Feminism- experiences of man-whispering and the refusal to do so...

[Athos]

The point involves ignoring the fact both genders are capable of being arseholes?

You're half way to proving that proposition.

 

[no-no]

and still lacking an explanation as to why

 

[Treacle Toes]

Read the thread.

 

[dylanredefined]

In my teens and twenties I was like a terrier with the question, asking older women and (more rarely) men, reading books, endless discussions with mates, even asking strangers on trains with whom I’d fallen into conversation. I phrased it in a dozen different ways but it comes down to a sense of real bewilderment about a basic question.

How and why did this happen?

It feels to me that we can’t truly take it apart unless we have some idea about how and why we set it up in the first place.

Was it just an incrementally accumulative process? Was it the agrarian revolution and the consequence of owning the land? Is it because men are scared of our power to produce new life? Is it innate? And when did women agree? Did we go along with it from the start?

But at root, just why and how.

Guess it's all comes down to babies . Men not giving birth are less vital to the tribe. So can be allowed to do high risk high reward stuff as if a few get killed tribes still survives.

 

[campanula]

Guess it's all comes down to babies

Not to mention the truth of that very old saying 'it's a wise child who know it's own father'...which, I think, is behind the fear men have of women...particularly women's biology (which must be controlled...by men.

 

[no-no]

There seem to be two types of examples on the thread which is confusing things.

Some people are posting examples from within their relationships, quite mundane things which are completely equivalent to the sort of behaviour you get from many women.

Then there are other legitimate examples of men in clubs pretty much harrassing women and getting aggressive if knocked back unless the woman delicately extricates herself with some man whispering.

It's not a good idea to label both these behaviours as the same, if you do then it shouldn't be surprising when people respond with "but my wife does that"

 

[Athos]

Not to mention the truth of that very old saying 'it's a wise child who know it's own father'...which, I think, is behind the fear men have of women...particularly women's biology (which must be controlled...by men.

Why is it important for a father to know kids are his? It's arguable that this preoccupation developed at the same time as societies began to accumulate wealth that could be passed to the next generation i.e. the owners if capital wanting to 'protect' it.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

Why is it important for a father to know kids are his? It's arguable that this preoccupation developed at the same time as societies began to accumulate wealth that could be passed to the next generation i.e. the owners if capital wanting to 'protect' it.

There are good examples of matrilineal societies. In many ways it makes better sense to pass things down the mother’s line because there’s less chance of getting the lineage wrong. And yet...

 

[SheilaNaGig]

I do think part of it is basic ownership of the land. In some ways it makes no fucking sense to “own” the land. But once we started farming plants, which can’t move, we needed to guard and protect the crop, and thus the land. The land is equated with Mother Earth, and that seems universal. So fencing the land led to fencing womanhood led to fencing and owning women?

 

[no-no]

I do think part of it is basic ownership of the land. In some ways it makes no fucking sense to “own” the land. But once we started farming plants, which can’t move, we needed to guard and protect the crop, and thus the land. The land is equated with Mother Earth, and that seems universal. So fencing the land led to fencing womanhood led to fencing and owning women?

I think pre agricultural humans also "owned" women....didn't they? It's older than agriculture.

Non agricultural tribes around today still seem to have plenty of patriarchal customs at least.

 

[Athos]

There are good examples of matrilineal societies. In many ways it makes better sense to pass things down the mother’s line because there’s less chance of getting the lineage wrong. And yet...

Mothers didn't have it pass on; the first capital was in the form of tools, which, largely as a result of physical differences, were in the hands of men.

 

[trabuquera]

The move to agriculture was almost certainly the main giant leap backwards for women in human cultures, but even among hunter-gatherer and nomadic, herding societies, there are different balances of power. Raiding and 'stealing' of women and girls as wives, domestic violence, gender segregation of labour etc, all fairly common even in more egalitarian and non-settled setups. Notoriously, in hunter gatherer societies it's nearly all women's work (foraging roots, fishing, gathering plants and small prey) that actually keeps people alive from day to day, but men going out and killing bigger animals gets massively more prestige and kudos, even if it only ever happens intermittently. (Sound familiar? ). Perhaps because unfortunately humans really really really like eating meat. Also, not all cultures are alike even if they live on similar resources - there's a lot of difference between say Yanomamo in the Amazon and Khoi/San in the Kalahari desert or Batwa groups in the equatorial African forest when it comes to patriarchy.

Also matrilinearity doesn't necessarily mean matriarchy (see several cultures in Ghana - where inheritance of goods, land and titles goes down the female line, women work, and there's more equality, but men still 'dominate' and there's plenty of DV etc to go around, plenty of shaming of nonconformist women, men can have several wives but no woman can have several husbands etc etc etc.) There's a good account of how it plays out in practice in a book by Kwame Anthony Appiah called 'In My Father's House' which explores it - he points out wryly that as the son of a Ghanaian dad and a British mum, his mother's culture passed most responsibility to the father's line, while his father's passed it down the mother's line, so who was really in charge?

There's a group in Meghalaya (far far north eastern India) which is matrilineal and they're not the happiest folks in the world as I recall. Same goes for the Chinese subgroup called the Na who're famous for recognising "neither husbands nor fathers" - and while women there are free to choose men for as much or as little romantic time as they like, in practice, most kids grow up being protected by their mums' brothers (ie their maternal uncles) and those uncles are the real bosses in society.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

I think pre agricultural humans also "owned" women....didn't they? It's older than agriculture.

Non agricultural tribes around today still seem to have plenty of patriarchal customs at least.

There’s no way of knowing. We think the first grains were collected for food about 20,000 years ago. The earliest evidence we have for deliberately growing grain was about 9,500 years ago, but it may have been earlier. And I reckon fruit trees and bushes would have been tended and monitored and valued long before grains were cultivated.

All of this can only ever be speculative.

Another possibility is that men were so scared and dumbfounded by women bleeding and not dying, and bringing forth life from their body, that they had to curtail and subjugate them.

We’ll never know. But it’s a question I’ve always asked “when did it start, why and how did it begin?”

Athos ’s idea that it was tools supposes that women didn't use tools. That seems very unlikely to me. Totally unlikely. Weapons, maybe, but not tools.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

There have been some really interesting recent studies that show that the Yamnaya rode throughout Europe and elsewhere and seeding their DNA throughout the entire population, also committing genocide as they went. I wonder if that had some kind of trigger effect in the whole of humanity. This was about 5000 years ago. Not saying it was all peaches and cream before that, but it looks like it was a huge event that caused permanent change.

Here’s the New Scientist link (which is behind a paywall) but lots of other publications reported these findings too.

Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA

 

[no-no]

yes, i'm pretty sure women would have used plenty of tools. obv we don't know for sure but in non agricultural tribes around today women use all sorts of tools. cutting tools to prepare hides, thin needle like things to weave & prep nets, combs, pestels and mortars, fire lighting kits, clothes, ornaments....

I reckon anything of worth would have been coveted and that would have included women, when did it start? as soon as any individual realised they had the strength to take something from another I suppose.

 

[Edie]

Sorry to barge in but as some of you know if your on the sofa, I’m having a pretty visceral experience of trying to stop man-whispering at the moment and the wild and angry side of me wants to share it.

For absolutely years (17 years) I have managed a man’s temper and proclivity to do whatever the fuck he wants (go out on drinking benders, drugs, use working girls, have an affair, leave, be an alcoholic).

For the first 10 years I didn’t even recognise it as a problem. That’s partly cos my early years were fucked up and I used drugs too, and partly cos it is so normalised in our society that men can act like that, go out drinking and womanising, that it just wasn’t that far from ‘the norm’ at times.

Then the violence was intermittent and mundane. Not serious or dramatic. Throwing stuff, throwing me, grabbing and shaking, slaps round the back of my head, slamming me into a door frame. I managed it by ignoring it, smoothing it over, forgiving him, capitulating, agreeing with him.

The reason I did that was because I thought the kids and I were genuinely better off if we stayed together. I earnt peanuts compared to him. And we loved him.

Even when the violence moved from being against me to being against the kids, after he’d left, I still thought the best way, the SAFEST way, of managing it was to minimise it and keep communication open.

Now in retrospect i shot myself in the foot. Social services and the police wanted to prosecute him, and I didn’t think that was best for the kids cos they’d lose their Dad. So I carried on man-whispering instead.

You may read this and think it’s a terribly extreme example of ‘man whispering’ and not really what the thrust of the thread is about. But here’s the thing, the very culture that encourages this shady, permissive behaviour towards men in all number of myriad ways- it creates the backdrop and expectations on which the darker shit plays out.

Man whispering is using passive and negotiating and even manipulate skills because you don’t have the power or the confidence to be assertive. It’s unhealthy. And ultimately, potentially dangerous for some of us.

 

[polly]

Athos ’s idea that it was tools supposes that women didn't use tools. That seems very unlikely to me. Totally unlikely. Weapons, maybe, but not tools.

My sister did her PhD on this and someone else did a paper simultaneously in the States on the same subject. Injuries to bones show that some (#notallwomen) women did a lot more of the heavy hunter gatherer work than we'd previously assumed. Certainly used tools, also used weapons. I can probably get more detail but don't know any off the top of my head.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

My sister did her PhD on this and someone else did a paper simultaneously in the States on the same subject. Injuries to bones show that some (#notallwomen) women did a lot more of the heavy hunter gatherer work than we'd previously assumed. Certainly used tools, also used weapons. I can probably get more detail but don't know any off the top of my head.

Yes, I’m pretty sure I’ve read somewhere about how Neolithic women were equally involved as the men, and sometimes more so. I didn’t have the confidence to say so earlier (because I’m a crap feminist really) so thanks for making me remember what I read somewhere sometime!

 

[polly]

(because I’m a crap feminist really)

Hush your mouth

I'll try to get some sense from her about it. If I get anything useful I'll post it.

 

[Steel Icarus]

So why have things changed? Because although things are far from.ideal, things HAVE changed in the last 100 or even 25 years

 

[SheilaNaGig]

So why have things changed? Because although things are far from.ideal, things HAVE changed in the last 100 or even 25 years

Dunno *shrug*


That’s really all I can say about that. I’m tired of thinking about it and talking about it. Every so often I just need to turn the volume down on the whole entire thing, because otherwise I feel angry and sad a lot, I mean over and above any other angry sad shit I’m dealing with. And war and arms deals and politics and food poverty and all the other shit-show shit is all bound up with the patriarchy, and I can’t do anything about it, because I’m a woman. This is why men need to step up: because otherwise it’s never going to be unpicked.

I’m not dismissing the question, I’m really not. It’s a huge and hugely important question because understanding how and why makes it more possible to undo it and stop doing it. And I’m deeply and massively relieved that finally men are asking these questions. But I’d quite like a break now please. Just a short one, because I know it will take all of us to do this work. But it would be so lovely if men could shoulder some of the burden now please, and women can just slack off enough, just enough, to rest and recover and stop being angry, so that we can all do it together.

Peace and love and all that stuff, ever hopeful....

 

[Steel Icarus]

But it would be so lovely if men could shoulder some of the burden now please, and women can just slack off enough, just enough, to rest and recover and stop being angry, so that we can all do it together.

See this is where I think it could come over as accusatory especially to men who think rightly or wrongly they ARE doing this.

 

[Manter]

Massive hugs Edie. I think you are very brave to try and break the cycle and I *completely agree* that the little/mundane stuff enables the big scarier stuff.

 

[trabuquera]

So why have things changed? Because although things are far from.ideal, things HAVE changed in the last 100 or even 25 years

Because of contraception and mass media you dingbat! (< I mean it with affection, honestly.)

Ever since survival's become less dependent on brute physical strength and labour, because we weren't all wielding scythes or mining coal any more, women's evident capacities have become more obvious. It's possible to escape your area/tribe/nation/family's culture and join another if you don't like it. Because women got the vote in the end and as soon as they did, society didn't collapse, but it became more obvious that they too were/are human beings with choices. It can all still go to sh*t in a moment, especially in times of war, or on a night bus for that matter, but fewer people these days are willing to maintain that women *really are* all hopeless idiots to be, at best, protected and told what to do, for their own safety.

I still say that the availability of birth control worldwide is going to change things far more than we can begin to imagine and in historical terms that process is only just beginning. It might seem, what with the incels and the manspreaders and whatnot that sexism is as bad as it ever was, if not worse - but that's a false reading. Progress is being made (in the teeth of vicious resistance) and there's so much still to do. But patriarchy is not inescapable. It isn't even inevitable. No matter how wearying it gets, there can be no giving up. It needs breaking, just like belief in witchcraft or the divine right of kings.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

See this is where I think it could come over as accusatory especially to men who think rightly or wrongly they ARE doing this.

Really?!

I thought we had travelled past the point where everything had to be wrapped in caveats like NAMNAW.

To be clear, I recognise acknowledge and am grateful to the men who are our allies, who are working to understand and overturn the patriarchy, who are ambassadors for women, who do the hard work of self examination and self directed change. I salute and give thanks to and for those men who pull their weigh, do their share, join in, look around to see where the gaps and holes are. I also salute and give thanks to those men (and they are legion) who do their share of “men’s work” and bringing home the bacon while sacrificing their free time, and their close relationships with their own children, so that their partners can be at home doing the nurturing care giving and child rearing, and who honour and respect that work, while unstintingly and uncomplainingly carry on trying to make things work and ends meet inside this nasty machine.

 

[Miss-Shelf]

See this is where I think it could come over as accusatory especially to men who think rightly or wrongly they ARE doing this.

It's not a test that can be passed once and for all

Any unpicking/ dismantling of oppressive systems goes in fits and starts of understandings and non understandings

Energised by recent public debate on women's experiences I'm looking more closely at my own behaviour and expectations of my relationships with men and finding things I can change

So when you say you're already doing it, do you mean you're already aware of the need to go ever deeper into your own and other males behaviour and reframe them in light of how it affects women?

 

[Steel Icarus]

I didn't say "I". Was talking generally, and thinking perhaps outside of the urban bubble. It's all well and good receptive blokes being asked to step up in the good fight but those less enlightened?

 

[campanula]

Why is it important for a father to know kids are his

You don't have any, do you Athos...because I will guarantee you wouldn't be so blase about patrimony if you had...although I will also agree wholeheartedly that blood is not thicker than water and a parent is simply one who parents (my, dragging up all the old saws today, Camps)
In my limited experience, the men who are actively engaged with child-rearing (including the huge acceptance and even sacrifice involved in raising dependents), tend to develop a less selfish and self-centred capacity. Often seen as a disadvantage (by owners of capital) for men to become so...'feminised'...but for women, well, it is always an improvement, sharing the emotional load of offspring. Obviously, this is purely anecdotal (but have seen a lot of relationships reach a crisis at precisely the point where a new life is added to the mix...and certainly, when my feminism was formed in the 70s, there was a LOT of time spend in consideration of female biology - how it impacted in the wider world...with childcare being a wedge issue (who did it...and why.)

The biological difference resulting in childbirth and the subsequent years of effort in raising the new generation) has always been a fulcrum upon which economic, social, cultural attitudes and behaviour must (uneasily) balance. Adding birth control, including abortion, into the mix really seems to raise some very atavistic fears in some men...particularly those who view women (and their childbearing capacity) as capital.

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

Why is it important for a father to know kids are his?

Same reason it is important for a child to know who their father is. Love.

 

[weepiper]

When you work in repairs you tend not to listen too much to the customer because they often get it wrong, you still have to carry out the diagnostic checks or you might miss something. The gender of the customer isn't important, if anything it's usually the men who think they're the expert and already know what the problem is.

I work in repairs and can confirm that this is absolute bollocks.