Safe Space For Possibly Unpopular Thoughts on Feminism, Leftism

Oh, Belle, I am just so angry for you, the whole time I was reading I was just getting so mad. You were only 16! The penalty for getting drunk is not rape, it’s a headache. I hope no one has ever said different to you.

Ah, geez. None of this sounds un-P.C. to me, but what do I know. I hate that that happened to you, and to your sister.

Thanks for sharing that, Belle.

My wife works on a university campus and is involved with students who have been raped. The list of problems and possible improvements are legion, but since this thread is about feminism, I’ll focus on that.

From what I’ve seen, many activists/writers in campus organizations and online are more interested in repeating talking points than in trying to do anything constructive. To use the examples from the Freddie de Boer thread, you will get these meetings where people spend a lot of time discussing whether campus rape is due more to the patriarchy, or capitalism, and don’t forget about racism, etc. They don’t understand the process of how justice can be obtained, and such concerns are secondary to having good politics.

And for many of these people, I don’t mean they’re 80% of the way to understanding and just need to be nudged in the right direction. I mean their worldview is orthogonal to reality and that renders them incapable of effective action.

I used to think it was navel-gazing bullshit of no consequence, but now that campus rape is a high profile topic those kinds of opinions are influencing the conversation, so to speak.

So, at the university where my wife works, there is a specific step in the process that it’s almost impossible for rape cases to pass, and it is something student activists could agitate about and have a real chance of changing. And with university politics being what they are, it is probably only students who can change it. But none of the student activists have bothered to understand how the process works, so they don’t know how to fix it.

On a more positive note, I’m glad that people are beginning to see that barring Sororities from throwing parties is insane. Allowing them to wouldn’t fix everything, but it would certainly help.

Belle you are a fucking lion.

/Write that book. Seriously.
//If you want to to.

Wowsers, Ms. Belle. Thanks, really liked this.

I’m thinking of a quote heard somewhere (source? too lazy to look it up right now): “Shame and shamelessness: the roots of violence.” Maybe more to add later but thanks for now.

OK the moping is warranted but one question, was NCS any source of support during that Oxford episode? You’re unlikely to have been the only victim.

Ah, Belle……..

I am going to try to write something for this post, but even though it will be much more mundane (in any number of ways), if it’s going to be worth the bother it will be long and may take a while. I hope anyone interested in this thread will keep coming back, in case more of us than just Belle need a few days to get something put together to post.

Belle, you have the courage to know and tell the truth, there is nothing that matters more. I spent years working in child abuse, until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and learned there about torture and rape as family affairs, over and over again. Not everywhere, I hope, but certainly here. Something else that is hard to tell the truth, a truth almost no one every wants to hear.

JG

Belle, thank you for sharing that experience in just that way. Your style renders its terribleness more accessible, in some way… in any event, I am both sympathetically upset by and appreciate the emotional response it has engendered.

Here’s the thing that I think that I think is likely to be ill received. Concerted action with the intent to cause physical or emotional discomfort among some decision makers for the purpose of effecting some policy change is an under-used tool. In my mind, this all takes a form that stops well short of what we would tend to think of as political violence. But if I’m really honest, sometimes that border is fuzzy. Implied threats are a type of harm, and there are cases where I’m, like, “Yeah, that guy /should/ be a little worried about whether or bad thing will befall him before deciding on X.” So that’s the fuzziness – I kind of believe there are legitimate applications of that sort of harm but not of the sort that effectuates the threat. If that makes sense. Distressingly, my judgment about what makes it legitimate is probably some simple correspondence with my other political beliefs. That is pretty weak tea as far as principles go. Which is why I cannot reasonably endorse this as a universal principle. I don’t want the other guys doing it too. And yet…

You are brave like a MOTHERFUCKER, dude. Much respect.

And in keeping with the personal is political and things you aren’t allowed to say, I’d like to share this.

This is all a bit new and raw for me, due to the fact that I have suppressed most of it for my entire life, but I was abused pretty horribly by my mother in ways that were pretty much always deniable, and which flashbacks leave me screaming and crying. That she was a malignant narcissist who inflicted pain and violation on me, I remember. But I’m pretty sure that there is a whole load more I buried. I’m not even sure exactly what happened some of the time, just that it was bad enough that childhood was a hell which I needed to endure so that I could survive and escape. Which I have, and I’m in a really good place – ironically, this is what is allowing the flashbacks.

But, anyway, part of the problem was the deniability of it. Your mother is the person who loves you most in the world, and being a boy you are all rough and insensitive and stuff. So the “don’t tell anyone” aspect of abuse takes on a particular role of being reinforced by a general societal agreement. Be careful round girls, and so on. And as I got older I realised that if I was walking down the street at night and a lone woman was there, I should cross the road to make her feel more safe. Be aware that my mere physical presence was intimidating. That consent, as it is talked about, is simply never about my consent (actually, this isn’t quite true. I feel safe in kink environments where consent is not a gendered concept – the difference from mainstream discourse is striking).

Essentially, the message I get from feminism is that I am a violator and I should stop being so violate-y. When I arrived at University, I read a book which had an entry on what to do to support feminism if you are a man – “Stop raping women”. And my reaction was, I think understandably, FUCK THE FUCK OFF. I AM NOT THE VIOLATOR. It was, to my mind, a fairly clear reinforcement of the “don’t tell” aspect of the abuse I had suffered. Who the fuck was gonna believe me? Men are abusers, not abusees. Man up, live with it. And stop raping.

So, ok, I got over that. I don’t take it personally in that way any more. I oppose rape culture, and I recognise the way in which men *are* largely the ones who need to think about consent. But that was an effort, in which I felt pretty isolated for a while. But I can’t help feel that I’m not alone in that reaction and that at some level the focus on men as violators ignores a fuck load of suffering. I certainly felt I could expect no support, and I think I was exactly right. And I sometimes think it actually *contributes* to rape culture. But mostly I wanted to say that mainstream narratives about privilege, abuse and so on are valuable, but – for my clear personal reasons – I do sometimes think that they can be grossly insensitive to individuals.

I’m just an uncool lurker and I was going to burn this nym anyway.

I think MRAs score a rare point when they argue that mainstream feminist discourse marginalizes the fact that men and boys do, in fact, also get raped, and even by women, especially in institutional settings.

Some will respond that grown men outside prisons do not live every day scanning the horizon for the threat of rape. And this is true. But still.

@LizardBreath: Totally with you on the drink thing. Its one example where it is clear that consent as talked about is so very gendered, in a way that I feel is very unhealthy.

I *have* confronted people on this – survivors of rape, in fact. Which was probably stupid and insensitive of me. But it was interesting watching them defend the position that the time they got tipsy and had some romantic sex was somehow non-consensual sex and wrong, and see them start to compare it in their minds with actual non-consensual sex. They aren’t the same. And the people saying so realised this, once their defensiveness abated somewhat.

Its an understandable defensive reaction, I think. Of anger and outrage. But its no way to actually try to construct sensible, *helpful*, notions of consent. I suspect it does the opposite. If you make unreasonable rules of conduct for people, you just create an understanding that the rules aren’t meant to be taken seriously.

LizardBreath I have actually had similar thoughts. I mean if the other person is unconscious the situation is obvious. But what if both parties are just stumbling around silly drunk?

On the topic of male-victim rape… I think our media treats it as a joke, and activists and politicians don’t treat it seriously. It’s more widespread than people realize, and if the statistics that MRAs throw around are even partially true, it’s a huge blind spot among people concerned about social justice.

That said… I’m a man who’s been raped twice, once long ago by a man and more recently by a woman. I’ve brought it to five people total, four women whose backgrounds range from non-profit work to medicine to consulting, and one man who works in finance. Of that group of people, four people immediately identified it as rape, offered to help me out in any way, and even went so far as to help me report it. One person laughed and told me to man up and admit that I wanted it.

It probably won’t surprise many people who the odd one out was.

If that was to me, I do completely agree with that. It seems very clear to me that most rape that involves drinking is about intentional predators raping people who are less able to defend themselves due to intoxication (as in Belle’s incredibly sad and enraging story) rather than to any kind of confusion.

And oh look, this is why I’m uncomfortable breaking solidarity to bring up concerns about this stuff. Brett, I think Belle’s asleep, but she did ask that this thread be a safe place. In the spirit of openness and generosity, think if the direction you’re trying to take the conversation in is something that is likely to be deleted when she’s paying attention again, and maybe spare her the effort?

“Yeah, what I’m comfortable with right now is actual expressed consent, regardless of intoxication, is consent”

Yeah, if you don’t draw a line there, it takes you to some pretty ugly places.

(Not that I’m the police around here, but given that I griped at Brett after his first comment, his second comment seems fine to me as I understand Belle’s rules.)

This Amanda Hess piece is very good and very relevant to the drunk sex debate, and also to colleges’ handling of sexual assault and misconduct.

And Belle, thank you.

@12
I’m also sympathetic to the ‘why would you just go and adopt another gender role’ line. Two things give me pause, however. Firstly, I can’t understand the subjective experience of someone who claims to suffer from dysphoria, and it seems humane to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially given the difficulties involved. Secondly, aren’t we just assigning another (different) gender role when we say trans women are men? Do women have the right to be girly?

@17
Brownmiller wrote quite a lot about men raping men, though I found her thesis a bit insufficient (transference of gender roles in situations where no women existed, IIRC).

Finally, my own unacceptable view: I’m sex-negative (as opposed to ‘sex positive’). To be fair, this is still a debated issue, but it does rather seem as if younger feminists in particular are moving toward the position that sex industry (porn, accessories, sex work, whatever) is basically or potentially positive. I think this is misguided: we’ve already seen how e.g. porn re-inscribes class and racial boundaries. I’m also concerned that sex products produce norms (or even implicit normative values) regarding sexual practice. I’m not sure whether there’s such a thing as sexual authenticity, but I’d rather the romantic imagination wasn’t mass produced.

LizardBreath: But there is a fair amount of rhetoric from anti-rape advocates who I am mostly entirely in agreement with on issues around rape generally, saying that it is impossible to give consent when intoxicated at all.

This came up in a recent discussion about Russell T Davies’ new series Cucumber and I think it’s useful to bring this up as it addresses drunken sex without making it a man vs woman issue – because the participants were all male and all drunk.

In the first episode the middle-aged couple Henry and Lance are in a failed gay relationship; they invite a young homeless man they meet at a nightclub back home with them on the condition he has a threesome with them. He is clearly pissed as a fart while Henry and Lance are only slightly less drunk.

Henry backs out at the last moment, Lance and the young guy have sex, Henry calls the police claiming the guy is an intruder and the young guy (who is naked) is arrested after attempting to assault a police officer.

Now, if intoxicated people cannot give consent this is rape. The young guy is drinker than the other man, he’s homeless, and by any standards in a vulnerable position. If this scene had involved a young homeless woman the scene would have been widely condemned.

But it’s not so long since homosexuality was illegal and the gay community is perhaps more wary about criminalising what for many gay and straight people is normal behaviour; alcohol plays a large part in our social lives and nobody expects to have to pass a breathalyser test to prove their own consent is free.

The objection to alcohol fuelled sex has traditionally assumed that a woman who is drunk may regret that sex later and characterise it as rape; there is a lot of social pressure to do so. Since arguments then polarise into automatic belief in the woman’s side of the story or knee-jerk rejection of it based on assumptions about unequal power relationships.

Yet young men or women often experiment sexually and use alcohol to lower inhibitions; and those who regret experimenting with partners of the same sex might find themselves pressured into redefining an unsatisfactory sexual experience as rape.

Right now tribal affiliations are easy to determine; that’s not going to be so straightforward if the conflict is between straight men or women who regret a sexual experiment and men or women more confident about their sexual identity who suddenly find themselves accused of rape.

It’s already hitting the fan, the tort lawyers have smelled blood in the water, and are going after school administrations for violations of civil liberties in their treatment of accused students.

Not trying to derail, but I predict that the college drinking/sexual assault issue will truly hit the fan when, in the near future, Fox News gets wind of a case at a big school in which the accuser and the accused are the same gender.

Or, as happened in the past, accusations are made disproportionately at ethnic minorities. Straight white cis male vs straight white female isn’t going to task the liberal mind; underprivileged black guy vs wealthy white woman might; Asian cis woman vs black transwoman is going to open up a real can of worms.

“Was that some woman? Y’all know you didn’t even think for a second that it was.”

I didn’t have to think for a second to know that it was some criminal. Generalizing about dangerous or unpleasant people’s irrelevant characteristics usually isn’t a good idea. It can easily lead where we don’t want to go.

I see that several of the comments are from people who don’t really identify as feminists explaining why they don’t. That seems like a separate issue from what the post is getting at, i.e., that people who generally identify as feminists sometimes have problems with particular feminist ideas or subgroups. It would be nice if the latter could be heard without being drowned out by the former, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

For my part, I’m a feminist, always have been, but I find that I’m irked by the way some feminists talk about childcare and childcare providers. There’s sometimes an “anyone can wipe runny noses” attitude that I see, a dismissiveness about the labor and skills of people hired to look after children. It does not accord with my experience at all. I understand where it comes from – the perfectly natural and necessary desire to break free from the ideal of motherhood and its various traps. But the fact remains, it’s actually difficult to find someone with the patience and fortitude to look after one child, let alone multiple children.

What people don’t seem to acknowledge is that what you are looking for in a daycare provider is someone who is actually better at minding your children than you yourself are. Yes, most of us parents slog along without degrees in early childhood education, and we get through it without making too many major mistakes. But the patience and fortitude one displays toward one’s own child is hard to muster day-in day-out for someone else’s. And we allow ourselves slips, like yelling or even the occasional smack, that we would never tolerate in a babysitter. So really what you are looking for is someone with a certain specific temperament and set of skills that even you yourself probably don’t possess.

I notice this because I happen to send my children to an extremely well-run daycare, and I remark all the time on the serenity and talent of the teachers. Part of it is that this particular center is run by my university, so it receives subsidies as well as fees, which means the teachers get a good salary and benefits. They therefore tend to stay in their jobs for decades, developing their skills over time. They are also allowed the time to develop a rapport with the children in their care. Most daycares pay very little and have high turnover, meaning the children don’t get attached to individual providers.

Yeah, if ever there was an issue that drives a wedge between me and feminism, it’s the refusal to acknowledge the connection between alcohol and sex in peoples lives. Same with the current fad for affirmative consent requirements for explicit step wise sexual initiation and escalation.

I don’t think these things will lead to a spare of false rape accusations, as some claim.

I just think that the point of ethics is to provide a practical guide for people’s lives. People are going to drink and have sex. They’re going to playfully push boundaries sexually. And the vast majority will have a great time. If you declare these things to be immoral, everyone will ignore you.

I think affirmative consent and the weird fog surrounding alcohol and rape is the feminist equivalent of conservatives who declare how great it would be if all teens everywhere never had sex again. Who needs birth control then, right? But that’s not going to happen, and the moral assumptions that demand it are shady, so let’s come up with ethical rules that work for real people.

Luke @ 35 Gender roles are socially constructed, our sex is not. This is my unpopular belief. It is not surprising to me that the more rigid the gender roles, the more people there are that feel they don’t fit those roles. I wonder how many people really do feel like they fit the roles, in all or even most ways.

I appreciate that, and I agree that sex is not constructed (to the extent that anything isn’t, anyway). I guess what I’m trying to say is: I still feel like the assertion that people who are born with one sex should stick to it is itself the imposition of a kind of gender role — a meta-role, if you will.

If nothing else, I see trans people fighting the good fight against restrictive gender roles (and dying for it, quite often).

Not trying to start a fight here, but this seems like a safe space to have this awkward conversation.

Gender roles are socially constructed, our sex is not.

Or.

feel the same way about trans issues – that sex is not socially constructed, but gender roles are. and that getting surgery does not make you into the opposite gender (and that, in fact, it is impossible to know what it means to be a gender you weren’t born as – that you can only know your own feelings about what it means to be that gender). But as a corollary that as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, that we should allow ppl to modify their bodies in whatever manner they please, and they can call themselves whatever they want, and if you’re sensitive to their feelings you’ll respect those decisions. but that respecting someone’s feelings about themselves does not mean taking on an entire ideology that is pretty illogical and incoherent in philosophical terms.

i also believe that there is a lot of bullying on the left, that a lot of the left has adopted identity politics (race, gender, sex) to the exclusion of addressing equality, egalitarianism, and even socialism. that you risk being ostracized from the left if you raise these concerns, mocked for your beliefs, and considered a bad person. that you can’t be skeptical of a rape accusation without being called a rape denier. or in some circles you can’t be skeptical of a radical, revolutionary political movement w/out being an apologist for colonialism. i also believe that post-colonialism focuses on the West as a locus of evil when it has historically been the biggest source of progression + standard of living increases in the history of humanity. i believe that huge swaths of the left are totally irresponsible + i’ve gone from considering myself a radical leftist to being grateful that the democratic party in the US are just republicans lite.

I’m sympathetic to radical critiques of gender roles and especially agree with Lynne that the hyper-gendering of childhood is a terrible, terrible thing.

But I also want to respectfully disagree with Lynne and agree with Luke: I don’t understand how feminists can ask others to take the experiences of women seriously on their own terms without being willing to do the same for those who identify as trans. I agree that SRS is something that people should be very cautious about committing to, especially at a young age. But this goes beyond that; it amounts to arguing that you know trans peoples’ minds better than they know themselves. And it seems to me that that’s a classic patriarchal trope, ironically enough.

Thank you for sharing that, Belle. Somebody I know had a similar early experience; she described a later, more joyful physical relationship as “taking back the night”.

I’m uncomfortable ascribing gripes to feminism writ large, as opposed to certain individuals or camps.

Some of the rhetoric around affirmative consent strikes me as ripe for blowback, in particular how objections get framed as so transparently ridiculous that they must be insincere or clueless. For example, there are in fact people who argue for explicit verbal consent. This is not strawmanning. They assure how hot that can be, much like the apologia we got for premarital celibacy in Sunday school. John Holbo, as I recall, resolved in favor of the non-verbal consent argument by saying we just have to trust prosecutors’ judgement the way we already do. That was maybe a week before the grand jury announcement in Ferguson.

I agree there won’t be a wave of false accusations, but the kind of situations Amanda Hess describes seem inevitable.

The only trans person I know went through six massive changes in self identity, the latest of which was trans. In one of them they moved overseas, regretted it, and came back to a significantly disrupted career. They now take the position that they were secretly trans the whole time. They’ve dived into self modification with a gusto that is now familiar.

I want them to be happy, and they’ve made clear that they need support. So I give my support.

But I’m terrified that this will last on longer than the other efforts at self identification. And this one may not be reversible. I know the feminist norm is to proclaim the primacy of self-asserted personal experience, as discussed by others above. And I can socially respect their assertions of how they identify. But I can’t buy it. Not yet. My friend seems like they’re just generally uncomfortable with themselves, and like they’ve spent their whole life casting about for the framework to explain that discomfort. Maybe transgenderism is that framework and they’re finally coming home to a place where they’ll find comfort.

But I thought that before, and it sure didn’t work out. I’m worried.

—–
If you’re the kind of person to get your back up at anything even remotely critical of feminism, don’t even bother. Anyone who can’t take criticism or won’t give the benefit of good intentions isn’t someone I can speak with and listen to.
Beyond that, skip to #4 or #2 for the main ones.
——
Firstly, are you planning on writing a book? You should think about writing a book.
Two, you know, I’ve been reading Crooked Timbers since senior year of HS-which was two years ago-and I’ve been thinking about stopping over the sheer amount of trash that came up in: re the Chait piece. Even if I didn’t find his arguments compelling, both the posters and the commenters were un-be-lievable dismissive. So I am glad this opportunity for some free thought is allowed.
Three, to the point. With a few stray exceptions, this thread has been dominated by people born pre-1992 and identify as feminists.
Before I get to the point, a word on context. I’m sure what I say will elicit a response something like: not all feminists believe X, or act like X. Well, I’m talking about the strains of feminism I run into as a student on a large public university with twentysomethings and younger. Take this as you will.
A lot of people might wonder what dog I have in this fight. As someone on the very lowest rung of academia, the way the highly educated discuss political issues matters a great deal to me. And as a mix of left-liberalism and ’68 radicalism, it’s up my alley to care how the left treats matters.
—
Aiiiight, throat clearing.
#1 A reliance on essentialism.
Men bad, women good. accuser must be protected, accused must be subject to the fullest examination of the law and some. Ally good, skeptic shitlord.
There are probably ways to analyze the discourse of feminist writings, but I’ll concede there is no way to empirically prove this.
Problem is that much feminist rhetoric doesn’t really capture the nuances of life, of people, of thoughts. You might think I’m spekaing to ’70s feminists, but believe me, just go through tumblr. Nuance is nowhere.
This leads to…
#2: A project of ultimate ends
You see this on the sexual assault issues. Even if I agree that it’s a categorically different type of crime (unsure, leaning yes), alll sorts of goods are subverted to achieve this one end. Anyone who suggests that there are other things that need to be considered in formulating policies is shut down in a hail of claims of rape appologist. Even while accepting that the way victims report the crime is messy and trauma seriously screws with a person’s memory…that should factor into a decision how?
But long story short, value-weighing tunnel vision.
#3 No schilling fence
My mention of this outs me as a reader of Scott Alexander. He’s one of the half-dozen websites I go to every few days alongside Lawyersgunsmoney, here, the guardian, popehat for fun, and a few others. My issue with feminists in this sense is the following: once the feminist ideology has left the station, where does it stop? Again, try going to /r/tumblrinaction. Scroll through that little treasure trove. And without appealing to the social sciences, ask yourself how a feminist would respond to the foul shit they find. Basically it seems like the only way to object to the extremes is by some appeal to common decency..which seems a little out of place…or social stat, which is usefully ignored elsewhere…
#4 in-group dynamics gone wild

I am honestly unsure of how much of a strawman that standard is: that is

From listening to other people’s anecdotes, it seems like this standard is most often encountered form overzealous freshman orientation counselors. At least with all of the people I know of who claim that they literally heard this exact standard put forth, that’s who they heard it from.

Lynne – not much by way of reaction, but I share some of your ‘unpopular thoughts’, especially wrt sex-change vs. up-ending gender roles.

I also totally agree with those above on the absurdity of university justice on issues of sexual misconduct. The incentive structure facing university administrators is often such that they would prefer to suppress these sorts of charges to preserve their brand name rather than legitimately resolve the cases as they come. So then the university gets called out, and overreacts because their incentive structure is geared not towards discerning the proper course of justice, but instead towards managing their public image and making clear demonstration that they are ‘doing something about it’.

Institutions not properly outfitted for the dispensation of justice should not be assigned that social function. Especially when they may have significant financial interest in one or another outcome of said judicial process (!)

My alma matter recently hired an ex-judge to serve as an independent consultant on issues of sexual misconduct. My thoughts are that this should be a generalized thing – a group of legal experts standing as an independent body, separate from any specific university/college but available to all for consult, to guarantee that proper standards are upheld, and exist as a check on the narrow interests of the uni administrators.

@19.2 makes a lot of sense. But I’ve done that exercise and gone the other way. For a long time I tried to write a story about a sexual experience I had in college–much too ambiguous to describe fully in a comment box–and finally I realized that the reason I was having trouble with it–the reason I couldn’t describe my own behavior in a way that made sense–was because it had not occurred to me that the guy was at fault. It was not factoring into the story in any way. I would not say today that it was rape. I don’t know whether if I’d resisted more forcefully/continued to resist he’d have left me alone, or he’d have held me down “playfully,” or he’d have manipulated me into a place where it was harder for me to get away, or how much resistance that would have taken. But an objective observer, I think, would have to say that he coerced me and was in the wrong. To write the story I would have to describe him as an aggressor. (Which, for complicated reasons, didn’t fit with rest of the story as I’d imagined it.)

And it wasn’t just a “nonverbal sexual initiation.” It wasn’t, ultimately, a pleasant experience. It didn’t lead to a fulfilling relationship. It led to periodic bouts of further manipulation and a lot of wasted time and lost opportunities to do other things.

I don’t think I should have been encouraged to press charges of sexual assault (it was a few years too early for that). But I’ve heard too many stories about women blamed for rapes after they started throwing things, shouting “get out of my room,” and so on, or in situations no reasonable person would think defaulted to “sexual,” because they didn’t resist “enough”. There has to be some place before that where it becomes a crime. Playful as grabbing someone and throwing them on a bed may sometimes be, I think I’m willing to draw the line at saying this is not okay on campus without explicit verbal consent, because there seems to be no way to distinguish this from intentional assault.

These are young people who have no living space except their bedrooms, living in mixed-gender dorms, with no parietal rules at all, except restrictions on non-students and off-campus dwellers. People move in and out of rooms all the time. It’s often not considered okay to lock your door. You can’t talk quietly or study together unless you’re in a bedroom. You don’t say to someone, “Wait outside while I get the book you asked to borrow,” you let them into your room and you let the door close. College students don’t have a lot of breathing space if they start to feel unsafe.

Some of the trans stuff here is making me boil over in frustration and I don’t have the time or brain today to offer some other angles. I make note here that I’d like to and will return to it when I can.

I can offer a few pointers. Julie Serano’s memoir and advocacy piece Whipping Girl is a good read by someone who’s thought a lot about what she and others are doing. If you’re on Facebook, also look up Jenelle Jacquays, a long-time figure in the roleplaying and computer game world (published as Paul Jacquays) who’s undergoing a middle-aged transition and is a delightful writer about herself and her concerns. Since trans women’s experiences are sometimes easier to find being discussed, I also point at What Becomes You, a joint memoir by artist Aaron Link and his mother Hilda Raz. Personal note – Aaron’s a long-time very close friend of a long-time close friend, and I really enjoyed the times we had to visit. He’s got a remarkable visual and kinesthetic sense, and his prose has this vivid quality that’s hard for me to describe. Good stuff.

LizardBreath, about drinking and consent: I know that some of it is about the specific condition of blackout drinking, where you’re functioning in present time but will have no memory of events later. I’m allergic to booze, so this is all theoretical for me – I don’t know how reliably one can aim for that particular state of drunkenness, but I remember it being something dorm mates shot for back in the ’80s and understand it’s still a thing. That’s the one bit I have to add to that exchange.

I think Hannah Rosin was right about the end of men and I’m very grateful that my daughters are more likely to achieve scholastically, and ultimately in the workplace, than they would if they were men. I think this is a major blow to the feminist narrative about patriarchal hegemony.

about drinking and consent: I know that some of it is about the specific condition of blackout drinking

This is right, but it’s also unhelpful. The thing about being “blackout drunk” is that it’s not a state you’re aware of when you’re in it—in the moment, it’s perfectly possible to think you’re fine (just drunk) and more or less in control. It’s only the next morning that you realize you were blackout drunk.

And I don’t think being in a blackout is reliably obvious to the people you’re around either. It’s a horrible evidentiary problem for rape — that it is very possible for a drunk person to literally not know what happened the prior night — but there’s no easy way in the moment to use it as a cutoff beyond which consent is invalid.

“And it basically works–satisfaction with surgery is generally high.”

I think this is a key point. Thank you temp.

I would recommend this book written by a transgender woman to anyone interested in the topic

Right Body, Wrong Junk
By Avery Edison
http://averyedison.com/rightbodywrongjunk/

dn and Luke, let me see if I understand your position (which I take to be the same). You are saying that if a man does not feel comfortable in the masculine role to the point where he doesn’t identify as male and believes he is really female, and wants to be treated as such, then no one else can no his mind as he does, so we should accept him as a transwoman. Is that right? Accept him in all ways, not just as another human being but as female—“F” on his passport instead of “M”, he uses the women’s washroom, etc. No difference. Is that right? So our taking his word for it, not presuming to know his mind better than he does, should be similar to our reaction to someone declaring their sexual preference. They know their preference, I don’t, I take their word for it. Am I understanding you right?

If I do understand you, would you be interested in rephrasing my point of view? I find that can help avoid talking past each other, if you are willing.

William Timberman @63

“…but sex reassignment smacks to me of an individual solution, and a drastic one, to what is in fact a social and political problem. Is there really no way that we could make the world safe for an expansion of sanctified gender roles without, as desperate individuals trapped what we believe to be intolerable situations, submitting ourselves — trusting ourselves — to the ministrations of surgeons whose record of successful interventions is questionable at best?”

Yes, exactly.

argh—“know” his mind.

I think leftists trying to get more status in their peer groups by leveraging their marginalized identities + victomhood is both real and super gross.

milx @70

“and ultimately in the workforce”

While I do think that it’s just a matter of time until the workforce turns over enough to reflect the considerably higher success of girls in school, I also think there is a legitimate question about the degree to which the behaviors that drive success in school are actually the behaviors that lead to eventual high-level success in the workforce. Most of these questions center around the very different nature of the teacher-student and boss-employee relationships.

…recommend a book as accessible as these three, but written by someone who had gone in the other direction

You mean FTM?

This page has names to google (there is a lot of online material; I have been reading by/about Louis Sullivan) and some books at the bottom of the page.

I am not feeling expansive today and am behind on my reading. Good thread! Maybe when the thread winds down I’ll paste some Joan Wallach Scott and confound you all. Probably not.

I think that racism and sexism can be directed by anyone of any identity group against anyone of any other identity group and that it’s no better because it’s “punching up” instead of “punching down.”

Right, even if it’s just the power of cruelty.

Here’s an opinion that may or may not be unpopular here, not really sure.

Related to the Slate piece linked above @33.

When two drunk college students have sex, neither one really remembering it but it being very clear (thanks to text messages, other witnesses etc.) that other than the drunkenness it was clearly consensual on both sides, and the college responds by expelling the boy but meting out no punishment whatsoever for the girl, the reason why the college authorities make this choice is because they are sexist. It’s basically that simple.

I’ve also got some other more incendiary opinions, but this one is enough for here.

(I also reserve the right to update my view based on information coming to light based on flaws in Amanda Hess’ reporting).

Having awarded D^2 laurels just about a week ago for inspiring the best comment threads at CT (here), I find that I must retract that or come up with something better. BW has topped him here! This thread is one I have read not with amusement (like the one I was commenting on last week), but with interest and fascination. I’ve learned a fair amount, or suspect I will have once I’ve digested this. Thank you, all.

Lynne: Sure, I’d be glad to. First, your reading of me – I think it’s mostly right; I think that gender identity should be respected in the same way as sexual orientation and that telling trans women “but you’re not really women!” is basically like telling gay people that they weren’t “born this way”. But with one proviso – I also see it as about more than discomfort with “the masculine role”. I’m inclined to take seriously the idea of “gender dysphoria”, and I believe that accepting a critique of gender roles – i.e. behavioral norms – does not necessarily rule out the existence of gender identity as a biological/psychological phenomenon distinct from “sex”. I think that gender is a very poorly understood phenomenon in general (just look at the complex and varied concepts of gender that exist in other societies). I believe that given how little we really understand, we should be very cautious before attempting to generalize, and should be willing to trust the word of self-identified trans individuals just as we would trust the members of any other disadvantaged group when trying to learn something about their problems.

Now, your position: I understand you to mean that you consider “gender” to be more or less synonymous with “gender roles“, and wholly socially constructed. You believe that when gender roles are made narrow and normative, such that “men” and “women” are required to fit their behaviors and lifestyles into narrowly-defined boxes, that this is a problem (with this I agree). You believe that transsexuals are generally people who have bought into such an illegitimate concept of normative gender, but find it narrow and repressive and are consequently dissatisfied with their own situation. You consider hormone treatment and SRS ill-considered overreactions to this situation, and think that, were repressive gender roles to be softened or done away with, trans people would feel more comfortable identifying with their assigned sex and would not feel compelled to resort to such drastic physical remedies (with this I disagree). In any case, you consider it incorrect for an anatomically-male transgendered individual to identify as any sort of woman and believe that such people should be excluded from “women-only” spaces and discourses. Am I in the right ballpark here?

dn, what a thoughtful reply. I look forward to getting back to you tomorrow.

“This may seem like a silly tic of mine, this constant introduction of my actual life, blobs and swirls of ink floating on water and ox-gall, and slashed at, just so, with a fork, yielding marbled paper on which the posts are hard to read at times when compared with the black on white clarity of some of my co-bloggers. But this is the secret: the personal really is the political.”

You should be writing a novel.

OK, here’s the anonymous secret part.

The first thing is that without witnesses or physical evidence of rape, cases often turn on “him against her” testimony. And given “innocent until proven guilty” and “beyond reasonable doubt”, it’s hard to see how cases without physical evidence or witnesses could be tried at all. And since rapes, like sexual relationships, are usually conducted in private, there are special problems with this category of crime. And furthermore, rape kits are good for identifying rapists but not so good for establishing rape. And finally, since consensual rough sex is accepted as permissible, even bruising might not count as evidence.

Second, while false rape charges are statistically rare, they aren’t non existent, and in American history they have led to a number of lynchings.

What about the other alternative: i.e. go ahead and expel both of them?

I certainly don’t agree with it, but it seems like it might be the logical consequence of the policies they’ve gone and written, and it might be productive in shaking (some) feminists out of their have-cake-and-eat-it mode.

First, thank you, Belle, for writing about this heartbreaking subject.

“Still, there’s really something a little weird about how sexual assault and battery would maybe get diverted into this weird para-justice-system, and simple assault and battery would probably lead to a chat with the cops?”

The problem, of course, is that the cops and the prosecutors mostly don’t listen. This is the solution that’s been sort-of worked out. I don’t think it’s a very good solution. The better solution, of course, is to fix the justice system, but people are oh-so-scared to actually do that.

“But if a girl or woman is mentally ill and involved in some way with a man, a false rape accusation is a common thing for that mentally ill woman to do!”

Also false child abuse allegations. :-(

But, yes, #notallwomen. Not even most women. This is what trials are supposed to be for, if only they actually were.

“The other Politically Incorrect thing that I worry about is that feminists are always accused of being man-hating and sometimes I think, yeah, I kind of maybe hate you.”

Yeah. I once had an abusive lover, who defended her rages as her “anger style.” But, again, I figure women are entitled to some anger and hatred. You can’t break up with sexism, after all.

Luke @35 Secondly, aren’t we just assigning another (different) gender role when we say trans women are men? Do women have the right to be girly?

Who is saying that only women have the right to be girly? The radical femist critique of gender is saying that biological males don’t have the right to identify as women. The problem I think Lynne is pointing towards, is that a focus on gender as an inate (but non-biogical) quality leads to a weird conservative view of gender roles, the opposite of your concern.

dn @97 I believe that given how little we really understand, we should be very cautious before attempting to generalize, and should be willing to trust the word of self-identified trans individuals just as we would trust the members of any other disadvantaged group when trying to learn something about their problems.

But identity is not something that can be arbitarily self-identified. For instance, white people who have tried to self identify as in indigounous people have been rightly called out on appropriating indigenous culture.

The problem with current dogma in trans activism is that it rests on this essentialist view of gender that breaks apart whenever you try to look at it from a feminist perspective that takes gender as a result of politics. The personal can’t be political, if the personal is some unquestionable essence.

At the same time persecution of trans people is a very real thing, and I think people should have the freedom to do what they want to their bodies and dress and act however they want. A lot of radical feminists go way to far in their critiques of trans people. But incoherence about how transwomen are women because reasons isn’t helping anyone.

A H @107 – “Identity is not something that can be arbitarily self-identified.” Would you tell that to a gay person? And who said anything about it being arbitrary?

js@72: It’s only the next morning that you realize you were blackout drunk.

I didn’t actually know until pretty recently that “blackout drunk” doesn’t mean “drunk until blacked out”, that is, unconscious, but instead means “drunk enough to suffer memory loss”, and that such memory loss is possible without passing out. So somebody who doesn”t know that, and wakes up in bed with somebody else without knowing how they got there, is likely to think that they were passed out and something entirely noncensual happened. And it may or may not have.

This is another reason that I think heavy drinking is a bad thing. Although it has never tempted me, so that’s easy for me to think.

A few pronouncements that I can’t resist given the topic:

“Affirmative consent” will not reduce sexual assault.

“1/5” is not a well-supported number, and assault rates are higher for people that age not in college.

Rape victims should feel able to report to the police, because the way the police handle such reporting should be *greatly* improved.

Rape victims should report to the police, because most rapes are committed by serial predators, and reporting and convicting will protect other people. Also, as imperfect as the courts may be, they are the best means we have to try to punish the guilty while protecting the innocent.

Rape of men in prison is not funny, not part of the punishment, and should not be discounted because the victims are men.

According to the standard that “having sex with someone drunk when you are sober is rape”, maybe Amy Schumer did
rape a guy. But I don’t think she did.

I think that being a transwoman is much, much more than not feeling comfortable in a masculine role. I don’t understand trans at all emotionally, and have a large “squick” factor about it, but what that squick actually tells me is trans people are feeling something of profound depth. But this is also hard for me to understand because my gender doesn’t feel *important* to me in quite the way that it seems to with trans people: my sense is that a version of me that was the opposite gender would not be a radically different person from the current me (internally, emotionally, ignoring the greatly different life experiences that person would have had). This sense might well be wrong, but it’s what I feel.

Ok, so here’s my unpopular opinion, which is (a) not about feminism, and (b) not an opinion (actually wait, I smuggled in an opinion):

I just think it’s really disapponting that over the last couple of decades—i.e. for as long as I’ve been politically conscious—the two big things that the gay movement (if it can still be called that) has fought for have been the right to serve in the military and the right to get married. And I think that the often-noted fact that the struggle for gay rights has been very successful very quickly, in a way that feminism hasn’t managed, isn’t at all unrelated to the particular rights that have been fought for, i.e. marriage and military service.

Now, I am a straight dude, and so I have basically no personal stake in this. And so I should maybe just shut my mouth (i.e. stop typing). But… well, I think I’ll leave it there and maybe add a Part 2 later.

js. — What should gay people have been fighting for instead?

(Another topic I could go on about for chapters, but … not now, maybe never, here.)

(But I will say: these various quests are not non-overlapping. One big example: gender equality in marriage surely helped (thought no doubt not on purpose) pave the way for same-sex marriage.)

Great thread. I have three observations from experience — not opinions, so hopefully the question of their popularity isn’t an issue, at least until the end — that I haven’t seen mentioned yet. I mean these to be anecdotes, not systematic evidence of huge social trends or anything.

1. I’ve known more than a couple women who have intentionally become moderately inebriated so as to overcome nervousness over picking up a man/woman as part of the process of moving on from a serious, monogamous, committed, longish-term relationship that had recently ended. That is, they intentionally got drunk so that they could intentionally get laid without second-guessing it. For more than one of these women sex within the prior relationship had become low-level abusive over time — no outright rape but definite manipulation — and for whom it was really important to once again experience sex as something fun and enjoyable rather than emotionally devastating. And it worked! That is, it’s not just that the combination of alcohol and sex can lead to some fuzzy lines as LizardBreath and others have said, although that is definitely true too, but also that sometimes the combination of alcohol and sex can be straight-up therapeutic.

These were very smart, very mature, very well-educated (all of them have postgraduate degrees) women in their late-20s and early-30s. I.e., they weren’t teenagers or in their first year in the dorm or anything like that, so I’m not in any way suggesting we should generalize from their experience. They are well-versed in feminist politics and well aware of what they were doing and why they were doing it. They still felt vulnerable at the time, as do many people who are initiating a new sexual relationship. But to claim that they’d been abused in these situations would remove their agency. They certainly wouldn’t stand for that.

2. More than one friend who has been violently, forcibly, raped has been infuriated and felt injured when other people seem to downgrade “real” rape by including drunk-consent/non-verbal-consent sex that regretted ex post in the same category as their abuse. “Rape”, for them, is not a word that should be applied to a wide range of situations. There should be other words for those other things, and these words should indicate strongly that those other things are very bad crimes, but they are not the same crime and so there should be *other words*. This certainly seemed reasonable to me, at the time, when they were saying it. But it is definitely not my place to draw such distinctions.

3. I’ve never had an open conversation about sex with a man without that man describing some form of (usually) low-level sexual abuse that has occurred to them. Most commonly this involves women doing things to guys because they think “he can take it” or “all guys want it anyway” or that it’s just funny or for unstated/unknown reasons. I’m not talking about ass-grabbing or ball-tapping or even uninvited kisses, which very few guys I know would even think interesting enough to worth mention. Frequently it has involved violent attacks on genitalia that are not in self-defense, which still seems to be a joking matter in mainstream culture somehow. (I used to know some otherwise-cool punk rock ladies who would wear steel-toed boots and kick guys in the junk while they were slam-dancing at concerts, just for fun. I’ve known others who were not punk rock and didn’t wear steel-toed boots but otherwise would do the same thing at bars and clubs and parties. This is… not acceptable. But not uncommon either.) Frequently it involves punching/hitting/biting/scratching/kicking during sex without prior notice, much less consent. Not infrequently it involves anal insertion without prior notice or consent. All of these and more have happened to me.

There are other things that I haven’t experienced but I’ve heard described in a seemingly-reliable way, some of which are incredibly emotionally and/or physically brutal. Yet none of these guys have said that they were abused, except one. It’s laughed off or otherwise dismissed as something like an occupational hazard: sometimes you end up with more than you bargained for. Which I find kinda strange, since more than once real physical damage has been done (broken bones, trips to ER, etc). But also not really strange at all, but there is no real language for guys to talk about this kind of thing as if it was a serious matter. The attitude is “Hey! sometimes these things happen I guess”.

I’m not trying to equivocate, At. All. This is clearly a very different thing than male-on-female abuse for a whole host of reasons. Still, if the goal is to eliminate sexually abusive interactions in general then coming up with a language that includes this kind of experience could be helpful. Especially because men who have had those experiences are — of the non-random sample I know — more likely to be comfortable with “blurred lines” than others. After all, if they haven’t been abused when the lines are blurry then they won’t be abusing in the reverse circumstance, in their minds. This is just how it goes sometimes, I guess, in their minds.

Yes I know that this could be a pure selection effect, but I don’t think it entirely is.

js. — tough, isn’t it. ;-)

If I write another word I’m going to regret it, because I have nothing brief to say about this topic. For now, thanks for the reply. I was tempted to add another comment, after I posted my question, to make sure you knew I wasn’t being snarky. But I guess you knew it without my having to say it.

And to think I still haven’t managed to write what I originally wanted to contribute on the “unpopular thoughts on feminism” topic. Maybe tomorrow or Saturday.

Belle — I just wanted to add my thanks to others’. Both for the thread, which I assumed would be a train wreck but, in the end, has been something like what you wanted plus a whole lot more than you reasonably could have wanted. And for the post. Like others I’m glad I had the privilege to read it, but I’m also glad that it is here, easily accessible, to point to the next student who confides in me that she was raped. Sometimes your elliptical style makes me impatient, and others, like this, I just marvel at what a wonderful writer you are.

Yes! It is tough. But fuck it, I’m going to make this somewhat about me (and possibly regret it later!).

I noted in above that I’m a straight dude and so basically have no direct, personal stake in the fight for gay rights. A sort of analogous thing to say would be that I’m a dude so I have no personal stake in feminism. Except that I’ve always thought that I did have a personal stake in it. Part of this is that I grew up around lots of self-avowed feminists. Going back to Lynne’s comment @12—the first few paragraphs, in particular—that’s essentially the feminism I grew up with. It’s practically in my bones. And I don’t for a second want to take anything away from the fact that feminism is a struggle for women’s liberation and women’s equality. And it’s that in a world still dominated by patriarchy, which is why it’s essential. But there’s a sort of universal liberatory potential there that secondarily applies to men, perhaps as a side-effect, perhaps as something more internal to the project. Either way, it’s why I do feel that I have a personal stake in feminism.

I think that there was, and perhaps still is, a similar sort of universal liberatory potential in the gay movement. Something evident in its challenging of heteronormativity, e.g. Or something sort of captured in the slogan, “everyone is gay”—I honestly don’t even know if this was an actual slogan or something friends of mine made up. And it can be understood (or misunderstood) in lots of ways, but I don’t mean something like: everyone ultimately wants to have sex with someone anatomically like them. Even the possibility of the latter sort of misunderstanding suggests to me a kind of loss of the radical potential in the gay movement. This still isn’t very well expressed, but what I was expressing in @112 was a sort of disappointment in what appears to me as this loss of radical potential, of the attempt to undo heteronormativity rather than enjoy some of its privileges.

I might well regret this later, but hitting “submit” anyway.

js. I don’t disagree with much of that, if any, and I don’t think you should regret posting it. Just a couple of quick thoughts on my way to bed.

The first (touched on also in a discussion on homeschooling in a post of Tedra’s in Oct 2012) is that there’s a hard question to be answered about how much personal sacrifice anyone should be expected to make in pursuit of an elusive goal that seems unlikely ever to be reached anyhow. I started out my adult life (not yet knowing I was gay) with a disastrous relationship that made me decide I was never getting married, and no one else should either. Abolish it, I thought! But life just isn’t that simple. People – including any children who are involved, and there very often are children, one way or another — can suffer in a lot of ways when they try to form partnerships or families without any legal recognition or protection.

The second thought is that I don’t know if I agree that the fact that gay people can get married now is a capitulation to heteronormativity. But I will need some time to sort out my thoughts on that. In the meantime — here’s a related unpopular thought for this thread, since you and so many other people have used the word: I hate the way the word “privilege” has been given a new meaning, in my opinion an extremely counterproductive one in terms of PR in relation to the goals it’s supposed to be supporting.

***

Extension of the first thought, and something that has never occurred to me before in quite this way, but prompted by what you wrote: gay people were in hiding before, and reviled and despised and thrown off bridges” etc. It took some guts and some rebelliousness and some defiance to live as a gay person, even in hiding, before the last couple of decades. But really, that was a framework imposed on us from the outside. Most of us, like most other groups you could name, are just folks. We get up, go to work and school, dress the kids, go to soccer practice, whatever. Not visionaries, not revolutionaries beyond the obvious and necessary. So from that point of view maybe it was totally predictable that neither gay people nor feminists would realize the radical potential you might have wished for, and in a sense imposed on us. (I don’t mean that in a bad way…..)

Gotta stop. Thanks – more eventually.

thrown off bridges

Something that everyone should get is a right, not a privilege.

Point taken. (There’s a bit more I’d like to say here, but see below.)

The thing I’d sort of take issue with is this: “it was totally predictable that neither gay people nor feminists would realize the radical potential you might have wished for.” The general sentiment here is one I totally get and agree with. But the thing is: feminism, i.e the same feminism that was around 1-2 generations ago, still seems pretty radical. I again want to go back to Lynne @12 because I think it’s a really great and clear statement (hi Lynne, hope you don’t mind), but Belle’s point about the E.R.A serves equally well. So I think the analogy breaks down.

But mostly, I’d very much like to hear your unpopular thought, so don’t want to unnecessarily detain you with this (though I am finding it very useful, and I’m almost entirely in agreement with you).

If you want to guarantee a movement will stay radical, all you need to do is prevent it from achieving its goals.

Obligatory controversial opinion about feminism; I don’t think it has actually won any political battles since about the early 70s. Any change since is basically demographics catching up with the status quo established then.

Llandru – and others – there’s two different things being talked about here. One is, people get unhappy, mean, screwed up – we do bad things, we hurt each other, we imagine things and we screw our own lives up. We can do something about that by trying to be kind, to understand each other, to talk about our fears, to seek help – maybe professional help – when we need it. Admitting vulnerability, letting kindness in.

The other thing is patriarchy. It’s a hierarchical social system that privileges (sorry, but that is actually a useful word here) men over women, but also sets men against each other in a competitive system that is damaging to all. We should aim to get rid of that system. It is to blame for a lot of the problems we are talking about here.

Please people, try to distinguish between those two things.

Seriously, my comment is in moderation? In THIS thread?

My unpopular thought is hard to articulate in a way that doesn’t just sound stupid.

I suspect I’m not the only man who agrees with everything that feminists stand for and yet balk at being called anything so single-gender-identified as “feminist”. I was quite pleased to hear Marcus Brigstocke on the Now Show last Friday proclaiming himself a feminist, but it’s not a sentiment you hear from men very often. I will describe myself as a feminist because that’s the language we’ve got, but I would much rather we had more gender-neutral language by default in the way that “civil rights” became the moniker for the black rights movement in the US — something so obviously inclusive that everyone can get behind without qualm.

Engels in one sentence: welcome to the economy, now you can be exploited like everyone else.

@Belle, 151: If I understood correctly the honors were the product of achieving a particular level of success in X number of advanced placement courses, and maybe some other similar “objective” (non-curved) measures.

I’d say it has a lot more to do with the mobility of capital (outsourcing) and the neoliberal political project (organized labor is bad, “flexibility” is necessary, and if you fail it’s your fault).

I think Very Occasional was saying that his friend-with-benefits confessed/asserted that by some standards, she had just raped him, because he had not really consented. Not accusing him of rape-by-some-standards because she was angry during the sex they had, but remorsefully admitting that maybe she was a rapist. (Which, everything you said about the contingency of the situation still holds, but I think you read Very Occasional backwards.)

Thanks, Magari, I expect you’re right that those are more important reasons, I just wondered if it was a factor…

dn @ 103

Yes, you’re in the right ballpark, with a couple of adjustments.

I’m just going to quote you here so I can refer to it because there have been a lot of comments since yours, which I look forward to reading:

“You believe that transsexuals are generally people who have bought into such an illegitimate concept of normative gender, but find it narrow and repressive and are consequently dissatisfied with their own situation. [Yes] You consider hormone treatment and SRS ill-considered overreactions to this situation [I’ll tweak that below], and think that, were repressive gender roles to be softened or done away with, trans people would feel more comfortable identifying with their assigned sex and would not feel compelled to resort to such drastic physical remedies [Yes] (with this I disagree). In any case, you consider it incorrect for an anatomically-male transgendered individual to identify as any sort of woman [No, as explained below] and believe that such people should be excluded from “women-only” spaces and discourses. [Yes] Am I in the right ballpark here?”

I do believe that with a more flexible, open, loving society, one unjudgemental of sexual matters, fewer people would resort to the painful, drastic measures involved in changing their sex. However, I wouldn’t say trans people are ill-advised or doing something incorrect. I would just say they aren’t becoming women. I don’t accept them as women, and I don’t want feminism derailed by the alphabet that follows LGB….

Yes, I do think they should be excluded from women-only spaces. To me, a trans person is less comparable to a gay person than to someone who is trying to pass as another race. I don’t suppose I’d be well-received by black activists if I tried to pass as black, however sincerely held my beliefs. That parallel strikes me as apt. So I don’t condemn trans people for changing themselves, but I don’t accept that they have changed themselves into my sex. They may be transwomen but they aren’t women.

Thank you for making the effort to understand my position. It is more than I dared hope for when I posted.

Can I just point out (and hopefully this bit of meta won’t topple this wonderful, and successful, experiment) that it seems like a lot of ppl who consider themselves leftist (or leftist enough to read + post on CT) were craving the opportunity to share ideological breaks from the left in a safe space? And maybe that suggests that there has been a level of censorship in the left (of the sort Chait, deboer, et al have been mocked for pointing out).

And maybe that suggests that there has been a level of censorship in the left

I don’t mean to imply that this is completely off-base in general, but fear of censorship from the left wasn’t where my inhibitions about raising the issue (about intoxicated consent) came from; it was more fear of exploitation from the right. I really am on board with the vast majority of anti-rape activism, I just have this one issue, but I see people who believe that anti-rape activism has gone too far using this same issue as a tool to discredit the whole enterprise, and I don’t want to help with that.

On different issues, the source of people’s inhibitions may be, and probably are, entirely different.

‘Neither sex nor ethnicity are discrete. Perhaps white people should be called out if they self-identify as indigenous, but what about people who are half indigenous, or quarter indigenous, etc.?’ (Temp 162)
It’s complicated. Americans have 1) the one drop rule (for blackness) and 2) the blood quantum (for Native Americans). In my country (it’s been explained to me by experts) membership in a minority community is something that is determined by the community. If other members of the community recognize you as one of their own, you are in, if they don’t, your ancestry and feelings are irrelevant.

I don’t think that Islam is a race; in fact I think the idea that Islam is a race is absurd.

172: Probably something to that.

What should gay people have been fighting for instead?

Pederasty, aka “The love that dare not speak its name.”

That’s my unpopular opinion.

“The Burka wearing is very specific to some predonimant islamic ethnicities however. In general, i would think a lot of complaints about islam are not very islam specific, but rather a question of social structures in many predominant islamic countries that are independent of islam”

I agree. Which is why I said they are a relic of a sexist and patriarchal culture. ;-)

/Of course I think Islam, like all of the Abrahamic religions, is incredibly sexist as historically practiced. How the faiths are actually practiced by many people today is a different story.

Clamping my metaphorical mouth shut on being called “sick” (that possibility was inherent in the rules of this thread, and I don’t think it invalidates it at all, it’s a wonderful thread) except to reference a book.

And because the relevant parties will likely never check out the book, this is from the Wikipedia entry about the author:

I don’t have time to type much right now (and I have a really unpopular but really trivial thought that I’ll save for when the thread dies down), but there are some inherent contradictions in feminism that, maybe, have developed in different directions than women in the 1960s and 1970s would have thought. There was always a strand of thought, even in equality feminists (if that’s an actual term, I’ve hit on it by accident), that the world would be better if women’s ways of thinking were more dominant. There would be less war, etc. It’s not obvious what that would mean, of course. And of course, women aren’t actually biologically coded to be “nice” in a way men aren’t, so the idea doesn’t work all that well. There was always a strand of thought that women are made to feel bad about being women, and wanting to correct this can lead to reinforcing gender roles and tradition, in a way that’s not really compatible with second-wave feminism (at least not if you think about it–I think, as a slightly younger woman, that some intergenerational conflict amounts to basically this–second generation feminists upset about the way younger women present themselves, in a way younger women perceive as reinforcing old gender norms). Thought about traditions handed down from woman to woman can turn into psychological theories about how women should get along with their mothers which can in turn be blind to whether mother-daughter conflict is itself essentially over feminism. Thought about gender roles can become essentialist and prescriptive. There is frequently too much emphasis, I think, on “structural” feminism, to put it shortly.

No offense taken–I was just curious, since that response is not one I’ve run into before.

Lynne: Re trans people: As someone with both friends and students who are trans, I’ll just say, wow. That has not been my experience at all.

Also, I’ve seen the analogy in which we compare trans to identifying as black when you’re actually white on a few other blogs. Trans people really aren’t that.

Since we’re not supposed to be duking this out, if I understand the rules for this thread, I’ll stop there.

Another one: whenever I hear about ‘male feminists’ I think of this

“I wouldn’t wear one, but surely this is a personal choice.”

Of course! No argument there. I just find that choice troubling. Less so with a headscarf or hijab and much more so with a Burka or a veil.

(Unless you have a reason for thinking the hijab suggests ‘shame’ about the ‘dirty’ body parts it covers whereas a bathing suit doesn’t–I’d have thought the opposite view was more plausible. Anyway, I assume this kind of cross-examination isn’t really in the spirit of the thread so I shan’t continue it…)

I don’t see how objecting to the burqa is problematic. Wearing the burqa is not a politically or ideologically neutral act, it symbolises (for a lot of people) something very specific, ie the subjugation of women. And this comes up regularly enough from the women themselves who *choose* to wear it, not that they’re passive victims of patriarcal cultural norms but that they’re making an explicit choice, to reject one conception of female empowerment for what they see as another. So I think it’s ‘fair game.’ My position is one of ambivalence. It’s much too complicated a question for me to get my head around, and none of my business.
This is one of my pet peeves, I guess, about (what I’ll generalise as) the left. I think that politically and rhetorically there’s a tendency to essentialise individuals, to imagine them as either passive victims of some larger structural process, or merely representations of some larger ‘identity group'(for good or bad). Both of these options, IMO, take all agency away from individuals. By extension I think there’s a reluctance to engage with people as equals, to acknowledge the *choices they made* and the specific reasons they made them. To argue against those choices. Not to say that it should be outlawed, but that you disagree. To me this is central to being seen as an equal, that you are not only or primarily a victim(or a representation of some relatively meaningless demographic), and that you need not always treated with kiddy gloves.

I think this is a manifestation of a larger problem, mainly the predominance of W(estern) E(ducated) I(ndustrialized) R(ich) (D)emocratic thinking and how it affects the lefts ability to either understand the world or speak to anyone outside of the ideologically commited. I can’t really articulate this at the moment. I might come back to it, but might not. If anyone wants to try decipher the point and speak for me, I’m more than happy.

@169 – Native American identity is a hugely complicated discussion that takes us far afield of the topic of this thread. Blood quantum is one factor that mainly impacts tribal enrollment, but different tribes have different definitions of what constitutes enrollable blood quantum – some require as much as a quarter, others as little as 1/32. But then others reject the notion of blood quantum – as Nahaan Fasts-from-English (Twinges) says “Blood quantum is not part of our indigenous language”.

Generally I find Native people in the us define Native membership as being culturally connected to a tribal community with some degree of ancestral connection. The cultural connection is key – so someone can be 1/16th blood Cherokee and tribally enrolled and be accepted as Cherokee, but someone who claims a distant Cherokee great-grandmother and is otherwise completely unconnected to the tribe is generally not considered legit. But it is also complicated by federally recognized vs unrecognized tribes, urban vs tribal experience (70% of Native Americans in the US do not live in their tribal communities), forcible adoption policies, forced assimilation and the boarding school / residential school experience (where the goal was to “kill the Indian, save the man”), etc. More recently there has been a huge controversy over some tribes that are trying to dis-enroll large numbers of tribal members, in some cases shearing off whole family lineages, in what is mostly an attempt to increase per-capita Casino royalties to the remaining enrolled members (google the Nooksack 306).

The more I work with Native communities, the more I realize how different those politics are from other racial and ethnic groups in the US. There is a whole language of sovereignty that is very different from issues of race and racism.

I must turn off autocorrect on this tablet thing. That should read Nahaan Fasts-from-English (Tlingit)”. For that matter, why would the Microsoft dictionary not include the name of a significant Alaskan native tribe?

(if this makes no sense it is because the post it refers to is still in moderation).

Biology is not 100% reliable in producing an optimum phenotype.

Brett,

Optimum phenotype? What is that? Surely a successful species has to have some way of controlling its population growth. Or it wouldn’t ultimately be successful, would it?

So, maybe when humans–who don’t seem to be subject to predation–come up against the constraints of environmental carrying capacity they will turn to their reservoir of homosexuals for guidance…

;^)

a malfunctioning system for identifying potential mates

That’s a pithy definition of civilisation, Brett.

Why don’t you like them?

They’re wearable symbols of patriarchal oppression which seem to me on a different level from, eg,, the hijab or high-heeled shoes.

Wearing niqab or a face-covering burqa in Western countries can be defiant protest. “You don’t like Muslims? I’ll show you Muslim!”

A headscarf, on the other hand, can be both a profession of faith, like wearing a crucifix or a yarmulke, AND a way to pacify relatives who would prefer that a female stay home, in purdah. Women who wear headscarves go to school, get advanced degrees, hold professional jobs … all the things that grandmother might not have been able to do. With added headscarf, it’s OK. A headscarf can be Muslima feminism. It neutralizes family resistance.

I’m thinking of those two lovely women recently gunned down in North Carolina.

Kinsley was researching sexual histories, not orientation, so it’s more accurate to say around 15% of his subjects had a sexual relationship with a person of the same sex. Brett continues to be strangely obsessed with naming people that are not like him as biologically inferior or damaged.

Thanks MPAV. Zora’s also right re symbolism depending on the context (it’s not what you wear but how you wear it, as they say).

I just want to add that this thread is amazing. There are dozens of posts that I would like to note and/or reply to, but that obviously isn’t feasible even on the logistical basis that if we all did it, we’d have an encyclopedia’s worth of comments in short order. I hope everyone who has posted feels, as I do, that this has been a rare and precious experience of being heard, even if not every comment gets a specific response. It’s very rare that I read every comment in a thread, but I have done that here and intend to go on doing it unless it descends….to where I doubt Belle will let it go.

Thanks all.

bianca- that wasn’t meant to be in response to anything you said specifically. I’ll try get back to it in a bit and perhaps make the point more coherently.(Just don’t have time at the minute)

Ronan, no worries. I noticed the reuse of the same word and I think it helps pinpoint the difference I have with your POV, not here specifically maybe, but e.g. on the France thread.

“Brett continues to be strangely obsessed with naming people that are not like him as biologically inferior or damaged.”

Let us say, rather, that I am not obsessed with denying that some people are biologically inferior or damaged. Including myself, or I’d have married in 20’s, and not have had my first and only kid at 50. Considering prostate surgery rendered me sterile a couple years later, I only barely escaped getting purged from the gene pool completely for being excessively phobic about women.

I think sometimes people will conflate moral and biological equality, and feel driven to deny the obvious, that some people are just better organisms, because they see it as necessary to assert that people have equal rights and worth. That’s a category error.

Kinsey committed research fraud, and enabled criminal pedophilia. I’m not sure how far any of his findings can be trusted. He’s certainly no guide to the percentage of the population with different sexual preferences. Perhaps he’s a guide to the nature of the people he liked to hang out with.

Elizabeth Wydville @ 47

Fantastic post. Thank you.

/Lynne thanks for bringing Elizabeth’s post to my attention.

“Unfortunately, I have a rather good memory so this also happens, sometimes.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2347 ”

My god. That comic is my mental landscape. I just cannot say how accurate it is.

For example, I like Indian food but I can never order it without my brain reminding me of the first time I went out for Indian food and didn’t understand the menu and embarrassed myself (at least in my own mind) in front of someone I had a huge crush on. So, EVERY SINGLE TIME I hear about Indian food I have to replay that little moment in my head and feel stupid and ashamed.

Basically a normal day will have multiple moments like that. Something will trigger a memory of a mistake or something that I made in the past and I will be stuck ruminating on it for a while.

/The invention of the MP3 player probably saved my life. Music, Audiobooks and Podcasts help keep my mind busy and negative thoughts at bay.
//Almost the same, my bad memories are of course nothing compared to those you shared but the cartoon you linked to just rang so true to me that I wanted to comment. Thank you for sharing it.

Val @141 Llandru – and others – there’s two different things being talked about here. One is, people get unhappy, mean, screwed up – we do bad things, we hurt each other, we imagine things and we screw our own lives up. … The other thing is patriarchy.

I wasn’t mixing these things up, my point is precisely that bullying complicates this distinction, and just like feminism can be racist or classist, feminists can also leverage and reinforce these other not-so-publicly-challenged social hierarchies. (In theory feminists may agree that it shouldn’t do that, that that’s not what feminism is about, but in practice it hasn’t been that uncommon for feminists to ignore or even reinforce social distinctions–that’s why we need things like #solidarityisforwhitewomen.)

When I was bullied in school, the distinction you’re trying to make is exactly how a school administrator (and various other people around me, such as teachers) tried to avoid dealing with the problem–by acting like it was a conflict between me and other kids, whereas in reality it was an unwritten (but not infrequently spoken out loud) rule that this particular kid (and one or two others) were fair game for almost any kind of abuse you could get away with. This was a very real, established social hierarchy that was confined to a classroom (lasting about 4 years–mostly the same kids in the same class together all 4 years), but that has such an impact on your identity and how you relate to others that it tends to live on for a long time after leaving the environment where it was strictly enforced. That’s the kind of thing people like Aaronson are talking about, and it’s abundantly clear to me now, many years beyond childhood and after having studied and learned a lot about patriarchy, racial hierarchies, and social struggles of many kinds, that this is a lot more like patriarchy or racial oppression than it is like acts of unkindness that poison individual relationships.

That said, I agree that the article Landru linked to are making a mistake by acting as if Marcotte speaks for all feminists. Anyone who wants to argue that this is a fundamental problem for feminism needs to do better than that article did.

engels:

“Much of American online feminism is identity politics for college-educated US women, which cares little about the interests or experiences of the majority of women in America and is rarely interested in non-American women except when they can be ‘rescued’ by American imperialism.”

I very strongly agree with this, except for the bit about imperialism. I’ve been really disturbed by the lack of a mainstream feminist response to the Rotherham (and Rochdale, Bristol, etc) child sexual exploitation scandals and the rise of the Islamic State. They seem absolutely feminist concerns, and I think the reason they’ve been ignored is they effect working class girls and Middle Easterners, and are ‘problematic’ for people concerned about colonialism and the West. I find this upsetting because I think political pressure in this area could do a lot of good.

I think the iconic recent feminist/progressive campaign was #bringbackourgirls. It made everyone feel noble and failed to achieve anything. And more than that; while the Obamas were tweeting sad faces and talking about their pain, and progressives were tweeting their support for womens rights, the Iraqi government asked for airstrikes against the Islamic State. The progressive anti-Imperialist playbook was followed and the US refused, and consequently thousands of Yazidi girls were abducted, raped and sold as slaves. I do not know a more appalling example of people engaging in a feelgood social media circlejerk while simultaneously conniving to allow the very thing they profess to be appalled by.

Kobane is another great example. Quick recap: there was a literal battle between Jihadists, trying to establish a literal Patriarchy, and the YPJ, a literal army of militant feminists trying to stop them. (And I do mean literal – stone adulteresses to death, throw gays from rooftops, sell women as slaves, marry 9 year olds – Patriarchy. In the IS we’ve seen the creation of the most oppressive place in the world for women). But the YPJ are Kurds and fighting Islamists, so good luck finding any sign of interest in Western feminist media. Any credible feminist movement would aid these women and regard them as heroes, not ignore them.

I wish feminists were in favor of American imperialism.

Thanks Belle for this most interesting, discomforting and challenging thread, and for, amazingly, eliciting such civility among commenters. I’ve been too busy working to compose a long comment but appreciate all that I’ve read.

I wish American foreign policy were determined by a concern for women’s rights rather than imperialism. Imagine how history might be different had the CIA said “well, we could support the Mujahideen, but they are to horribly patriarchal.”

In Santería, I am told, the eidola of Christian saints are invested by the gods, for the duration.

Likewise, it seems to me, America is the eidolon of the Enlightenment invested by the animus of Aristotle’s Politics, for the duration: wherein the world is a hierarchy of subordinations, and the relief for your misery is that you, who are not at the bottom, are authorized to kick down at someone else, by God!

At least that’s the theory one might propound over sherry. America is a knife fight.

“Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

MPAV,

In terms of unwanted thoughts, you are FAR from alone! I seem to recall film maker Errol Morris being asked, “do you ever have any unwelcome thoughts?” To which he responded, “Are there any other kind?”

:^)

But seriously, have you ever tried meditation or gone on a short (1 or 2 day) retreat? Can be a really helpful thing.

Lynne @163 – Thanks for the reply, that was very useful. Want to say before I go any further that this thread has been wonderful; thanks to Belle for starting it and especially to all who have shared stories, they were very powerful and harrowing – best wishes to all of you who have suffered.

I’d like to elaborate on my position a bit (okay, a lot), which will probably entail expressing some unpopular opinions of my own. Full disclosure: I, a white, straight, cis man, am about to declaim at length on all of the above categories. Please ignore me, or better yet, slap me down, if I say something idiotic or come off as an insufferable white/straight/cis/mansplainer.

First I want to make one point, which will be assumed throughout what I say below: I believe trans people who tell me they did not “become” another gender, but always were, even with the wrong anatomy. In web spaces I frequent that have many trans participants, I often see cis commenters express the idea that e.g. trans women “became women” through hormones or surgery, and day in and day out the trans commenters correct it. They feel so strongly about it that I feel compelled to operate under the assumption that there is something to it.

Anyway: it seems to me that gender identity and sexual orientation can both be helpfully thought of as orientations toward bodies. Gay people have a different orientation toward other peoples’ bodies. Trans people have a different orientation toward their own. I’ve often seen it described as something felt since early childhood, and I have no reason to believe that they couldn’t be “born that way” in essentially the same way a gay person is – which in turn would tell me that their identity can’t be totally socially constructed; I believe it probably has some biological basis comparable to what scientists think about sexual orientation (and yes, I do think that this has implications for men and women in general; there’s my unpopular opinion). And when I think of it that way, I start to feel that telling them “you can be a trans woman but not a real woman” is a lot like telling gay people “you can get a civil union but it’s not a real marriage”.

The comparison to race I do find compelling, but in an ironic way, because it says more about race to me than gender. What I mean is, I’m sure most of us here are comfortable with the idea that “race” is a social construct. Being white has very little to do with biology and everything to do with social in-groups and out-groups. Yet our racial borders are reified to an incredible degree, such that we feel comfortable citing them as the definitive example of an uncrossable social line. Obviously there are good reasons for that, given the history of racial oppression. But that’s just it – the normative boundaries are not fundamentally based on inborn differences, they’re based on power relations, relationships of social advantage and disadvantage.

Patriarchy is also about power relations, and that’s perhaps a legit reason to be suspicious of people crossing gender lines. But in that case I think there needs to be more attention to how patriarchal power relations impact trans people. Even in a patriarchal structure, cis women have one genuine advantage over trans people – they have their own place, even if it’s a terrible, shitty place that we should all agree is often shamefully degrading to those forced to occupy it. The category “women” is accepted as a real category, if an inferior one. Women-only spaces not only exist, but patriarchy even endorses some of them insofar as they don’t challenge male authority outside the space. Conversely, trans women have no place at all in a society where the binary holds sway. Thus simply existing as trans becomes incredibly dangerous. In the face of the appalling level of anti-trans violence that’s out there, I can’t help but think that a radicalism that excludes trans people is deeply inadequate. I not only think it’s cruel to trans people; I think it actually amounts to a win for patriarchy.

Patriarchal ideas constrain people by putting them in boxes, by telling them that anatomy is destiny and that arbitrary constructs built around anatomical sex are actually “natural laws”. I think anything that shows the inadequacy of those constructs and the unreality of those “natural laws” is effectively subversive of patriarchy. In that regard, I find it strange that gender transition is being framed as a reactionary response to a “judgmental” patriarchal society, because I’m having a hard time thinking of something more likely to open a person up to judgment! Patriarchy doesn’t accept trans people any more after transition than it accepts them before; if anything it rejects them even more harshly. They fly in the face of the most basic patriarchal rule, the rule that a person is wholly defined and constrained from birth by what’s between their legs. That’s why I think merely sympathizing with trans women is insufficient; if we don’t grant them authenticity, we fail to break that most fundamental boundary keeping men and women separate and unequal. Accepting trans men as men and trans women as women can be a genuinely radical step if we understand that people are more than just gender roles, that trans people shouldn’t be pinned down by their new bodies any more than by their old.

In general, i would think a lot of complaints about islam are not very islam specific, but rather a question of social structures in many predominant islamic countries that are independent of islam.

I think this is wrong. For example, a chief complaint about Muslim minorities is that they will not “integrate” into society. And yet no one seems to care whether the Chinese do. Actually, we on the left treat it as a benefit! Authentic xiao long bao! “Ethnic neighborhoods!” Diversity!

But do I think they are a relic of a sexist and patriarchal culture?

This may be true, but it’s also true that it’s a relic of a culture comprised of men and women who do things we don’t understand out of reverence for God. Secondly, Arab critics take especial glee at pointing out our own sexist/patriarchal sartorial matters, including the objectification of the female body and the social expectation that women will work for sex appeal. You say burqa, they say bikini. Something to keep in mind when you single out their patriarchy.

dn: Gay people have a different orientation toward other peoples’ bodies.

That whole comment was well done and thought-provoking, but I want to note this in particular because it echoes something I used to try to articulate in a different way. There are times when it’s important to remember or remind people that sexual orientation and gender are, while overlapping topics, not the same thing. Not everyone who you think is gay, is gay, etc. (Over-simplifying.) But I do think it’s fair to say that gay people by definition violate one of the biggest gender rules there is — the rule that tells you which gender you’re supposed to fall in love with.

The one transwoman that I’m acquainted with (that I know of) I didn’t know was trans without someone telling me, long after I’d met her. Because of her look and manner I inferred that she was a lesbian. I have no idea what degree of medical interventions she has or has not had, and it’s not really any of my business.

I guess what I’m getting at is she “presents” as woman. The idea that she should not be welcome or included in a women-only space seems pretty discriminatory.

Fuzzy Dunlop @ 223
I don’t think we are in disagreement in the way you think, though after I wrote my previous comment I worried that it could be seen that way. I think in fact that patriarchy in its ‘extreme’ form (men privileged over women, systematic hierarchies of domination and oppression amongst men) actually does encourage that kind of awful and prolonged bullying that you had to endure. It presupposes that some men (males/boys) have to be at the bottom of the heap, and what is more they deserve to be.

What I meant to say is that even in a society which was broadly egalitarian (which is the alternative to patriarchy) you’d still get individuals behaving badly to each other. I don’t think we’ll ever have a perfect egalitarian society, but hopefully a “broadly” egalitarian one would be less likely to have that systematised and ongoing bullying and oppression.

Also, of course, there are different types of patriarchy, including what I think someone (Carol Pateman maybe?) called ‘fraternal’, where all men are considered to be equal as citizens and heads of private households, and the more recent Neo-liberal form where non-gendered ‘individuals’ are all considered to be equal, except they are assumed to have the characteristics of the adult (white middle class able-bodied) male (like not giving birth, and not having to do the caring work and the body/dirty work, like cleaning the toilet).

Anyway, it’s very tempting to use this thread as an opportunity to write dissertations on what patriarchy actually means, but I don’t really think that’s what it’s all about, so I’d better stop.

JanieM – thanks for the kind words.

I just want to add one clarification based on what Belle said @238 re: women-only spaces. I think I can understand some of the concerns Lynne mentioned about w/r/t such spaces. For instance, her example of a rape crisis center – insofar as spaces like that are intended to help people going through trauma, it’s absolutely fair to say they should be willing to go far to avoid distractions from that mission, and to accommodate the needs of the people they serve. Clearly trans people still have less-than-total acceptance, and I suppose that could be a distraction, although I still wouldn’t agree that they should be excluded.

But saying they “shouldn’t be allowed to drive feminist discourse”? I can understand why people would not want, say, me driving that discourse. I’m at the top of the patriarchal totem pole. I’m pretty limited in what I can add. But trans women? Who better to include, if you’re looking for distinctive angles on the nature of patriarchal oppression? Besides, I wouldn’t worry about them co-opting feminism. They’re a minority and I’m sure they always will be. All the more reason to lend them support, to make sure they are heard, it seems to me.

First and most importantly, many thanks to Belle for providing this thread (and admiration for opening up about a horrifying and infuriating story), and to commenters for the serious discussion (and also opening up).

Here is my own issue deserving of self-criticism, Maoist style. I feel that in the US in particular, but increasingly in the rest of the world, we try to make things that are fluid and grey, fixed and black and white. Wether it is sexual consent or the memory of it, or whether it is hate crime legislation (if you execute Muslims but what set you off was a parking issue it apparently is not a hate crime…) we have this need to write the perfect law drawing the perfect line. But of course we cannot, so then we write laws with the implcit understanding they will be applied with prosecutorial discretion but, taken literally, do not allow it – like rules requiring explicit consent.

I”m coming late to this and sort of a tangent.

I am not American so I suspect my encounters with feminism and leftish things are different as to me the US “left” is central and maybe even centre right, and the experiences of American women I have see via the admittedly distorting lens of the internet are nothing like my experiences.

But then I’m not much of a woman. I have never been girly, I’m non-girly enough that most people who meet me assume I’m a butch lesbian.

If I had known FtM trans existed when I was young I may well have gone that way but I still do not know if I want to be a man, or just do not want to be a woman. I have never liked the look of my body but that is just as likely to be because it isn’t stick thin as it is to be because it has boobs and hips and so it is always going to be ugly in my culture-shaped mind. (But then… I find womanly shaped women aesthetically pleasing to look at and stick thin ones not so, so who am I fooling?)

When I was young gender roles were strong but being the daughter of a woman who did not conform all that strongly to them when she was young (studied physics as the only woman doing so at her University) and being moneyed middle class I could ignore them. At some cost, but I could. A man in the same situation and even the same class could not.

Took me far too long a time to realise that.

I have had the advantage that men looking at FtM transition do not have: the ability to dress as I feel comfortable in, do the things like motorcycle racing and swordfighting that I enjoy (and I note that my fellow racers and combatants have no issue but those outside the communities often do) with only some social stigma and that has faded as I got older.

I have been in “women only spaces” and felt unwelcome or to be more accurate unconnected. The focusing on childbirth and menstruation and “moon” and the sort of tribal identity with men as a nasty “other” just made no sense to me.

I also found that in some places women found my butch presentation and my heterosexuality difficult to deal with. Men coped better, maybe they crossed me off their lists as obviously lesbian and so could get on with talking about things without having to have one eye on the mating dance?

FtM is almost never mentioned in discussions about transexuality. I have never knowingly met one and I’d love to, to see how they felt and what made them go that far.

Is an FtM still a woman and welcome in a women’s only space if an MtF is not a woman and not welcome?

My guess is neither would be because “women only” are as much about gatekeeping gender roles as “men only “are.

It has been my experience that feminists who feel strongly enough about it to form groups are very uncomfortable with non-conforming heterosexuals. It is OK if you are butch and lesbian but butch and het is right out. A femme lesbian friend once told me the same happened to her at a feminist meeting: once she mentioned her sexuality most of the women there became a lot less comfortable. I guess because it was hard to say she was brainwashed into dolling up for the men!

Thanks, Ellie.

[following Belle’s suggestion of floral throwaways]
Great thread. A few people turned up simply to attack feminism, but that’s to be expected.

My unpopular opinion is that some of the conceptions of sex and gender promoted by leading trans*activists are foolish, confused and/or harmful to feminism, that many feminists are aware of this, but don’t want to be seen to beat up on a tiny and horribly oppressed minority.

In particular, I think that identity is social: it involves performance and recognition, and cannot simply be declared by fiat. We are not infallible authorities on our own identity.
Identities can develop, through social and political struggle, so that now for example someone with XY chromosomes and a penis can under certain conditions be a woman (and vice versa), but it is nonsense to claim that merely declaring oneself to be X means one is and always has been X.

Well, an argument that they weren’t raised as or treated as women wouldn’t obviously apply to lesbian or disabled women. I’m not sure how similar an argument you’re thinking of.

I don’t think trans women should be excluded from feminism (I also don’t think men should be excluded from feminism, or, I’m not exactly sure what you mean by thinking feminism shouldn’t be open to cis men like you. Shouldn’t be primarily concerned with the interests of cis men, that I get). I just wanted to spin out the nature of some of the concerns, insofar as I’m aware of them, for a commenter who seemed unaware for why feminists might be concerned about the effects of making trans issues central to feminism.

@254 In which case, you can safely allow those women to continue wearing the burqa/niqub/whatever so long as other women do not suffer for omitting it. Then we can cease with the moralizing about how the burqa is repressive, since women choose to wear it, and it’s not your place to decide whether it’s right.

ugh. “separate from men”, obviously, not “separate from me.”

About men supporting feminism, we used to call such men pro-feminists. And they called themselves that, too.

There have been some stories in this thread of men being rebuffed by feminists, thoroughly and unkindly. And other stories of men who experienced a lack of sympathy from feminists for the abuse they had suffered. I felt for the men who told these stories.

I would like to offer a glimpse from the other side, though, which might be relevant. Most women find they are routinely expected to do the emotional work for men. Sympathize with them, and help them articulate their emotions and so on. And sometimes you just don’t want to, or you just can’t.

Also, not the same but related, I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard (or been) a woman talking about an issue affecting women (rape, child abuse, being talked over in meetings) and a man has interrupted with “what about men in this issue?” It happens over and over again.

And you just want to say, Yes, that’s important, of course. Lots of things are important. But right now, we are talking about this issue that affects women.

Men typically have not received this well. They do expect to be listened to, and if their experience is discounted they can be pretty vocal about that. But it is derailing. You need to keep repeating, Yes, their experience is important, but it is not the focus of this meeting.

I mean no offence to those who have shared their stories, which moved me. But I thought I’d fill in the picture of the demands made on feminism and that might make the rejections some men here have experienced feel less personal, and more a consequence of the overall situation feminists find themselves in.

engels- I have literally heard, IRL, a trans woman declare to the world that she never realized how pervasive misogyny was until she transitioned. Now that she was being treated as a woman, she could see how badly women were treated.

I was obviously polite enough to keep my mouth shut. I knew the person had things rough, and there was no reason to pile on.

But my immediate thought was, “Are you sure you’re experiencing misogyny? Because I can tell at a glance that you’re trans. Transphobia is a thing too.”

Patrick, I agree, but you could refrain from making a similar comment to a lesbian feminist could you not?

Wow, what a great thread!

I know I’m late but I have some unpopular opinions that didn’t seem to be listed above.

#1. It’s been easier and safer-feeling for me (a woman) to get into male-dominated spaces by putting up with the male dominance than it has been for me to get into spaces that were being subjected to feminist criticism, with everybody divided into camps pro and con. In fact I remain happily involved in several of the former, and have given up participating in several of the latter.

#2 I think being a feminist has sometimes been bad for my relationships with men. When I put on my feminist head it makes me treat any mildly sexist action or remark by a man like “The 500th time that s*** has happened, a**hole!” instead of treating the guy like an individual who gets to make his own mistakes. I would never respond to my students like that, and you can bet that their antics *have* happened 500 times before. So nowadays, I mostly leave my feminist head at home.

#3 I feel more silenced by ‘gotcha’ feminism than by overt sexism. And I feel more able to deal productively (and enjoyably) with sexists than with ‘gotcha’ feminists.

Patrick, sorry I wasn’t very clear. Trans women suffer from misogyny and transphobia. Lesbians suffer from misogyny and homophobia. Some lesbians are generally perceived by at a glance to be lesbians and sometimes anti-lesbian homophobia even takes the form of regarding them as not ‘real’ women.

I agree that if your friend inferred that the poor treatment she was getting was due to misogyny she would be wrong but I think it would be possible for a hypothetical lesbian woman to make the same faulty inference.

Also, I don’t want to send this off on a tangent but I’m pretty sure some feminists define ‘woman’ in a way that is independent of biology, so some people who are biologically male (who occupy non-normative or subordinate locations within patriarchy) are classified as women and some who are biologically female (who occupy powerful locations within patriarchy) are classified as men. I assume that has no problems accommodating trans women (and perhaps gay men, etc) as feminists.

I think the safe space idea is mostly used to protect your own glass house. The space will never be safe enough; the constant effort to shrink has wildly diminished the influence of feminism. It has been a great mistake, IMHO.

I wish you folks luck, but the derisive behavior has been pretty revolting, particularly the nice guy stuff that Landru has pointed to in the various threads at SSC.

I agree with Lynne, this is a fine place to talk about what patriarchy is & isn’t.

Val @243 I think in fact that patriarchy in its ‘extreme’ form (men privileged over women, systematic hierarchies of domination and oppression amongst men) … presupposes that some men (males/boys) have to be at the bottom of the heap, and what is more they deserve to be.

I do think we are largely in agreement, so this is kind of a nitpicky point: the relationship between bullying and other social hierarchies may be more one of resemblance than causation. Like, something in our culture or social-psychological constitution demands that we place ourselves in social hierarchies, so when it becomes not-okay to overtly enforce certain racial or gendered hierarchies, people (especially children, with the unconscious encouragement of certain authority figures) will try to create similar hierarchies, because they want to have a sense of who they should emulate and who they should avoid being like. I could certainly see this happening less over time as patriarchal/hierarchical habits are repressed/forgotten, but also maybe not, and I think this is why a lot of men who self-identify as socially excluded fear that the suppression of hierarchies is a zero-sum game, up to the extreme position that feminism just wants to replace patriarchy with matriarchy.

It might help to make more use of “hierarchy” as a term of critique, because using “patriarchy” as the blanket term for all social hierarchy really stops making sense even for many kinds of racism (especially orientalism), and all the more so for non-racial & non-economic social hierarchy. Orientalism is a very good lens for seeing the problems with “patriarchy” as a term of critique, and it even has a historical connection to derogatory terms like “nerd” that originated in resentment of Jews and Italians–“greasy grinds”–who ‘unfairly’ outperformed ‘white’ students by studying too hard (sound familiar?). In one sense, the “Oriental” and “nerd” are feminized, but equally essential is imagining them as excessively and childishly masculine–think Borat. I wouldn’t stop saying “patriarchy” or “white supremacy,” because that’s what hierarchy is so much of the time, but it’s also other completely different things, and I think there’s something gutsy and fresh about saying one is opposed to social hierarchy in general–almost like saying you believe in anarchy, but without the inconvenient policy implications.

Pat @265 #2 I think being a feminist has sometimes been bad for my relationships with men. When I put on my feminist head it makes me treat any mildly sexist action or remark by a man like “The 500th time that s*** has happened, a**hole!” instead of treating the guy like an individual who gets to make his own mistakes.

This is why I really like reading Dan Savage’s column, he has a really good sense of how to balance thinking with his feminist or queer hat on, with sensitivity to people’s individual circumstances. Even if you don’t agree with him on every point or principle, it’s a good model for understanding how other social hierarchies play out at the level of individual or small group relationships. I think having been a regular reader has made me a much better & happier male partner.

Here goes my Saturday.

When Lynne @214 first flagged Elizabeth Wydville @47, I too went back and tried to catch up on the comments that had come out of moderation. My first reaction to 47 was that Lynne was surely appreciating Wydville’s comments on child care, because the first paragraph of 47 was (from where I sit) an unpleasant, excluding, boundary-policing comment that suggested that I should not participate in this thread. (Not literally, because I hadn’t contributed anything of substance yet.) (The boundary-policing also seemed presumptuous, to say the least, given that “Elizabeth Wydville” has never, to my knowledge, posted a comment here before. Of course, the handle could be a temporary pseud for someone who’s here a lot, in which case that doesn’t apply.)

I was tempted to react “out loud,” but I decided that even though I didn’t think the first para. of 47 was in the spirit of the thread (both on its face and meta-wise), I wasn’t going to bite the hook because biting the hook was surely not in the spirit of the thread.

But now that Lynne has foregrounded the first paragraph of 47 @261, I’m going to bite.

First, “on its face”:

Here is what Belle wrote in the OP:

some of us discussed what it would be like if I were actually kind we had a “safe” thread in which we could discuss feminism without worrying we would ban ourselves from polite society by saying The Wrong Thing.”

Here is what Belle wrote in originally proposing the idea of this thread:

“And, indeed, I would be glad to provide an entire safe thread for people to say things they think about modern leftism but are afraid to say for whatever reason, in which everyone either backs the fuck off harsh criticism or gets banned.”

And I would note that the very title of the thread includes leftism as well as feminism. So I don’t see any evidence from Belle herself that she meant people who don’t identify as feminists to shut the fuck up.

And “meta”:

By rights I certainly should be a feminist. In terms of what I want for the world, it’s a quibble to say I’m not. If you put me in a room with Lynne for a few hours, or Belle, or almost anyone else who identifies as one (Hilzoy, let’s say, with whom I a blog-commenty conversation very like this once at ObWi), I’m pretty sure we would be 90+% in agreement about the kind of world we’d like to help build. So I posted here from the point of view of someone who – shy, nerdy, not articulate out loud, and temperamentally about as unsuited to overt activism as it’s possible to be – has felt shunted aside from feminism for my entire adult life because it’s too damned hard to fight my way in unless I keep my mouth shut. (Pat @265’s #1 and #3 apply.) (And a movement that purports to be working for me and speaking for me but wants me to keep my mouth shut, what is that?)

And this is where I think the point of the thread applies: it’s to a significant degree the fault of feminists that I’m not a feminist.

(I have lost two of the most important friendships of my life, not overtly or directly because of disagreements about feminism, but that disagreement was always, after a certain point, in the background of those connections. I was an asshole some of the time, no doubt about it, and I have to take my share of responsibility for that.)

People keep writing about how it’s important to have women-only spaces, because otherwise men tend to / want to dominate. I get that; I certainly have experienced that. But I have also been in women-only contexts where, in the absence of men, certain women push their way to dominance, and it’s just as fucking unpleasant. It’s also just another illustration of the fact that – as I tried to say to my friends when I was figuring out how my birth family worked – all the good isn’t on one side and all the bad on the other. In single-gender contexts, as in same-sex relationships, people polarize around certain axes because we’re human. That isn’t to say that there should never be single-gender contexts; I don’t believe that at all. I guess it’s just to say that it’s dismaying to see the same thing happening here (@47), and then to have one of my favorite commenters (Lynne) second it.

If my comments haven’t been in the spirit of this thread, I’d like to hear it from Belle, and I’ll go away. She can even delete them if she wants.

The whole mess reminds of the time after September 11, when the US was plastered with the message “United We Stand.” My feeling about that was: Okay, if you want to stand united, let’s stand united behind my opinions and values. But of course that’s not what the people pushing that slogan meant. If we can’t be united when we’re 90% in agreement, then it’s no wonder we’re (as usual) in trouble.

Lynne and MPAV, thanks for the support. I’m glad I could add something to the discussion! I don’t have a huge amount to say about trans issues, which seems the main gestalt of the thread.

I wonder my response about trans issues. Of course I feel for people who have suffered, and I try to be understanding and behave well around the (few) trans people that I know, but then sometimes I feel this little tingling of resentment or hackles-raising at the demand for inclusiveness in women-only spaces, or the demand for gender-neutral language in areas where you are mostly discussing the experience of women. It may be unfair, I would have to think more about the individual cases where I have felt this to really unpack my response, but that is occasionally my reaction. For instance, when I read Michelle Goldberg’s New Yorker discussion of trans issues, I started out thinking the radfem position was a bit strange or harsh, and then by the end as I confronted the actual examples I was thinking, hmm, maybe they have a point.

A short comment on hijab–Orthodox Jewish women are also supposed to cover their hair, after they are married, in the presence of other men, and some make sure their collarbone is covered, though few I think (except from present-day majority-Muslim areas) cover their neck. Some do wear a scarf over their head. Others wear a wig. Some “modern Orthodox” wear a hat. So some women are comfortable marking themselves off visually from the majority and some are not. (Most non-Orthodox women don’t cover their hair, though some synagogues provide little lace “veils” to pin on the back of your head.)

“If my comments haven’t been in the spirit of this thread, I’d like to hear it from Belle, and I’ll go away. She can even delete them if she wants.”

I appreciate your comments Jane. In fact I have appreciated almost all the comments here so far. Even the ones I disagree with (for example I think men can be feminists and I think that trans women should be welcome in welcome in most women only spaces, with perhaps some exceptions for things like rape crisis centres).

Lynne @260, 261–comments that I now see may have been directed partly at me–the point you make about women being expected to do emotional work for men is on the money, and although I don’t think Scott Aaronson’s ‘comment 171’ was making such a demand of feminists, the “feminist bloggers are not your therapists” objection is valid in a lot of other contexts.* It isn’t–or, at least, wouldn’t be–fair to blame feminism because it hasn’t been trying to solve social exclusion of boys all along, since, like, the 1960s. But Aaronson’s claim is not that, it’s that certain aspects of feminism have been actively harmful. Specifically, that many individual feminists, and maybe a lot of feminist discourse more broadly, leverages social hierarchies to advance its agenda, and that is fundamentally at odds with its avowed philosophy–at least if we see feminism as opposed to something bigger, like “patriarchy”, that includes racism. The classic example of this would be the common practice (by ostensibly pro-feminist men at least as much as by women) of stigmatizing people it opposes as sexually-undesirable–“pimply basement-dwelling mouth-breathers” and stuff like that. If the larger goal of this discussion/thread is to make feminist and leftist politics more inclusive, this seems very much on topic to me.

JanieM @275 What you said about your family history and how that impacted relationships with friends is the kind of thing I had in mind when I suggested we should pay more attention to the difference between feminism in theory (what people write) and feminism in practice (social relationships/interactions, in person or not). From what you’ve written, I can’t see any difference between you and a (pro-)feminist other than the name and whether your use of it is accepted or meaningful in your own particular social circles. I think it may be a real problem that we are sometimes talking about 2 or more different things when we talk about “feminism”–we aren’t all talking about the same thing. One can’t simply blame feminist writers for “every problem looking like a nail” to some individual feminists.

* In fact, looking at that and other reactions to Aaronson, it seems like they’re trying to reconstruct a lot more context and background from his comment than is really reasonable, and/or misreading it–most importantly, he never said how he got to feel socially excluded, so it’s not at all fair to assume that this was largely due to psychological problems he had, as the linked post and Arther Chu’s response did; and he didn’t actually deny being privileged as a man. In other words, they’re misreading him in order to have the broader conversation that they want to have, but Aaronson is much, much less guilty of these mistakes in comment 171 than they imply. I don’t see how comment 171 is a whole lot different from the occasionally-valid criticism that feminism is really only concerned with middle-class white women. Isn’t it just as unfair to ask why feminists haven’t been trying to solve racism all along since the 1960s as it is to ask why they haven’t been trying to solve other kinds of social exclusion all along?

Fuzzy, I get your point and I was tempted to refer to your previous mention of it, but life and comment threads are finite, so I refrained.

“An idea isn’t responsible for the people who espouse it” and all that. As I think you recognize, feminism in theory and feminism in practice are, while not the same thing, also not non-overlapping. I at least never “blamed feminist writers” for anything, unless you count Gloria Steinem. Also, the distinction you’re making is further murked up by the fact that (as with definitions of “left” and “right” and a lot of other things) there is no pope-like authority to speak ex cathedra and set us all straight on official definitions.

Janie, I’m so sorry how Elizabeth’s comment and my endorsement of it came across. I do see how it did, but I understood it the way Elizabeth has clarified. And you always seem to be talking in good faith to me, about feminist ideas, too, a lot of the time, even though you don’t identify as a feminist.

Lynne — thanks. I know myself to have a hair trigger about being excluded or condescended to, and for the most part I’ve learned to walk away when it’s tripped on the internet. But this thread seems to have made space for some challenges amongst us, and I’m glad to know I misinterpreted and maybe overreacted to something that maybe wasn’t expressed with precision. If that’s enough qualifiers…..

I’m really curious…are you still up or up this early? ;-) (You don’t really have to answer, but I the time difference was on my mind when I posted my comment, and it made me hesitate. It’s unavoidable, I guess, and I shouldn’t worry about it.)

An, Ontario. I thought you were further west…….

Anyhow, thanks for the kind words.

My students who wear the hijab certainly *believe* they are wearing the hijab of their own free will, and that they are wearing it to honor God, and not because they are being oppressed. I’ve had passionate essays from them arguing just this point — this is how I know that’s what they believe.

I don’t think the influence of culture (habit) in early childhood can be underestimated. What we experience as toddlers & young children tends to leave a profound imprint on our feeling of who we are and who our community is. Similar to the [Jesuit or Aristotle?] saying, “give me the child until 7 and I’ll give you the man.” So we need to be careful about telling people that habits and cultural attachments they formed in childhood are, in our opinion, deficient.

Even harking back to one of the torture threads, I think it was Peter T who mentioned the existence of what we might refer to as indigenous ‘warrior’ cultures where ritualized torture was practiced. Imagine telling a young man in this tribe that his people were morally inferior!

As a thought experiment, I imagine a 12-year old boy from such a warrior culture being brought to America to be educated, say, through to the college level. I imagine that at some point along the way, and maybe it would take longer than his early 20’s, but at some point he would probably come to think, “wow, my native culture is really barbaric!” But reaching that point might be a very slow and painful process for this person, with many periods of vacillation.

My point is that there is a limited place for telling people what the deal is with them. Far better they come to it without being pushed.

“But I can’t see how any of us have the right to tell these women, who are after all intelligent adults, that they’re wrong about what they believe. ”

First, we all have the right to tell them whatever we wish – that’s what freedom is about. Beyond that, I think there’s some obligation to challenge beliefs we find both wrong and dangerous.

That being said, I’m not at all sure about banning it. There are clearly some voluntary practices which should not be permitted (indenture comes to mind) but I’m not at all sure the hijab rises to the level of banning. And I agree with Mattski when he says it’s better people come to the realization of wrongness about their cultural beliefs, unless there’s some urgency to putting a stop to harmful behavior.

I absolutely don’t think that the hijab or even the burqa should be banned, tho. That strikes me as utterly counterproductive. I’m not sure if that was clear.

Luke @ 294

” In short: women are expected to display their liberation by displaying their bodies, i.e. the revealing of flesh is a Western social expectation in the same way that veiling is a Muslim one, and those who refuse to conform are clearly ‘repressed’, i.e. victims to be liberated or enemies to be punished.”

You could be right – I could just be sexist western pig, lusting for a glimpse of some hot hair!

On the other hand, it could be that I’m drawing some conclusions from the observation that there’s some correlation between the level of legal and social enforcement, and the choices Muslim women make about covering; in that a lower level of legal and social pressure to comply always results in a lower rate of compliance.

I have in fact been to some of these places, and observed the differences in levels of compliance.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/08/what-is-appropriate-attire-for-women-in-muslim-countries/

Really interesting point at 299 layman.

Engels @ 300

I think you’re right. And…?

Layman, perhaps I misread your conversation but Luke said:

he revealing of flesh is a Western social expectation in the same way that veiling is a Muslim one

I don’t think your claims to have observed social pressure to cover up in Muslim countries contradicts this unless you are also going to claim that there aren’t also pressures to expose yourself operating the West.

Have you looked at the effect of social pressure on women’s clothing choices in Western countries too? I think may find it’s not non-existent…

Humbly, having some first-hand experience of both sorts of “cultures” (for lack of a better term), these are completely different levels and kinds of social pressures. I’m leaving aside legal constraints entirely, and even so, we’re talking about things like the very real possibility of being ostracized by your entire family. It’s really a difference in kind, not just in degree.

I do think there’s a danger of white liberals treating Muslim women as, in Luke’s words, “victims to be liberated”, and frankly, I’m having trouble coming up with a worse idea. Which is partly why I would almost never push this line of argument in an online forum with an overwhelmingly Western audience (also tho, racist trolls). All that said, and with the caveat that I’m not a woman, I do think that e.g. the clothing-related social pressures faced by women in conservative Muslim societies are of an entirely different order than those in liberal Western societies. Importantly, though, the previous sentence is equally true if you were to drop “Western” and “Muslim”.

“My point isn’t that there aren’t pressures on muslim women to conform by covering themselves; it’s that wearing a headscarf in a country where it’s expected and wearing one in a Western country are two very different ‘statements’.”

I’d agree that they may be two different statements, but not that they necessarily are. Unless you think that social pressures to comply don’t exist in Muslim families & communities in Western countries? That such pressures can only be ‘national’, never local or familial?

Oh, good. Layman said (@309) exactly what I was going to say. And @299 also strikes me exactly right.

About banning the burka or niqab: I hesitate to add my voice to those telling Muslim women what to wear, but there are places where a covered face seems wrong in our society where we have a tradition of face to face interaction.

There was a court case a few years ago where a young woman was testifying against two male relatives who were charged with sexually abusing her. She wanted to wear her niqab, and was refused by the court. I thought, reluctantly, that that was the right decision because in Canada the accused has the right to face his accuser. Also, we rely on seeing people’s faces when we evaluate whether they are telling the truth.

There are a few other places I wouldn’t want to see people wearing veils (off the top of my head; teaching children, certain professions where the contact is personal, eg. medical or if you were consulting a lawyer) but I think these could be dealt with without a general ban.

Thanks Lynne and others for comments re patriarchy, I will continue my thoughts on this. First though a bit of “self-criticism” – reading this thread has made me realise that normally I am quite quick to get fed up and snarky. It’s partly, as others have said, because as a feminist you do encounter the same objections to feminism again and again – you deal with them here, they crop up again there, like hydra heads. Tiring. But also I think I’m impatient because I grew up in an era when children were “IQ- tested” and I was so repeatedly told that I was the smartest person in the room that I’ve probably internalised it!

So mea culpa and trying hard to be patient, polite and humble (a bit of snark is fun sometimes but this isn’t the place) – the other reason I stopped commenting about patriarchy before is because I have been reading a lot about it (many sources but recently particularly Gerda Lerner) and I could write at length.

So trying to keep it brief and respond to a few things here. I don’t think it’s useful to conceptualise gender and class as opposing theories or explanations. They interact. However patriarchy historically precedes class ( at least class in the Marxist sense). Lerner suggests that subordination of women was the model for other forms of subordination and that they all involve “othering” the subordinate class (I hope I’m doing her justice). She, and others I’ve read, suggest there hasn’t ever really been matriarchy – the two main forms of social organisation are patriarchy ( subordination of women and ‘othered’ men, competition between men for “women, cattle, slaves, scarce land” as Weber put it) and gatherer-hunter societies (I’m not sure this is considered the best term now but not entirely up with this yet) which while they may have hierarchies and violence, don’t tend to have systemic inequality and tend to share resources rather than compete. (I have written a little about this on my own blog here, if I may be excused http://fairgreenplanet.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/why-we-should-acknowledge-elders-and.html)

Also, as I hope this makes clear, there doesn’t seem to be any historical evidence that people ‘naturally’ form hierarchies, at least not in the form characterised by systemic inequality. We lived much longer as gatherer hunters, 60,000 years or so, whereas patriarchy seems to have been around only about a few thousand.

In response to Fuzzy Dunlop, I also suggest it would not be useful to substitute “hierarchy” for “patriarchy” as patriarchy is the form of hierarchical system that many humans have lived with in the last few thousand years, including us contemporary humans here, to greater or lesser degrees, and which has influenced our thinking (the discourse in which our subjectivities have been created, if you like).

I could talk about some of the work (including some of mine) that has been done in understanding the way the normative individual has been constructed in liberal democracies but it might take rather a long time. Just briefly however the normative individual generally has the assumed characteristics of an adult able-bodied male (and often I think someone middle class who doesn’t have to scrabble for existence, and although this no longer formally the case, often also white).

Also just briefly one of the reasons we have so much trouble dealing with abortion legally is because apart from the patriarchal aspects of men wanting to control women’s reproductive capacity, our normative legal individual is one single self contained (adult) person.

An interesting thing I’m working on conceptually at present is how can we think and write in a way that allows for individualism (because I think there is truth or reality in the concept, just not that restricted liberal adult male one) but also sees us as as being connected to/part of other people, other species and the environment.

Finally I think the term “identity politics” is a push back term from people who want to keep the adult male as the normative individual.

Spell out what? It’s an observation. In both countries there is a lot of effort by men to influence what women wear. The methods employed are different in kind. In SA they’re much more brutal, and, I’m guessing, cheaper.

Val @315 Thank you, that was interesting (I may have more to say later).

Geo at 288: Thanks. Upon reading that earnest (if somewhat desperate) plea, I proved no more capable of containing the chuckle than you announced yourself to have (occasionally, reminiscently) been.

Luke, going back to you @ 294

“One thing I find striking about the whole business is that people expect muslim women to *choose* the ‘liberated’ option. ”

I gather you think this kind of thinking happens because Westerners are steeped in their own cultural norms – norms created by the social pressures you note – and can only imagine Muslim women choosing the same. You may be right, but there’s actually evidence of Muslim women choosing the ‘liberated’ option even in non-Western cultures, where those cultures have a lesser enforcement regime. So I think you must grant that there is some reason besides Western cultural bias to expect it will happen; and not all Westerners who think it will happen do so because of their culture.

Engels @ 324

Mars, you mean?

No, forget Mars. Tunisia ought to suffice. Check out the data I linked to earlier.

Otherwise, I’m really failing to see your point. I get that no human exists in a cultural vacuum, but I don’t think that means data are irrelevant because cultural bias. People are born nude. In the presence of an enforcement regime that requires them to cover their entire bodies with cloth, they tend to do that. Do you really doubt that, in the absence of such a regime, they’d be less likely to do it? And is your response to data which corroborates this simple hypothesis really to dismiss the results as the artifact of some other cultural pressure?

PS, for ‘not great’ above, substitute ‘bad’.

bianca @282 – I think you’ve misunderstood me. I’m strongly against an essentializing gender binary in the way I think you’re using those words. (Please correct me if I’m not understanding, and again, if I’m mansplaining please tell me so. I’m acutely aware of the fact that I’m a cis man writing a lot of words about trans women and feminism right here.)

I think there is such a thing as “gender identity” and that it is more than “just” a social construct, but that what exactly it really is is not at all well-understood by anyone. (Kind of like dark matter – we know it’s there, but we can’t actually see it and have no idea what the hell it is.) I believe that the “gender binary” is a social construct, or a sort of “folk theory” of gender that has been built up in the absence of any actual scientific understanding. Unfortunately, this folk theory – which I reject – simplistically blurs together distinct phenomena into a false essentialism, much to everyone’s confusion.

The folk theory gives us only two concepts, “man” and “woman”, to describe gender. These words lack simple definitions; they are expected to carry the whole weight of huge bundles of ideas about anatomy, psychology, morality, you name it. Unfortunately, because this binary does not capture reality particularly well, the meanings of “man” and “woman” are intensely contested (as clearly shown in this thread). What I wanted to express in the passage you quote was simply that while these socially-defined and contested categories, “men” and “women”, are inadequate to describe the totality of actually-existing gender, they are comparatively more adequate for some groups of people than for others, and that this does have serious real-life effects on those who fit less comfortably in the generally-acknowledged folk categories.

What I ultimately believe is lacking in a trans-exclusionary feminism is respect for trans persons’ self-determination. Lynne would critique all boundaries, would allow for self-determination in all areas – except one. That one happens to be a vitally important one for trans women. I think it’s wrong to stop short. I think if you’re going to contest the meaning of “man” and “woman” you should be willing to go all the way. That’s all.

Holy shit! I didn’t know what bianca steele was talking about @322, but that is fucking terrifying! I guess I didn’t get how literally “realistic” was meant.

bianca – Now I’m weirded out, because most of what you wrote @332 I completely agree with. But we’ll let it lie.

Emma @ 308
Thanks Emma that was really interesting. You may not wish to link it here for anonymity reasons, but I would be very interested to read your work.

Bianca @ 322 – side note – I know the blog tends to be predominantly North American but some of us here in the Southern Hemisphere certainly aren’t shovelling snow, we’re sweltering in heat! Good luck with the snow shovelling and keeping warm.

Pat @ 265
I really agree with a lot of what you say. I also find it quite difficult to have conversations on feminist blogs generally, even though I’ve been a feminist for many years, and have a real sense of having to be very careful what I say. It isn’t conducive to solidarity and making progress as feminists. I have some theories about why it happens, but I wonder if Emma in Sydney might be able to comment on this?

Val @335, the project resulted in this book <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/7824171?selectedversion=NBD22117255&quot; title="Australian Feminism: A Companion". I was the senior researcher on the project and wrote about a third of it. I’m one of the et al in the author list. Remaindered long ago, I’m afraid. When the project ended and the funding ran out, I was out of a job and ended up in technical writing. I’ve often wondered what became of the laptop containing my database for the whole project. We also published this <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/21899879?q=Emma+Grahame+&c=book&versionId=46461954&quot; title="Research Guide to Feminist publications" .

Copies can be found at AbeBooks for not outrageous prices.

Oh fuck! It parsed the tags! Just ignore me.

missed -> messed … where’s the proofreader?

In the presence of an enforcement regime that requires them to cover their entire bodies with cloth, they tend to do that. Do you really doubt that, in the absence of such a regime, they’d be less likely to do it?

No, I don’t. I’m just saying that in the absence of coercion softer pressures (conditioning, persuasion) come into play and the American capitalism is much better at these than developing countries are.

bianca steele,

I don’t know why you think I’m in Europe! I’m very much an Eastern Time Zone kinda guy—in fact, currently in eastern Mass. housesitting for my parents, and hating every minute of it. (They do have someone who comes and cleans out the snow, so there is that.)

And JanieM, thanks for picking up the pieces of my HTML fail.

See also. (Sorry, kinda in derail territory, and I will stop. Just really kind of insane around here right now.)

Those photos are amazing. It’s 32C here (about 90F) and 3.30 on Sunday afternoon. I am lying around trying to work out whether I can be bothered to go out.It’s not really hot by our summer standards (this has been a cool- ish summer in Melbourne) but it’s humid, which we’re not so used to here.

I read somewhere that the murder rate in New York has gone down because of cold weather.

Anyway back on topic. Thanks Emma @ 337, I will get those books from the library next week. I know your research was on pre-Internet feminism but do you have any theories why Internet feminism might be so fraught (at least for some of us)?

js., I’m not sure why I thought you were English.

Janie, others, we’re far enough west to get a little less snow this time, but that’s making up for the first storm when we got a lot. Way too many snow days, between scheduled days off and snow days, in Jan. and Feb. the schools will have been closed 16 days even if it doesn’t snow any more.

Should men say they are feminists, or should they refrain from it?

Why or why not? If it depends, what does it depend upon, and how should a man determine whether the conditions that mean he should do it apply to him (in general or at given time depending on context, whichever it is)?

There is a movie The Day I Became A Woman with one section about a girl on the day of her ninth birthday when at noon she turns from a child to a woman and must wear a chador in public and can’t be friends with the boy who is her best friend. In a Shakespeare play a King recalls being “breeched” when he went from wearing the dresses befitting a young child to the trousers of a man. This gendering is less formal in our culture but remains nonetheless: in one gender class we were asked when we thought it happened in our own experiences and the answers varied from early childhood to adolescence. I think the lack of formality means that you are viewed as having freedom but there are a lot of informal expectations and constraints etc that are out of your control.

My unpopular idea is that one of the reasons I started to like Iranian movies in late high school was that it seemed to me the girls and women in their chadors in, say, Salaam Cinema, could be more like normal protagonist characters . It was also important to me that they were around about contemporaries with me rather than people in a 19th C book or something, as I tended to find it hard to relate much to the mid-late 20th C Western representations of young women that I was familiar with at that age. I was the sort of kid that when a friend and I were underage in a pub and an interstate guy gave us drugs I thought what would be great next would be to have a discussion about the Velvet Revolution — my knowledge of which was admittedly rather hazy. So since the films were well regarded the Iranian women in their chadors for me broadened — as opposed to limited — what I saw as contemporary forms of being a girl and woman.

(Of course I did not ever have to wear a chador or hijab, so I was not subject to any of the actual limits Iranian women are, and there are certainly problems in Iran especially with corruption and violence by police and in gaol)

*****

“TELL US YOU BELIEVE SOMETHING CRAZY. IT IS A NEAR-CERTAINTY!….
But if a girl or woman is mentally ill and involved in some way with a man, a false rape accusation is a common thing for that mentally ill woman to do!”

While I am fortunate to never have suffered rape like Belle — and that was a horrible story, I am very sorry it was done to you — I do wish that there was less use of the word crazy as a derogatory term for non-crazy people’s stupid or scoundrel-like behaviour, and fewer unsourced claims about mentally ill people.

People with a serious mental illness are about 2.5 times more likely to be the victims of violent assaults and rape. I could not find any figures concluding that false allegations of rape are mainly made by mentally ill women: One study I found said the majority of false rape allegations (over 50%) were made by people who just wanted to escape the negative social consequences of having that instance of consensual sex; then the next biggest category was people who made false allegations for revenge and retribution (27%-44%), with mental illness being only a small category. Other studies criticised police for not following through on complaints by vulnerable groups with learning difficulties and mental illnesses for reasons based only on police officers’ discretionary judgements.

Val,
Those numbers I cited were from a study by Kanin (1994) about a town in the Midwest USA from 1978-87. They were cases where the accusers withdrew their accusations. The incidence of false allegations there varied from year to year from 27%-70%.

False allegations are more studied for prevalence than for reasons and motivations, but scanning two other papers they did find mental illness was a factor, if not the highest. Although both papers included cases where the police decided the allegations were false, rather than the allegations being recanted as in the former case, and some other papers are critical of this as they see the legal system as having a tendency to believe men rather than women or the young or disabled.

O’Neal (2014) studies a smaller number of cases in L.A. (55) and used multiple motivations: the main reason is wanting attention or sympathy (23) ; then to have an alibi/wanting to escape the negative consequences of consensual sex (22); then some form of mental illness (18); then personal reasons (17) and revenge (13) and so on. And Kelly, Lovett, and Regan (2005) found that young people, less educated people and disabled people were over represented demographics in the false allegations group, but didn’t look at other motivations. All the papers pointed out that their results were not appropriate to generalise from.

ZM @359 My unpopular idea is that one of the reasons I started to like Iranian movies in late high school was that it seemed to me the girls and women in their chadors in, say, Salaam Cinema, could be more like normal protagonist characters .

I’m curious how much this is due to how they’re dressed, as opposed to other things, like how dedicated those writers/directors are to telling women’s stories. I mean, it’s not really surprising that Iran would produce cinema or other art with international appeal, and it’s not like there’s even a rough consensus on how women can dress, so these movies (especially The Day I Became a Woman!) probably don’t reflect the views of people who want to enforce “moral” dress codes.

I think ZM’s points are good, on both ‘women don’t make up rare allegations’ (which I’ve never understood) and of ‘it’s common for mentally ill women to do so’ (which I don’t like at all).

Fuzzy, re opinions not being _that_ unpopular: I think that’s the point. The unusual thing seems to me is the discussion has been about views which are not consensus ones but are still worth discussing, whereas 99% it’s a flame war between the right-thinking person’s opinion and some right-wing trollish bullshit alternative. Imo this ‘unite against the enemy’ dynamic actually imposes ideological conformity among the right-thinking.

Let’s remember that the title was “Safe Space For *Possibly* Unpopular Thoughts on Feminism, Leftism,” so let’s not act like w should be laughing at anyone who offered an opinion she thought might be unpopular but turned out not to be. Merely offering a possibly unpopular opinion is not claiming that it is is in fact unpopular.

Let’s also not pretend that two meanings of the term “unpopular,” 1) not held by very many people in general ; 2) likely to be very ill-received in some particularly defined community – are the same. Soliciting “unpopular” opinions, which clearly refers to 2), and then pointing out that they may not be 1) is a bait-and-switch,

to get a little less snow this time

Or not. At least I don’t have to fling it to the top of Janie’s pile with my little shovel.

Echoing Lynne: thanks, Belle.

I’ve been planning on commenting but haven’t had time to compose. But anyway, if I don’t get time to do it (as it sounds like these threads are closed eventually?), I’ve found the discussion here very interesting!

but the commenters (Landru & Yama) that partly started it seem not to have stayed around to continue the discussion.

Well, some of us do have day jobs and demanding family responsibilities. In my own case, though, an additional important factor is that takes me a _very_ long time to compose anything that reads smoothly and gets a point across. In generating new prose suitable for CT standards I would guess that I average in the ballpark of five to ten minutes per sentence, probably at least one or two orders of magnitude slower than Belle and many of the regulars.

I did have a comment almost ready to go last night in reply to Belle back at 140, after several days of work; but that’s now been completely obviated by the new thread. And while I do take a certain oddball pride in meriting a beat-down from herself every now and again — “A sneer from him, Meriadoc, is a compliment” — it’s not really a good use of anyone’s time for me to engage there while outgunned by a hundred to one. So I’ll just stick to the opportunistic bon mot for now.

Overall, though, this thread has been a great achievement, and I don’t at all begrudge the effort of going over it several times to pick things up coming out of moderation. Definitely time well spent!

Looks like I’m late by several days, but I want to take advantage of the opportunity, so here I go.

My unpopular thought about feminism is that it shouldn’t only be about women. It should long ago have broadened to be a critique of gender roles in general, emphasizing how rigid gender roles are bad for men and women both, and how easing those gender roles will be good for men and women both.

In fact, when I was younger, I thought that’s what feminism was. But I think it’s usually seen now – by proponents and opponents – as a movement specifically about women’s issues. Any critique of male gender roles tends to focus on the way those roles are bad for women.

My feeling is that rigid gender roles are bad for men and women – perhaps even equally bad, but if not certainly bad enough that men and women would all be happier if we could ease off of them. I think traditional male gender roles don’t work for most men, and often lead to lives that are stunted by emotional disconnectedness and feelings of anger and inadequacy. At its worst this leads to “toxic masculinity,” including violence.

I don’t think this opinion is original at all. I’m sure it’s right there in mainstream feminist thought. I suppose the reason I need a safe space to express it is that I’ve seen similar opinions shot down as being hateful, anti-feminist, misogynistic, and typical of those awful MRAs. I think unfortunately feminism is seen now as a zero sum game, where any gains by women necessarily come at the expense of men, and any attempt by men to complain about their problems is seen as beside the point, or actively hostile to women.

OK, here’s the thing I am really not sure about with rape on college campuses. We don’t think there should be student and professor group evaluations or judgments on what to do if one student just beats the tar out of another student. Simple assault and battery. No one thinks, time for that committee of…randos…to…decide if this dude should get suspended for a semester for breaking that other dude’s arm with a chair? Right?

Right. Here’s why:
1) We have a system set up to deal with assault already, with a set of valid and well known rules that have been evolving for centuries and which have specially trained professionals with specific subject matter experience dealing with them;

2) Assault is an issue which is general, and which is unrelated to college or campuses or anything else other than “that is where it happened to occur.”

….Because of course we think that you might lose a whole semester’s worth of fees because you committed plagiarism. It’s not as if non-criminal complaints can’t result in serious sanctions as it stands.

Right. And that is because it is the converse:

1) We DON’T have a system set up to deal with plagiarism already; we DON’T have a set of valid and well known rules that have been evolving for centuries; and we DON’T have specially trained professionals with specific subject matter experience;

2) Plagiarism IS NOT an issue which is general, and IS an issue that pretty much only matters in a few isolated arenas.

Still, there’s really something a little weird about how sexual assault and battery would maybe get diverted into this weird para-justice-system, and simple assault and battery would probably lead to a chat with the cops?

That is entirely true. Sexual assault is just like battery, car theft, and anything else: universal; part of a system; with trained experts; with known laws; etc.

But I don’t want it to be that you can only get help from your school if you go to the cops.

This is a common problem in feminist college-rape discourse: You’re mixing up “help” and “taking action against the accused**.”

Help is things like medicine, psych, protection, assistance with filing a claim, and so on. Help is generally defined as “anything which benefits the accuser WITHOUT hurting the accused.”

Help has NO due process issues and NO complaints, because there’s nobody to do the complaining. If there’s no consequence from an inaccurate accusation, who cares about accuracy?

Punishment is the issue.

And yet, perhaps, shouldn’t a special relationship between the local cops SVU and the college be established that would make that an easier, gentler prospect?

This would be faultless, so long as the college did its best to HELP (“free rides to the police station; lists of victim advocates; free rape kits; etc.) and not JUDGE.

***Here’s step one: everyone involved should start using “accused” and “accuser,” as a means of reminding folks that it makes no sense to adopt a stance of “victim” and “perpetrator” until AFTER you have actually come to a conclusion about who is/was actually a victim and a perpetrator.

It’s hard to believe you intend to create a ‘safe space’ about discussions surrounding feminism when you prime the audience with a rape story.