seventh bullet
sovietwave
Again, no.
Feminism - where are the threads?
- Thread starter JudithB
- Start date
Again, no.
SheilaNaGig
Break requested
Thanks for asking. But that discussion has happened over and over and nothing has changed.
I’d like it if I could read along, and if I get stuck or lost, say so without expectation of mocking, scolding, or being told to refer to an obscure treatise.
I really admire Edie because despite being mocked and scolded in the past she keeps plugging away and finally someone will give her a brief laypersons outline of what she needs to know in order to understand the discussion. I’m always glad when she’s on a thread in there.
I don’t know any philosophy or political theory over and above the basics I’ve picked up along the way. But I don’t feel shit out on feminism/sexism threads, and that’s not because I’m a woman and so have first hand experience blah blah. After all, I’m person and a voter and a worker and I’ve been at the shitty end of things like everyone else, so why am I made to feel that I’m not qualified to make a point or ask a question in p&p?
If course it’s partly my own fault. But I know it’s also largley the fault of the roaring lumbering attitudes I find in there.
SheilaNaGig
Break requested
seventh bullet
sovietwave
<shrugs>
SheilaNaGig
Break requested
The thing is seventh bullet you've left no room for “Why do you feel that way...? In what ways might this have contributed to this assumption....?”
So it’s the end of the discussion. You’re right and I’m wrong. Apparently.
seventh bullet
sovietwave
I never said you were wrong. I was never denying your experience. My post was about firstly relaying my own experience of p+p generally and wanted to expand further on just how long it took before I plucked up the courage to begin to explore my own views so publicly, open to blistering attack.
It was about acknowledging people feeling vulnerable and also how long term posters have actually attacked those who seek to bully others and act as an authority via not only their behaviour but the content of their arguments getting ripped apart. That's a good thing imo.
spanglechick
High Empress of Dressing Up
The problem for me with saying that everything is structural and the only answer is to undo capitalism... is that as kabbes has said, that’s going to take a good while. In the meantime, In actually quite short timescales, working within capitalism, advances have been made.
Some oppressed groups have been helped by changes that weren’t about undoing the whole structure. Now those changes have often only benefitted some sections of the oppressed group... but not always and that doesn’t make them meaningless anyway.
To choose the most lightweight, middle class example: The Let Toys Be Toys movement may feel like rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic, and it obviously doesn’t address food poverty or domestic abuse or FGM, let alone bring down capitalism. But it’s been achievable wins on the route to a small battleground. And individual women have been involved.
The answer to austerity hitting women hardest might be “undoing capitalism”, but in the meantime shouldn’t we get the fuck on with working within the system we have? Isn’t that what we, as feminists should be actually doing?
Some oppressed groups have been helped by changes that weren’t about undoing the whole structure. Now those changes have often only benefitted some sections of the oppressed group... but not always and that doesn’t make them meaningless anyway.
To choose the most lightweight, middle class example: The Let Toys Be Toys movement may feel like rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic, and it obviously doesn’t address food poverty or domestic abuse or FGM, let alone bring down capitalism. But it’s been achievable wins on the route to a small battleground. And individual women have been involved.
The answer to austerity hitting women hardest might be “undoing capitalism”, but in the meantime shouldn’t we get the fuck on with working within the system we have? Isn’t that what we, as feminists should be actually doing?
Athos
Well-Known Member
Ta. I see how that would make it better from your perspective.
Manter
Lunch Mob
Athos
Well-Known Member
I guess it depends on the unintended consequences of our actions; the risk being that some efforts to make capitalism less harmful end up perpetuating it. But I agree with the sentiment, and think there's loads we can (and should) do, here and now, to e.g. end the gender pay gap, that can be done alongside attempts to end capitalism, and that are not only consistent with those attempts, but, also, further them. I don't know any serious anti-capitalist that would argue that no other struggles should take place; historically, liberation struggles (e.g. Black Panthers) have been an important component of class struggle. But they are different from, say, a campaign whose ultimate aim is to ensure capitalism is 'fairer' by increasing the number of black people in the boardroom.
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SheilaNaGig
Break requested
I understand when a thread is moving quickly that there may not be the time, inclination or opportunity to explain something. But if people are able to take the time to make a mocking jeering post, then they have time to jot a couple of lines to clarify something. So why do one and not the other.
We can’t all be experts in everything (I’m considered an authority in my own field but my political theory is very basic). And I really am puzzled by the apparent reluctance to share, include, bring in, teach, and increase understanding. Surely ffs that basic tenet underlines left politics, right? But it doesn’t translate into the general atmosphere in there.
I’ll stop now, no further derailing from me.
I always wonder whether those calling for its legalisation would a) be willing to do sex work themselves and/or b) be happy being forced into it by the DWP in order to get them off the dole.
seventh bullet
sovietwave
I guess the DWP already forces people into it, unofficially.
Not dissimilar to fully legalising drugs under the current system where Smith Klein Beecham becomes your dealer.
Good point that I wouldn’t disagree with. But one that wealthy liberals probably don’t consider.
eoin_k
Lawyer's fees, beetroot and music
In my experience feminists who argue that "sex work is work" include a fair few women with first-hand experience of the sex industry, as well as others who put their politics into practice organising with sex workers and collaborating on other projects with them. Their perspective is also often informed by an autonomist feminist/Marxist critique of work in general, too.
May I bring up a short anecdote to illustrate how deeply (some) women have internalised a way of thinking which directly reflects both class and the patriarchal hegemony which still casts a long shadow? In the 80s/90s, I worked for several women's organisations including the Cambridge Women's Resource Centre. When this opened, we had 1 full-time worker and several part-timers. I joined because there was a free creche, and eventually taught carpentry for several years. Everyone was paid a basic flat rate. Everyone. However, as the organisation became more successful, council, European and even lottery money allowed us to expand and employ more workers. Initially, it was agreed that creche workers would recieve exactly the same rate as the admin crew in the office, along with various tutors. This arrangement did not last the first year of having salaried workers and within 2 years, there was a complete separation of the 'real, qualified' workers...and creche workers, many of whom came to the job as a parent themselves. Fulltime workers were paid 4 times more than creche workers, who also had no employment rights apart from a very vague rota not dissimilar to the current zero hour contracts. The higher paid types argued vigorously that they had been to uni and had 'experience' plus their jobs were somehow 'more important' while creche work was demoted to the usual lowly position BY OTHER FUCKING WOMEN! Tell me this was not class based entitlement because I have no explanation for the utter betrayal. I have never worked in a women -only organisation since as I found the weight of dissonance and hurt, along with casual dismissal of fellow women, ro be unforgiveable.
I have floundered regarding feminism in the last 30 years and struggle to find relevance for a specific feminist discourse. The deep structures of equality run far deeper than equal pay...and at heart, I feel, is a contempt for parenthood (not just women either) which reflects the prevailing attitudes towards caring and other modes of action which are not easily quantified or placed in a hierarchy of status where worth and value are predicated on profit, consumption and a fear of falling off some imaginary economic ladder.
I have floundered regarding feminism in the last 30 years and struggle to find relevance for a specific feminist discourse. The deep structures of equality run far deeper than equal pay...and at heart, I feel, is a contempt for parenthood (not just women either) which reflects the prevailing attitudes towards caring and other modes of action which are not easily quantified or placed in a hierarchy of status where worth and value are predicated on profit, consumption and a fear of falling off some imaginary economic ladder.
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Is Let Toys Be Toys working? To me, it seems that the whole area is light years behind where it was 20 years ago.
A perfect example of class vs identity politics. Your fellow identitarians will more often than not sell you down the river than the reverse.
It is also fair to say that I despair of the increasingly fragmented, almost tribal cliques - a horrible twisting of the earnest politics of single interest groups, including feminism, which has proved to be such an effective weapon in the armoury of Capital. The seemingly intractable class/identity is also an example of a false binary since they are not in opposition, yet are frequently construed as such. I am fed up with foregrounding difference rather than solidarity. My initial feminism was actually a hopeful belief that boundaries of gender and biology could be dissolved or at least recognised as not some immutable law of nature, but something to be resisted.
I edited my post, Magnus McGinty, because I am really uncomfortable with drawing an adversarial line between class and identity - it seems easy and obvious, to me, that one is in a fundamental relationship with the other.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
+1. I've never heard or read anyone serious addressing gender issues who doesn't think there are deeper structural issues, but addressing individual instances in this context is how things progress. How else is anything going to happen? Let Toys Be Toys is great, it achieves something measurable and works in a broader systemic way too.
It seems to me that the major modes of attack on feminism still seem to be denying the existence of anything structural. "There's no gender pay gap, women just do different jobs", "toxic masculinity doesn't exist some men are just bastards it's not to do with society" etc. Including some people nominally lefties or anarchists.
I think that's an absurd idealisation of class politics.
Thinking a bit harder, I find I am also not comfortable in isolating parenting as a pivotal point, but service work, ranging from retail to care work, has been placed in a economic and psychological subaltern position (Gods, let me resist using political theory terms I am not altogether sure of). The ease and 'naturalness' which this has been ascribed as 'women's work', and devalued for the usual range of reasons, has, I think, more use as a rallying point than concentrating on equal pay...In employment rights, the main inequality is still the sharpening distinctions between owners/workers, blue collar/white collar, us and them. Feminism is a specific subset of a broader category of social justice. I think small, grass roots campaigning (Pink Stinks and Let Toys be Toys are terrific) though, spanglechick
It isn’t though, is it? My point here is that women can oppress women as equally as men can oppress women. With class the distinctions are clear.
In what bizarre world would women not be capable of doing horrible things to other women? But as equally as men oppress women? Really? What distinctions? Ah soz - forgetting quotes) Magnus McGinty
I’m losing sight of the context within the point I raised was made. Read backwards, if I’ve said something irrelevant then accept my apologies, I’m not after a row and the point you raise wasn’t one I was raising.
Class vs Identity every day of the week.
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