Misguided post on feminism

oh shit...i thought it was a trail-off misspell of taking polaroids

You learn something new every day, Wills.

ahh cheers. i'm obvioulsy insufficiently old, british and/or gay for this thread

hey Serge, wanna write for a magazine?

Shit, I'm not that old! Polari was used back in the days when it was illegal.

Wills, maybe.

polari or being gay

on side note when i studied law there was an influential school of thought that said anything that was voluntary could legitimately be banned - thus banning beards is ok but banning blacks is not, hence the tories banging on about being gay as 'a lifestyle choice'.

Being gay pre-1968.

i do forget how recently this kinda stuff was illegal. Its like it was legal for a man to rape his wife (or rather it wasn't classed as rape) up until like the 70's i think (whoa back on topic with a vengeance 8) ).

up until the eighties actually!

I believe it was more recent than that, someone posted the details of the case that set the precedent on another thread recently.

I believe in certain Latin American countries rape an wife-murder are easliy gotten away with. And of course 'honor killings' in the Occident...

Poor Oscar ,in Reading Gaol for two years, several hundred gays atleast fled across the channel to France as his trial tanked...those that wore the Green Carnation.

Yeats had arranged for his escape...the police were expecting it, really, would have looked the other way...his Mother told him to 'face up to it son, or I'lll never speak to ye again..." and the rest is tragedy. A warden at Reading told one of his friends that, never having done hard labor in his life, he would be dead within 2 years, and he was. Biographer Ellman postulates w /no small proof that it was ultimately syphilis, tho. And Nietschze, as well, both in the year of our lord 1900.

I believe in this country rape is also easily got away with too. And wife-murder is also slightly easier to get of in this country than you'd imagine, too.

http://www.jfw.org.uk/ONTRIAL.HTM

quite dreadful.

gwen, I dunno, but maybe walking beard has a problem with some feminism because its not explictly w/c. Then he can be united with them, and accept that some of his interests coincide, despite being superficially excluded.

I still see the fat geek with the Darth Vader helmet, although my first impression was a somewhat wafe-ish new romanticism scenester, all of which is prolly totally wrong...

And maybe I have not been clear, that is possible. I am not against anyone acting anyway they want. The point of the Dan Savage articles is that looking for 'straight acting' is fucked up. There is nothing wrong with being a sissie. It is no more an act for some people than not being a sissie. But compared to self-conscious passing that tries to hide oneself in some mask of "straightness", being the sissie one feels like takes a lot of courage because it is a far less safe thing if it is who you are everyday.

Of course, the objections to me in this whole discussion are implicitly about the gay ghetto where it is much safer to let your sissie out than some kid in high school or in some generally hetero-normative community or workplace, where it is "unprofessional" or worse, simply physically unsafe.

And of course the other side of Dan Savage's point is that there is no such thing as a 'Gay Lifestyle' or a 'Straight Lifestyle', and that acting as if there was perpetuates oppression and identity garbage.

But I am sorry, its you rotters (and you know who you are) who started picking on sissie and queens for being campy. To which my response still remains, "Fuck off you fucking campy anarchists." Jeezus, i am sorry but no anarchist has a right to make comments on anyone else's fashion sense...

And yay for the bears... "Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear, fuzzy wuzzy wore leather there.. and there... and there, but not there where fuzzy wuzzy was awfully bare."

Chris

Sorry the only thing I know w/c to stand for is water closet.

?

There is an idea I cam accross called queer by choice ( http://www.queerbychoice.com/ - how many rainbows can you get into one page?). It deals specifically with the above concept.

Some mainstream gay lib organisations deal with queerness as something you are "born with". That is certainly what I got in school. These people cannot help being the way they are (if they could then they would change to be straight obviously!) so you should be nice to them. It's not their /fault/. It's just like having a disability....

I do think that sexuality is fluid and has a lot to do with choices made by a person. Like a lot of people choose to be straight because it is convinient. Some feminists choose to be lesbians because it satisfies them politically.

I chose to be a punk because I thought that's what anarchists did.

I was not very good.

Yeah thats what meant I meant.

Well, tbh, if some feminisms, think that women's interests cannot coincide with men's, how can anyone who gives a shit about themselves just roll over?

Noramlly, I'm like, totally let minorities do whatever they want, but what good does it do? Some people think that a critical theory is not worth anything if after its application those who were oppressors do not see its worth. If we cannot have anything in common - then we're hardly going to agree.

Surely your not going to get anywhere without men co-operating, or some kind of violent revolution?

Are you armed?

Or are you just going to shame men out of existence?

Sounds a bit loopy! I shouldn't comment on stuff I know nothing about. But I'm here to learn!

Sorry I am not sure what you mean by "roll over" and I don't know who you mean by "anyone" but other than that...

I think the idea is more that wimmin's interests DO NOT coincide with men's, rather than CAN NOT. While there are many men who recognise the benefits feminism could bring them, they are still in a position of privilege compared to wimmin overall and feminism challenges this.

Wimmin are not a minority. Wimmin are not a minority. Wimmin are not a minority.

Calling wimmin a minority or dealing with us in that way will never help the situation. Numbers don't make an opressive system. For examples, in addition to men being a slight minority, the ruling class are an extreme minority. An 80% black town in a white supremicist nation will still be subject to that racism.

Sexism and other forms of opression don't exist because there are less of one group than anothr. I think that is part of the "tyranny of the majority" argument that I learned in school as an answer to the question about why our "democracy" isn't more direct. It is a gross simplication and to a large extent ignores the insidious nature of opression.

OK so the primary work of feminism traditionally has been within communities of wimmin. The best way to ensure we don't get shit from men is to empower ourselves not to take it. We support each other in this, for example rape crisis work and shelters for wimmin coming from abusive relationships.*

There are criticisms that we leave men behind with this strategy. Personally I don't see anything at all wrong in working to correct a power imbalance in myself and those whose experiences are like mine, and more importantly get treated the same way by the system. I only have a very few hours every week to do this sort of work and I think it's reasonable to use those in my own interest.

If there was a male feminsit movement I would support them and stand in solidairty. I would support working with them on stuff. But we can't start that. The feminist movement was born of our experiences as wimmin, as in the classic slogan "the personal is political". Most wimmin do not have the experience of beign a man so how can we build a movement that addresses their problems? We cannot.

It is largely up to men to emancipate themselves. Wimmin cannot do it for them. We have a large body of feminism written and acted by us, about our experiences. I generally pick up every feminist book by or about men that I find, and on my whole shelf of feminist books I have precisely three that I know to be written by a guy.

* Not all sexual and physical assault is perpetrated by men over wimmin. In homosexual relationships, as far as I know (I'm not an expert), there is a comparable amounts of abuse. It is known that some wimmin's resources will not work with wimmin they know to be coming from a lesbian relationship. I wonder if this is because they have so few resources they feel the need to focus. Limited resources are certainly often the issue when people ask why feminists don't do this that or another thing.

That is the main reason why I'm not a feminist.

You're afraid of losing privilage?

Or possibly because of people who call themselves feminists and say things like that?

I never understand what the privileges are that men have to lose? Why cant the privileges be gained all round?

Well, whatever OP was talking about - anyone (man/woman/beast) accpeting that they have to lose privilege, while knowing their interests do not coincide/they are going to be excluded. iyswim

Can anyone recommend a feminist book? I should read something really!

Doesn't 'privilege' just mean that you get special/different treatment of a kind that people think is good? So, almost by definition it couldn't be gained all round.

I guess there are some things which are now thought of as privileges which it'd be cool for everyone to have - having a swimming pool in your back garden for instance. They'd become just things about everyone's life, not privilege

But I think the sorts of privileges in question are aspects of social relations bound up with the domination of one gender over the other. So, while there's a sense in which everyone can gain the privilege of having a swimming pool, there's no way that everyone could get the privilege of always jumping to the front of the queue - or having a lot of imagery in the public domain present your identity over and above others. So I guess it depends on the sort of privilege we're talking about.

Yeah sure that makes sense.

I dont really Get OliverTwister/Gwen/Johns lats 3 posts in relation to that tho.

Theres Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist anthology

http://www.akpress.org/2002/items/quietrumoursamarchafeministreader

http://www.anarcha.org/sallydarity/QuietRumoursIndex.htm

(and that last website) which might have some ok stuff on it...

But that's a rubbish idea anyway, or at least i think so and I AM a feminist. I think on the whole women's interests do coincide with men's. I'm not denying patriarchy or anything, or arguing that it's a side issue, but I personally think that class oppression is the most fundamental issue we all face. Things like gender, race, sexuality, ability etc etc are played out on to this and are significant and you con't just simplify them or write them off, but a lot of feminist perspectives don't recognise that.

I think that anyone who calls themselves an anarchist/libertarian communist/whatever must be a feminist, you can't have libertarian communism without feminism. And you can't have meaningful feminism without, well, libertarian communism.

I gotta agree with that!