I'm off then. Good luck.
Feminism and the silencing of women
- Thread starter friendofdorothy
- Start date
I didn't dismiss the thread. I engaged. But whatever.
Solidarity, or something.
krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
friendofdorothy
Solidarity against neoliberalism!
seriously? Did you not know why women who love women are called after Lesvos the island where Sappho lived? she was celebrated on 2nd century coins playing her lute and appears on 10Euro coins now. Only fragments of her poems still exist.Thank you for this, had never heard of Sappho until now.
friendofdorothy
Solidarity against neoliberalism!
If we are talking silencing women in history - when I was young there were hardly any books including women in history - in my polytechnics library there were half a dozen books on suffragettes and a book about british royal women . I read anything I could find on women in history but there was so little.
I was really inspired by this Judy Chicago artwork - The Dinner Party.
I was really inspired by this Judy Chicago artwork - The Dinner Party.
39 women represented every area of life and history - mythology, religion, arts, music, medicine, literature etc and there were hundreds more names of women on the tiles too. It was really inspiring. I had heard of the names and stories of so few of them. Legacies silenced.
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krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
Know about Lesbos and Sapphic, yes. However, did not realize that the latter term originated from Sappho.
Don't really deal with euros but will look closer next time am in Ireland or Europe.
story
Changing the facts
This is why this conversation never gets any further.
The instant men feel cornered by their own thought processes and conditioned responses they bail.
Cloo
Banana for scale
I've read that book Pickman's model - very good, very infuriating. So much was lost to the winners of that early 'culture war'
bluescreen
tofu eating wokerati
I've bored on before about how I went all through school, including English at O-level, A-level and S-level, and non-exam lit without encountering a single work of literature by a woman. We were even told by one teacher that it was because women couldn't write proper literature, just domestic stuff, as they weren't creative like men. (Luckily we had many books by women at home.) Oh, and it's many years since I read Joanna Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing and I may just go back and give it another look.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
One thing I've found out about in the last few years is the (irish) ladies land league,that was in existence in the early 1880s while the men who ran the land league were in prison. They were really radical and in Ireland ran rings round the cops who wanted to prevent and suppress their meetings. It ended after the men's release from jail. There's a bit written about it, about fanny and anna parnell who ran it, but it's very little known of generally, generally Irish nationalism and republicanism seen as wholly man's work tho people like Margaret ward have done sterling service bringing women back to the historical record. There's much more about women in history, and women's history, than there was when I first studied the subject but there's still such a distance to go, it's only been a start made in the last few decades
Cloo
Banana for scale
Very good, very salient article here that I thought worth posting on this thread on the specific contempt reserved for young girls: The war on girls: why can’t society take young women seriously? | shots
bluescreen
tofu eating wokerati
Very good! (And it's long overdue that the creepy Chevalier song in Gigi was called out. In fact the whole character, in fact the whole film...)
ElizabethofYork
Old Crone
Really interesting. Thanks for posting.
friendofdorothy
Solidarity against neoliberalism!
that articulated a lot of stuff I have always felt. No doubt some bloke will be along in a minute to tell us not them, not all men or we are wrong or some such nonsense.
My grand-daughter tells me that all the boys in her class are sexist and ignorant. The casual use of 'rape' in conversation,(along with the still popular 'gay') is bewildering and depressing. These are 10 and 11 year olds in their last year of primary school. The attitude of teachers at school varies but the language is so all pervasive, it doesn't even seem to register how deeply regressive and damaging this is. There is, at best, a sort of vaguely liberal inclusivity, with a wishy-washy attempt at dealing with the more obvious expressions of inequalities (race and gender) but the ubiquitous and casual sexism and misogyny is normalised, resulting in, at most, an exasperated shrug. My daughter has been discouraged from bringing this (again) to the attention of the school authorities because it is expected that young girls either develop some resilience or risk being seen as a trouble-causer/ whiner or fucking snowflake! It is everywhere, all the time. It feels too amorphous and generalised to mount a targeted response other than putting all the onus on our girls to somehow get through this to some imaginary, post adolescent sunny uplands of equality.
mentalchik
"I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit."
Watched a very interesting documentary called "Scouting for Girls" the other evening......set mostly in the 80's it was about the top and most powerful model agencies in the world at the time and how it was a cover for the owners and a large group of their powerful, wealthy friends and financial backers to have a pool of girls, (13,14, 15, 16 years old) to basically have sex with...whilst my old cynical self was not really suprised it was shocking to see the depths of their depravity and how easy to get away with....it was the era of the "supermodels" and young girls were so easily manipulated...these men were actually picking girls from the fashion magazines and paying to have them...made me sick to my stomach
chainsawjob
Kipping in the dunes
Very good article.
I was with my 2 daughters at Olivia Rodrigo at Glastonbury (and the eldest saw Harry Styles at Wembley the week before), they're 12 and 17. The author's right, about the actual power of young girls. We all sang Fuck You at the SC judges.
This all makes me feel fierce, angry and emotional. We've got to stop the (old) men shutting up, hating on, and exploiting young girls especially, but also, all women. Root out every last little bit of misogyny until the playing field is level. God, I feel angry.
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chainsawjob
Kipping in the dunes
This doesn't seem to be my daughters' experience so much. Or maybe I just don't hear about it all. I want to say more when I'm not on my phone. It's all so wrong and pernicious.
I told the school and my daughter told the teacher she was distressed about the boys continually making 'sex noises' in her year 6 class. Another mum I know is feminist called the school. The boys were spoken to more seriously about it following that and they haven't done it since. I had to convince my daughter that the school take racism very seriously and that I expect them to take this as seriously so she was more confident in challenging it.
chainsawjob
Kipping in the dunes
Both my girls have been in friendship groups at school which are either all/mostly LGBT or have a some LGBT members. I think this is one reason there's not the same misogyny. Both pick me up on misgendering their friends or other people (I still struggle with Kae Tempest!). Or on casual sexist assumptions I might make, or stereotypes I unthinkingly use. They're not having it, and they challenge it, with me at least. Hopefully in wider contexts too.
As for the more general school population, my youngest talks lately about her interaction with the boys she gets on with at school, and they seem tolerant, respectful and curious about her being gay. They tease, they use rude words, some of which I think are misogynistic or sexist, about women's bodies, for example, but I think at 12 they're just learning maybe, what's acceptable and what isn't. Obviously they've been influenced to use these words and have these ideas from somewhere, but I haven't got the impression it's more than being uneducated and unthinking. They're still friendly, not nasty or horrible. There's obviously still a huge imbalance between what girls can expect in how they're treated and how boys are. But I think there's more awareness now that this imbalance exists?
Secondary school has been much better than junior school, in that girls aren't seen as 'lesser' by the school on the whole. At Junior the boys got to do football and the girls country dancing at one point, which angered me. WTF, are we in the 1950s? It was a very traditional CofE school, about which we had no choice except to go out of area. They had crap attitudes on many things. Hopeless at sexual health ed, embarrassed to talk about it in some instances. Both girls seem to have come through unscathed from the religious influences though.
I'm sure JimW's right about the incel influence. Thinking back there have been instances of sharing of sexual images by phone (of girls) at school, which had bad consequences for the girl. There's been an instance where one boy wrote fictionalised sexual stories about some of the girls at school, but he, I would guess, had problems over and above the average male student (or am I being generous?). There are regular alerts about students, mostly female, being approached by males on their way home from school, and warnings to stay with another person, not walk alone. So yes, there is certainly this pernicious, more dangerous stuff going on too. But how bad the low level misogyny and sexism going on is, I find hard to gauge.
Does class come into it? We live in a middle class area (posh as far as I'm concerned), but the intake of the secondary school is mixed between the quite wc town it's in, and the outlying rural more middle class area. All my youngest's friends went to different junior schools to her, she hasn't stuck with her friends from there. It's very racially unmixed, mostly white. I don't know what effect either class or race has on all this, some I would imagine. I've heard it suggested that the LGBT acceptance, popularity even, is a mc phenomenon, that you don't get in more wc schools. I'd find that a bit surprising if it's the case.
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chainsawjob
Kipping in the dunes
I've seen a real rise in incel thinking, especially since the pandemic, on another forum I'm involved in running. And it seems to go very much hand in hand with mental health difficulties, it can be hard to see what are just incel ideas, and where that veers into disordered thinking. And it's a job to educate people who aren't very politically informed, quite how dangerous incel ideas can be. How it's lead to events like various mass killings (was it the guy in a vehicle in Toronto or somewhere that was incel?), not to mention all the other lower level stuff. There have been several incel-influenced acts of violence in recent years, and I'm sure it goes back longer than that, before we had a name for incel. But also how it's basically rooted in hatred and despising of women (coupled with a serious resentment that women aren't willing to date/sleep with them, and feelings of confused superiority) which is dangerous to all women.
chainsawjob
Kipping in the dunes
Actually, not being nasty or horrible, is a pretty low benchmark isn't it. It's still misogyny, even if it's apparently friendly. Still needs rooting out.
That manifesto that Elliott Rodger wrote a few years ago, that was clearly a paranoid fantasy. Nazi ideology is also paranoid fantasy i.e the fantasy that there is a persecutor who has it all, is deliberately keeping the goodies from you, is malevolent, and you are the good and superior victim who deserves power and revenge. Its always seemed to me that at the basis there's hatred - and real self-loathing - and this gets hung on ideas that are available out there, incel thinking being very easy to access, and this feeds the hatred and gives it form, and takes on features of disordered thinking, as you say. Its why at the time I said that his motivation wasn't misogyny, which wasn't to say that I couldn't see that there was hatred of women involved, of course there was, but that seemed to me a shape it took from aspects of our culture, that there was something more fundamental underlying it.
I don't think there's much space in our society to talk about the hatred and aggression which is part of our make. up, it's all positive thinking and being kind. There's no space for this in primary schools, helping children recognise these are normal feelings, and how self-dislike gets externalised, and how to reflect on this, how hatred might manifest in sexism or racism etc.
chainsawjob
Kipping in the dunes
Cloo
Banana for scale
Same for my oldest... luckily I think there is a strong sense that homophobia is Not Cool and it certainly doesn't Impress The Girls, so that latter in particular becomes less of thing - you don't have to use homophobia as much to prove you're 'a man'. Robin's school is a quite middle-class-north-London one, though, so I don't imagine it's the norm everywhere.
Regarding incels, it does seem above all about self-hatred - that then gets reflected onto women and girls; from what I've heard they spend an awful lot of time talking about they don't have the apparently prefect facial proportions and strong enough to chin to ever attract the sexy girls so they are valueless may as well 'lie die and rot' - it's really quite pathetic, in both senses. There's no 'self improvement', just accepting you're worth less than other people... something I suppose men and boys are less used to feeling than women... It kind of beggars belief that they haven't noticed the world is full or ordinary-looking people being happy together, but then, they're not looking at the world.
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