who came before you fought the battles to get you the equal rights you enjoy now.

The problem that I think is irresolvable is how to compensate those who genuinely didn’t know and have been demonstrably impoverished and those that did know for whom it is a question of justice not hardship.
I remember older women I worked with discussing it and finding out who fell on which side of the divide they fell. It was a gradual process with a long horizon albeit with a couple of leaps forward so the failure to plan narrative is hard to evidence.
But the time lag on workplace misogyny, which this group faced v much more than younger cohorts has disadvantaged waspi women. When I was v junior, this was the group of colleagues who were seen as in the retirement waiting room by 50 at the v latest and so not considered for promotion. They were also having ‘women’s problems’ which seemed regularly to end in hysterectomies and a noticeable time off. They were often managed by older men who were from an age that hadn’t given up paternalistic attitudes which saw finances as the man’s role at home.
Now I’m firmly in that age group I have menopause leave, workplace initiatives and absolutely in charge of my money and tax affairs.
We should pay morally, esp as Labour in opposition supporting paying, but I think the ignorance has been over-egged by campaigners.
Top up pay for that cohort who get no more than state pension?

I read her book and sometimes listen to her podcast but she lost me when she interviewed Bonnie Blue.
She kept repeating ‘but what if the men (that Bonnie shags posts online) are fat’ …what if they are ‘horrible and huge and fat’

Bonnie Blue was great and said all people if all shapes and sizes enjoy and desire/deserve and that some of these guys stop going to the gym/eat on the hop/comfort eat when the kids are born/little as between home and work they don’t have time etc

Class answer

Tone?

i has no idea who has said what but I do hate people who complain about the tone as a way of disparaging something / someone they disagree with

The WASPI women do themselves no favours by being dishonest about what happened.

This is from their FAQ.

FAQs - Women Against State Pension Inequality

Our campaign is not about the change to the State Pension age itself; it’s about the lack of notice of that change. Although women born in the 1960s have had an increase of six years to their SPa, they received a much longer period of notice than women born in the 1950s. The DWP did finally get around to writing to all women in 2012. This meant that women born in the mid 1950s had an 18-month or two-year notice of a rise of nearly six years to their State Pension age. Women born in the early 1960s had a notice period of at least eight years, and much longer for most 60s women.

Under the Pensions Act 1995, for those born between 1950 and 1953 the pension age increased gradually from 60 to 63. These women had at least 15 years notice of the change.

Those born in 1953-55 were hit hardest by the 2011 changes, and found that they would have to wait an extra year or two for their pensions but they were given at least 4 years notice of this as they would have been due to retire in 2016 or later under the 1995 rules.

Details of changes here.
State Pension age timetables

Original retirement ages from the 1995 Act.
Pensions Act 1995

Response one (that I actually think)
Its not really tone that's the issue. It's the arguments used. And that does matter. I think people shorten it to mean "tone of the debate". Which is different to implying the tone of voice is different/words used aren't polite enough.

Response two (sorry)
Go F* yourself. People like you are the reason the country is a mess so frankly you deserve to be "tone policed". Ideally you wouldnt be online at all.
(Sorry again)

Those two responses are different in tone/language. But that's not the main/only problem with the second response. De

Nah I agree, some women may feel hard done by but you can't really expect much sympathy from anyone under 40.