“I say: the world is getting colder and meaner, and there are too many of us now for anybody to hold back the culture revolution that’s coming.”

Where exactly are all these cultural revolutionaries? By the looks of things the winner of the next election will be the Conservative Party, not the Radical Cultural Revolutionary Socialist Party.

This piece reminds me of the radicals in the 1960s who thought the revolution was just round the corner. The rest of the country just ignored them then voted for Ted Heath in 1970 (ok, so only 46% did but the majority of Labour supporters didn’t unleash the revolution either).

I honestly believe that you have to have hope.
And what’s more, I don’t believe that significant cultural change is going to be acheived by our politicians any time soon. I think it’s going to happen in spite of them.

Since the internet is largely anonymous your ability to win a debate ultimately rests on your ability to marshal evidence and construct a rational arguement. The reason you find the Internet so hostile is that the kind of special pleading that gets you by at a SWP meeting or on the university campus has no dominion here.

‘Identity politics’ mean fuck all in a world where you can invent a new identity in the time it takes to open a new hotmail account.

And anyone who posts under a ‘realistic’ sounding name is either lying about it, or lying to themselves if they think their online persona represents what they are really like.

And I thought: fuck you. Fuck all of you snide little losers and rednecks and toryboys spitting bile at keyboards in your sad little bedrooms. This is my internet too. I want it back.

Heh, well said. The amount of times I’ve thought this too…

love this post Laurie.

Actually in the Matrix it was the guy who sold them out to the machines that said the Kansas is going bye-bye line – I re-watched it the other day, honest!

I like the fighting spirit in this article. We need something like that in the public sphere offline too – someone in parliament saying it. At the same time I share Richard’s concern that this echoes some of what was said in the late 60s, but ultimately to no avail. I remember watching Woodstock quite a few years ago, and whilst finding a lot of it inspirational, I couldn’t help but feel “Well, they clearly they didn’t stop war, violence, famine, poverty, racism, sexism, etc”. I felt like they had failed, and had mistaken their resistance for victory – in the same way that I see a lot of my more radical fellow students reveling in the act of resistance itself rather than what that might actually result in. Are we ever actually going to stop these things, or is it just a case of the virtue is in the struggle? Because I don’t see any inherent virtue in constantly trying to defeat these things, and constantly failing, and “hoping” that the generation that comes after us will finally do it.

Perhaps the wheel of progress turns slowly, and we are impatient for change: I know I am.

Laurie,

I am an old heterosexual white man. The place I feel most comfortable on the internet is a largely, or allegedly for the alliteration, Asian web site. Pickled Politics if you ever want to look it up.

I consider (most) of the people there friends.

It is voices like yours we need to hear, not the stereotypical aggressive folk.

There are folk that comment here, there, everywhere, who come simply to rant. And I do not mean that in a good way. Evidence shall not divert them and they see this media as just another way of spreading their attitudes and opinions. Fuck that.

It is, at the end of the day, a fact that folk like that are on a slippery, slidey slope to nowhere.

I have seen – to be honest – more rants against homosexuality. But that is not to say that the anti-lesbian brigade can’t come out in whatever pathetic force they can muster. The risk, for you is that you might think that these folk represent the world.

They do not.

I for one – as the old, etc etc – need to hear alternative points of view, lest I become as fossilized as you detractors.

Least, that’s what I think.

(Though there might be a codicile, later.)

IRC channels, gaming communities, debate forums and messageboards are no longer populated by a self-referential community of mostly-white, mostly-middle-class males with ponytails and ketchup on their tshirts*.

Debates about how to increase the number of women involved in the the technological engineering that underlies modern communication systems are vital, and we need to discuss problems of class, race and gender inequalities in the computer science and programming communities in general. However, dismissing an entire subculture by an offensive stereotype like that, one that has been used for decades to break down a certain type of person for being different, is not the way to do it.

Shatterface: “Since the internet is largely anonymous your ability to win a debate ultimately rests on your ability to marshal evidence and construct a rational arguement.”

Oh dear. Not been present at many internet “debates” then, have you? What colour is the sky on your planet?

Too funny.

Maybe because it’s a Monday morning, while I share many political sympathies with Laurie, I side more with the pessimistic angles of her piece than the hopeful nuggets in there.
Yup, direct identity is fluid on the internet. That has given a voice to many hitherto marginalised and powerless people but what it has also allowed is for everyone to play identity politics. It’s also provided an easy, bugger-all-effort required, platform for the idle, complacent and bigoted to make a loud noise, probably empty sound, but enough nonetheless to scare many of the traditionally downtrodden as they are just beginning to assert themselves.
In some respects, the masks are off, as although direct identities are often hidden, the opinions of these identities aren’t, and it does sometimes feel like the weight of those opinions isn’t liberal: it’s light on evidence, heavy on stereotypes, obsessed by ephemera, nasty and brutish.Maybe it’s an indicator of just how big a battle it is we have to fight, almost for a new rationality, a new enlightenment with humanity at its core alongside solid evidence to counter the assertion, oppression and ignorance that appears too often to be prevailing. We’re not helped by ‘false friends’ (I’m thinking New Labour types) who seem to delight in appeasing the ignorant on their terms, but who also use their tactics of distorting facts, telling plain lies, mendacity and venality.

Well said Laurie.

I’m slightly more optimistic than you seem to be though. I remember first going into chat rooms about eleven years ago and finding plenty of ‘safe’ spaces for the those wanting to escape “white heteronormativity” (thanks for the new word, by the way).

Having said that, we shouldn’t need separate spaces. People should just be respectful of each other.

The suggestion that we’re all “equal” online because we can all hide our identities or invent new ones is utter nonsense. The case remains that white hetero men can more freely choose whether to be open about their identity or not, whereas the rest of us need to choose whether or not to invite hostility from the sad little people who think abuse and debate are the same thing.

I think it basically comes down to the nature of the medium. I doubt very much if you got all the CiF contributors into one room (for example), identified each one and then asked them to discuss any given issue, whether the same level of abuse would be evident. The behaviour basically stems from the safety of anonymity. Which is a bit sad really. Perhaps blogs should have a pop-up warning to anyone posting a comment, along the lines of: “would you say this to your mother?”

Dood, Biting Beaver was targeted after a post describing her horror at her son masturbating to pornography and wishing that she’d aborted him. The whole messy saga can be read about here:

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/BitingBeaver

Do I think that people acted in an excessive fashion? Unquestionably, without a doubt. But I also find it pretty damn weird that you’re a fan of someone who can write something like this:

“Several years ago my accountability program found that the computer had been accessing pornography. Turns out it was my middle son. To date he has been ‘caught’ accessing pornography many times since then. He was 13 I think when this started.
“I banned him from the computer, but after a few months I would allow him to be on it for short periods of time. Each and every single time my son would access pornography within days (and sometimes hours) of being allowed back online. He was aware that he would be caught because the computers are monitored but he chose to do it anyway.

“Most recently my youngest son allowed my middle son to play with his PSP. Brandon (the middle child) used it to immediately access pornography online. The child is now banned from computers, video games and so forth. I’ve talked until I’m blue in the face, I’ve grown angry and yelled, I’ve cried when I was alone and when I was in front of him. I’ve had him read Dworkin, my site, and other places (namely OAG’s site) and I still can’t unseat this problem. He can recite feminist literature all day long, he can understand the tenets, the ideas behind it, how it links together but he will not allow this knowledge to stand in the way of his porn use.

“I don’t think I’m looking for advice (I’ve tried everything I could think of so far) but more a place to simply be sad. I can clearly see why he’s looking at pornography, I’ve figured all that out readily enough, but I can’t seem to make it stop.

“I know, that as soon as my child leaves my home and moves into his own place that he will be looking at porn immediately. I know that I am raising a problem for women. I know that this child will one day grow and will fully absorb the messages that porn sends to men. I know that my child masturbates to degradation of my people (when I use that phrase I mean womyn) and that with every orgasm he will further solidify his own hatred of and superiority over, women.

“I know that there will likely come a day where my son coerces a young woman into sex (rape) and there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it. I look into the eyes of my son and they still sparkle like they did when he was a baby, but he’s not a baby anymore, he’s growing into a man and that man will have trained himself to degrade women before he leaves my home.

“As a radical feminist who puts women first I cannot begin to determine what I should do with regards to this issue. My heart breaks because there is nothing I can do to protect the womyn he will come into contact with.

“I have three boys. One of them is lost to me and as a mother and a radical womyn this breaks my heart in a way I can scarcely express. I don’t know if it says something terrible about me, but you know what haunts me late at night? More than anything else? I know, in my heart of hearts that, knowing what I know now, if I had it to do over again I would have had that abortion.

“I also find myself blaming myself over and over again, even though that radical womyn inside of me stands up and yells that I’m placing blame in the wrong place. I’m not sure what I intended to say with this message. I began writing it this morning and put it away again and finally decided to finish it this evening. I think that maybe I just wanted to share, I keep trying with Brandon and I keep failing. He simply doesn’t care. When he wants to jerk off, everything goes right out the window.”

Isn’t this the antithesis of your sort of feminism, Penny

Good spot James@13. Blimey, that’s vile crazyness. Very obviously, that doesn’t excuse sending her death threats, but it’s a long way from the ‘brave campaigner in terrible situation driven offline for writing about her life’ narrative that LP outlines.

I was almost about to make a comment about LC not having the kind of patronising fuckwittishness that characterises rightwing blogland… but then Newmania and Jackart kindly stepped in to remind me that actually, it does. Good work.

The attack on BB started with her abortion this came after.

Then, Biting Beaver received so many death threats that she was driven from the internet and disappeared.

So Biting Beaver was her real name then?

Having read her words above, I do not think I need reiterate my concerns about the feminist view that lesbian couples have an absolute right to have children.

She makes the case.

“Having read her words above, I do not think I need reiterate my concerns about the feminist view that lesbian couples have an absolute right to have children”

What’s the link with lesbian couples?

Laurie,

This is a great post. I want to find a suitable link for the pseudonym phase of RaceFail09, but it might take a while, so I’ll just post this now.

self-referential community of mostly-white, mostly-middle-class males with ponytails and ketchup on their tshirts

I’m struck, once again, by the fact that you seem to devote as much time to attacking other counter-cultures than you do to attacking the prevailing ideologies of our age. Geek counter-culture gave us the internet, IRC, blogs, the totally invented-identity worlds of WoW (or whatever; I don’t play it personally, but I’ve played similar things) and so forth, yet it often seems to be first in your firing line. As someone who broadly agrees with what you’re trying to say, I’m bemused to find my ‘tribe’ on the list of enemies of the revolution.

I’m genuinely shocked and disappointed that people give you abuse for your writing. It is, for the most part, pretty good and a valuable addition to the blogosphere, although it does bear recording that some people will object to just about anything. Fortunately, these people are normally safely ignored as the idiots that they are.

Biting Beaver, on the other hand… I do dimly recall her, though I can’t remember why. Possibly I saw a post about her, and I know a few people who post on SA so maybe that’s where I heard about her. I think that – abuse, which we definitely disapprove of, aside – a perfect example of someone with very strong views coming up against other people who disagree and not liking it very much. I don’t think that it is necessary to create a ‘safe space’ for people to hold and expound strong views in total isolation from anyone who might disagree. The basically open nature of the internet makes that a fairly tricky thing to do in the first place. And I don’t think that that is what you are suggesting.

Now sit the fuck down and see what we’re going to build with the pieces.

One tiny criticism: you’re good at rhetoric, but rhetoric doesn’t make things happen. I’ve lost count of the number of incredibly driven, inspired people who have encountered the internet with its myriad possibilities and declared an intention to harness this power to change the world. When it comes to actually building something, they tend to fail. Until you can be a bit more specific, I think it’s fair to assume that you might end up the same way

Susan, thank you.

Encyclopaediadramatica is a hack site, and it describes BB not as a feminist writer or even as a blogger, but as a ‘cumdumpster’. I’m having no truck with it.

No, actually, I don’t agree with everything she said. She’s a radical feminist; I’m a socialist feminist. We’re descending into ad hominem here, though; point is that she was chased off the tubes in the nastiest possible way for daring to talk about her abortion.

Some women, BB amongst them, have been abused so consistently and repeatedly by men that they become misandrists, and/or violently anti-porn radical feminists. I don’t agree with that viewpoint, partly because I’ve been lucky enough not to have suffered that level of abuse, but I can see totally and completely where it comes from, actually. I can accept that hatred and try to differ myself from it.

From a radfem’s point of view, catching your son obsessing over misognyist porn is the equivalent to catching your son dressed in a Nazi uniform, reading ‘Mein Kampf’ and jacking off over a picture of holocaust victims. It’s the equivalent. And if I found my 13 year old son doing that? Yeah, I’d question what I’d brought into the world, actually. I’d probably still love him, but I’d be incredibly disappointed, and try to explain to him exactly why.

Sorry if that shocks you. But no, I don’t think women have a duty to respect whatever men want to fantasise about putting their dicks in. I think men, and women, have the capacity to be better than that.

[troll]
I was almost about to make a comment about LC not having the kind of patronising fuckwittishness that characterises rightwing blogland… but then Newmania and Jackart kindly stepped in to remind me that actually, it does. Good work.

John this testosterone soaked sexualised chest thumping is exactly the problem . I worry that women may feel unwilling to participate where the language used carries a latent threat of aggression . You see ,John , the truth is that women have made lots of progress but we are stalled until men are able to move into what was female territory . Child rearing , empathising , a more emotionally literate style of interaction.. Do you see John ?
Can you John , be the change ? Start now by ceasing stop your simian roars across the jungle canopy and instead seek areas of agreement . There is a cast of mind who ,whilst professing an interest in feminist issues , seems to enjoy am assertive style that is all but the textual equivalent of a bull walrus bellowing its ownership of a harem.

Language is an important weapon of the male supremacist , John, as is the denigration of emotional thinking . I `d like to feel nurtured and understood John ,and I am sorry but I just don’t get that feeling .. I don`t think you really care !

Wow.

Encyclopedia Dramatica has some good pages, though that’s not one of them – but I never thought I’d see anybody cite it as a source! Especially for a quote which has a warning on it saying, essentially, that it’s probably fabricated.

It’s hilarious that a post saying almost literally “There are some spittle-filled, angry people writing on the internet…. Fuck, fuck, fuck them! Grr! Fuck!” is being praised without irony as some kind of powerful contribution. I find hate-filled and nasty personal invective unpleasant and frankly dull from whatever side it comes, but if you can’t take it, Laurie, don’t dish it out.

James, I agree with you about the post you quote, but most of it is *exactly* the kind of stuff I read here whenever the subject of ‘gender’ arises. All kinds of militant feminist assumptions within it would fine support here, from the obliviousness to human nature (“even after lengthy indoctrination with Dworkin he finds pictures of naked young women attractive!”), the view that rape is something most men do, the view that a mother’s loyalty to her ‘gender’ matters more than her loyalty to her family…. What on earths makes you say it’s the antithesis of the above author’s feminism?

@20: …and some abuse victims become Scientologists, Nazis, Catholics, paedophiles, for similar reasons. You can see why that might happen, but that doesn’t make it something that should be tolerated.

@21: yeah, very funny

You, you with your wars and your big spending and your bigotry and your cruelty and your constant fucking lies, you broke it. Now sit the fuck down and see what we’re going to build with the pieces.

Hmmm…most of the bile-dispensers on CiF, Lablist and here aren’t Government lackeys (who tend to be too cowed to venture beyond their own corners of the web), but the worst kind of glibertarians (that ain’t a dig at Libertarians, by the way, it’s a dig at psuedo-Libertarian arses).

“What on earths makes you say it’s the antithesis of the above author’s feminism?”

It’s a judgement of the author’s writing on its own merits (rather than just screaming FEMINAZI!!!1! ROFL!!1!).

Well this thread’s evolved nicely hasn’t it? The trouble with identity politics (and we all play it from time to time) is that with the wide expanses of the internet, there room for everyone to SHOUT and SHOUT that their identity group (be it radfems, disgruntled right-wingers, out-there libertarians, new puritans, or the society of sarcastic piss-takers) is missing out, getting a raw deal, being done over. Everyone’s shouting, nobody’s listening, and in the meantime, the powers-that-be get on and bugger everything up for all of us: they see no need to listen to such a cacophony.
Almost makes me want to give up on the old inetrtubes and return to pigeon-post for communication (doubtless some PETA-philes would protest). Just look at the the Convention on Modern liberties. You’d think there was plenty of common ground for disparate identity groups to come together, but, lummee, the sniping, the back-biting, the failure to drop the more tribal elements simply lets those who’d screw all our freedoms have a clear path to their ends.
Laurie says

Now sit the fuck down and see what we’re going to build with the pieces.

, BUT who is the ‘we’ in there when everyone is separated off into their little identity boxes (and god forbid you straddle categories…)

Funny, I actually read Newmania’s comment and thought he was finally talking some sense.
Then I realised that he was trying to be funny.
Pity, that.

Marcus: If you want to look at the screenshots of her saying that, you can.

Encyclopaediadramatica is a hack site, and it describes BB not as a feminist writer or even as a blogger, but as a ‘cumdumpster’. I’m having no truck with it.

It’s account is seemingly accurate.

No, actually, I don’t agree with everything she said. She’s a radical feminist; I’m a socialist feminist. We’re descending into ad hominem here, though; point is that she was chased off the tubes in the nastiest possible way for daring to talk about her abortion.

…No she wasn’t.

Some women, BB amongst them, have been abused so consistently and repeatedly by men that they become misandrists, and/or violently anti-porn radical feminists. I don’t agree with that viewpoint, partly because I’ve been lucky enough not to have suffered that level of abuse, but I can see totally and completely where it comes from, actually. I can accept that hatred and try to differ myself from it.

I would say that her ideology did a lot to drive her mad. I’m aware that the radfem blogosphere is largely an online rape support group gone wrong, but this sort of man-hating nonsense hardly helps anything. It just generates aimless rage and noise, promoting prejudice and reinforcing the binary. I’m glad that she isn’t on the internet advocating that ideology any more, although the means of her exit were less than ideal.

From a radfem’s point of view, catching your son obsessing over misognyist porn is the equivalent to catching your son dressed in a Nazi uniform, reading ‘Mein Kampf’ and jacking off over a picture of holocaust victims. It’s the equivalent.

Yes, because radfems are largely insane.

And if I found my 13 year old son doing that? Yeah, I’d question what I’d brought into the world, actually. I’d probably still love him, but I’d be incredibly disappointed, and try to explain to him exactly why.

…You’ve gone off the deep end.

Sorry if that shocks you. But no, I don’t think women have a duty to respect whatever men want to fantasise about putting their dicks in. I think men, and women, have the capacity to be better than that.

I’m not shocked, but I’m really disheartened with this. I thought a lot more of you and you’ve really let me down. Good luck doing any harm to the current gender system with this extremist clap-trap, Laurie.

Oh for fuck’s sake. Whoever keeps removing the vowels, please stop being such a nob. We’re all adults here and are perfectly capable of arguing with each other without someone coming along to point out which opinions we’re meant to agree with.

People are going to disagree with you. Even when you’re right. I can fully understand the desire to cover your eyes and pretend that the disagreements don’t exist, but it gets you nowhere. It makes you look weak, childish and petty. Some of us care almost as much about how the participants in the debate behave as about what they say, and you don’t get much more off-putting behaviour than ‘amusingly’ censoring people. It’s particularly humourless to censor a mild parody. I know I’m probably wrong, but it conjures up the image of some moderator sat somewhere thinking “how dare people use my website to poke fun at my beliefs?”. Is that how you want to look?

The one particularly interesting thing about threads like this is that it involves people who inhabit genuinely different frames of reference. Penny’s feminism is, well, weird to some people, just as (say) Newmania’s conservatism seems oddly out of place alongside the mainstream of opinion here. The whole bloody point of this kind of discussion is to put a bunch of people who don’t share each other’s assumptions together so that they can try to learn something. And there is something to be learned, from both sides. That kind of learning experience is probably the only reason that I come back here, and censorship interferes with that. You don’t break down a culture whereby everything outside of the ‘acceptable’ political mainstream is unsayable by censoring the people you disagree with. One might begin to suspect that the moderators are rather insincere in their desire to broaden the debate.

It’s a judgement of the author’s writing on its own merits (rather than just screaming FEMINAZI!!!1! ROFL!!1!).

Well, that’s what I thought Ben, but it looks like I severely overestimated her.

Laurie: And if I found my 13 year old son doing that? Yeah, I’d question what I’d brought into the world, actually. I’d probably still love him, but I’d be incredibly disappointed, and try to explain to him exactly why.

“I’d probably still love him, but I’d be incredibly disappointed” is a line you often hear used by parents discussing their reaction to finding out their child is homosexual. Why on earth would you be disappointed?

Masturbation is what teenage boys do. All of them. Whether you like it or not, most are programmed to be sexually aroused by thoughts and images of women and their body parts. Pornography caters for this drive.

So, you’re disappointed and you express this. You tell him that you object to his lusting after women as depicted in pornography and that he should see women as people and not objects of desire. And you are wasting your breath because he has no more control over the nature of his sex drive than he has over the colour of his eyes. None of us do. As I said somewhere else, I have tried hard to find fat women with small breasts attractive but I just can’t.

So, as Beaver Biter found out, your options are really pretty limited. In fact the only one I can think of is castration.

Please no.

I’m sorry, precisely what have I said to earn being dismissed as crazy, James?

Was it when I said that I wouldn’t want to find a child of mine looking at Nazi propaganda?

When I said that what men want sexually isn’t the most important thing to my politics?

When I implied that sometimes, when it comes down to it, I can see where the radical feminists are coming from?

I’m not a radical feminist. But a lot of women who are aren’t ‘crazy’, although that seems to be the favourite way to dismiss women’s ideas when they differ from your own. I believe that radical feminism is an ideology – rather like the black supremacy ideology pursued by Malcolm X – that has its roots in a lot of hurt, a lot of fear, a lot of reactive hate. I believe that it’s extremist, I don’t think it’s necessarily productive. But actually, I’m glad that some people are saying it. Feminism needs its Malcolm Xs as well as its Martin Luther Kings.

I’m sorry, precisely what have I said to earn being dismissed as crazy, James?

Was it when I said that I wouldn’t want to find a child of mine looking at Nazi propaganda?

When you said that that was just the same as masturbating!

I’m not a radical feminist. But a lot of women who are aren’t ‘crazy’, although that seems to be the favourite way to dismiss women’s ideas when they differ from your own. I believe that radical feminism is an ideology – rather like the black supremacy ideology pursued by Malcolm X – that has its roots in a lot of hurt, a lot of fear, a lot of reactive hate. I believe that it’s extremist, I don’t think it’s necessarily productive. But actually, I’m glad that some people are saying it. Feminism needs its Malcolm Xs as well as its Martin Luther Kings.

No, I’m not dismissing their ideas because they origin from the insane, I’m saying that ideas that irrational could only originate from the insane. Not entirely true, of course, there are rad-feminists who can string a sentence together. I really like http://rageagainstthemanchine.com/ for example. But for the most part it’s a set of deeply traumatised women, often incapable of basic writing structure or propped up by pure, seething hatred for half of humanity (which, by the way, is highly binary obedient).

They generate misandry, they reinforce the binary, they poison this debate.

And Pagar has a point.

As to the disemvowelling, I really would prefer if the moderators would leave the original post intact but giving it grey text and a smaller point size. That would effectively neuter those who do come along and abuse the comments policy whilst still leaving the comments readable for those who actually wish to read them.

As it stands, I don’t have the energy to read Newmania’s comment and figure out whether it crossed the line or not. It would be nice if I could read it because occasionally the moderators will (inevitably) get things wrong and being able to stand up for the diemvowelled on the rare occasions that they do warrant it would be a Good Thing imho.

Pagar and others:

I have NO PROBLEM with teenagers having a wank. I spent a lot of MY teenage years frantically doing just that (yes, girls masturbate too). I think parents should be encouraging their children to experiment and explore their sexuality.

I object to the majority of porn that’s out there on a political level.

I find the imagery of most pornography available on the internet to be hugely disgusting, degrading, limiting, insulting, and indicative of a very narrow fetish for male-eye degradation of women – something that’s actually not inherent to male sexuality either. It frustrates me, actually, because I often want to get my rocks off by looking at porn and there’s nothing out there that shows my sexuality. Nothing out there apart from endless shots of cocks going into shaven, mutilated holes and films of barbie-a-likes crying, screaming and being covered in semen. That does not turn me on, actually. I respect the right of people to watch whatever DOES turn them on, and I would never EVER advocate censorship. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It doesn’t mean that the nature of porn, the nature of how heterosexual sexuality is phrased, doesn’t make me incredibly angry.

I think the fact that young men grow up looking at this stuff, often as their formative sexual experiences, is massively problematic.

Back to this hypothetical situation in which I have a 13 year old kid who’s been looking at porn. Let’s call him little Jimmy. What I would do is this:

*sits down with little Jimmy*

‘Jimmy, I want you to understand why I’m upset that you’ve been looking at pornography on the internet. Firstly, I want you to know that I’m not cross that you’ve been masturbating, I think it’s an absolutely fine thing to do – I’d be more concerned if you weren’t. But I’m worried that the images you’ve been looking at could affect how you think about sex and about women in a negative, abusive way. I know you’re a good kid and you’re not like that really.

‘If you feel like you need pornography to get off (cue: AW, MUM!), why don’t you take a look at some more niche sites and explore what else is out there? I’m not going to direct you sexually, but I want you to understand that there are other options, and other ways of looking at sexuality that aren’t abusive or degrading to women.’

Did I do okay? Did I fuck little Jimmy up?

‘Was it when I said that I wouldn’t want to find a child of mine looking at Nazi propaganda?

When you said that that was just the same as’masturbating!’

I said that it COULD be seen as SIMILAR to looking at abusive, violent heterosexual pornography.

Looking at porn and masturbating often occur together. They’re completely different things, though. I know a lot of people, actually, who masturbate away from the computer. Many of them are – gasp! – WOMEN. Women like to get off too! Who knew?

I think you’ll find that it’s the cocks that are far more likely to be mutilated…

I think Nazi propaganda should be strictly for masturbation purposes only. After all, it is exactly what they wouldn’t have wanted!

When you said that that was just the same as’masturbating!’

I said that it COULD be seen as SIMILAR to looking at abusive, violent heterosexual pornography.

…It isn’t. How the fuck could it be?

Looking at porn and masturbating often occur together. They’re completely different things, though. I know a lot of people, actually, who masturbate away from the computer. Many of them are – gasp! – WOMEN. Women like to get off too! Who knew?

What the hell are you doing? Supposedly a gender revolutionary and you’re tossing this presumptuousness at me? I’ve written about female masturbation before on my site, stop being so presumptuous. I suspect that your ideology is leaving you rather prejudiced, Penny.

‘I think you’ll find that it’s the cocks that are far more likely to be mutilated…’

Yes, I’ve written extensively about male genital surgery and why it’s fucked up, if you’re interested. Have you anything else to add to the discussion, or did I just slap you down with the burning torch of sexually open righteousness?

(Ouch)..

Yes, I’ve written extensively about male genital surgery and why it’s fucked up, if you’re interested. Have you anything else to add to the discussion, or did I just slap you down with the burning torch of sexually open righteousness?

(Ouch)..

I just found your selection of descriptives interesting, is all. I think that feminism struggles to get its head around the fact that men suffer, and tends to be pretty dismissive of the notion. It’s the standard problem for any ideology which relies upon rigid structuralist modelling.

Heterosexual pornography contains images of women being degraded, tortured, humiliated, hurt, raped, abused and turned into sexual slaves.

To radical feminists, that’s pure hate-speech, in the same way that we might interpret ‘Mein Kampf’ as hate-speech.

That’s the comparison here.

I never said that masturbating makes you a Nazi. If it does, well, you can call me Goebbels. Grow up.

james, sorry did you say you were trying to further the debate? I hope not because I’d think anyone who resorts with ‘you’ve gone off the deep end’ or quoting stuff from a deeply mysoginist website is somehow helping. If someone quoted stormfront to me, regardless of how well it was written, I’d just laugh in their face.

I’m sympathetic to what Alasdair says above though. The problem is partly that one the hand you have to have a ‘fuck you I’m going to say this anyway’ space… But one also needs a more open space where ppl aren’t just advocating for their own tribe. The language is different and has to be different.

I think the web allows space to be created for different identity groups, but it’s hard to see evidence that there can be any space, unless tightly controlled that will facilitate conversation between different viewpoints.

Politically, it looks like the right are better at doing this than the left – primarily because they’re less interested in ideological purity. Is it just down to identity politics? I’m not convinced, because on matter of economics too – the far left and the centre left can be equally sectarian.

Heterosexual pornography contains images of women being degraded, tortured, humiliated, hurt, raped, abused and turned into sexual slaves.

All of it?

To radical feminists, that’s pure hate-speech, in the same way that we might interpret ‘Mein Kampf’ as hate-speech.

That’s the comparison here.

Fucking hell, have you ever so much as leafed through Mein Kampf?

I never said that masturbating makes you a Nazi. If it does, well, you can call me Goebbels. Grow up.

Your comparison as it stands is moronic.

Penny @ 34

Did I do okay? Did I fuck little Jimmy up?

7/10. You lose points for forgetting that there are some niches that are even more degrading to women than the mainstream, so advising Jimmy to explore them might backfire. Otherwise, you’re exceptionally sensible.

However, I do reject the notion that merely looking at porn will turn men into mysoginists anyway. I think you do have to explain the plentiful cases of men who’ve looked at such porn but haven’t turned into mysognistic woman-haters. I’m not sure, but might be, in this argument, on the same side as people who disapprove of violence in movies or of violence in video games.

james, sorry did you say you were trying to further the debate? I hope not because I’d think anyone who resorts with ‘you’ve gone off the deep end’ or quoting stuff from a deeply mysoginist website is somehow helping. If someone quoted stormfront to me, regardless of how well it was written, I’d just laugh in their face.

God forbid that I be dismissed by the mighty Sunny Hundal. Read that text I CPed, Sunny. Take a viddy at the screenshots if you think that it’s some kind of (bizarrely elaborate) forgery. What do you make of that woman?

And well done for generalizing about feminism. You might as well call yourself newmania.

Oh god, love, I know that men suffer.

Quite a lot of the time, men suffer in silence.

But I don’t think that that suffering is the fault of feminism. I think that an inclusive feminism is the SOLUTION here.

Patriarchy hurts men. A culture of male violence hurts men. A culture of male emotional rigidity hurts men, and I know this because in my time I’ve had male lovers and male friends who’ve felt comfortable enough with me to tell me about that hurt. It makes me so mad.

Do you want me to link you to where I’ve written about this in more detail?

And well done for generalizing about feminism. You might as well call yourself newmania.

Where did I generalise about feminism? I suppose if there’s a strand of feminism which doesn’t depend upon the structuralist understanding of society as a Patriarchy, then it’s possible my criticisms didn’t apply to it.

Oh god, love, I know that men suffer.

Quite a lot of the time, men suffer in silence.

But I don’t think that that suffering is the fault of feminism. I think that an inclusive feminism is the SOLUTION here.

Patriarchy hurts men. A culture of male violence hurts men. A culture of male emotional rigidity hurts men, and I know this because in my time I’ve had male lovers and male friends who’ve felt comfortable enough with me to tell me about that hurt. It makes me so mad.

Do you want me to link you to where I’ve written about this in more detail?

It was a by-the-by point, I’ve read a lot of your stuff already. My point wasn’t intended as a substantial one, it was just your selection of words that I found interesting.

And I’d argue that it’s impossible to have an inclusive feminism at present, largely because of the presence of the radfems.

…Who want feminism to be a “Woman’s Movement”. Which I suppose makes some sense, but is never going to do much damage to a binary system. Indeed, it can only really serve to strengthen it.

‘However, I do reject the notion that merely looking at porn will turn men into mysoginists anyway. I think you do have to explain the plentiful cases of men who’ve looked at such porn but haven’t turned into mysognistic woman-haters. ‘

Yes, completely. I think that porn by itself does not a misogynist make. But the language of pornography intrudes into life and into the bedroom, even of the most considerate, feminist men.

I have male friends who’ve been extremely shocked, the first few times they slept with a girl, that the girls didn’t seem to like them pulling out and coming all over their face and breasts. It didn’t particularly bother the boys either way, but they were embarrassed and ashamed – because their only handbook for how it works had been porn, they thought that that was what they were supposed to do!

This conversation is totally bizarre. I don’t know James, but I’d be willing to guess that he’s a reasonable person. He doesn’t seem to be mysoginistic in any way that I can tell, and he seems to be disagreeing with the OP mostly because he thinks that radicals undermine the feminist cause. This looks like another case of a bunch of people who want to get to the same end point – a fairer society in which no man or women is damaged by the unreasonable pressures created by that society’s dominant forces – but refuse to make any progress because they can’t agree on how to get there.

The radfem stuff is, frankly, a bit nuts. Biting Beaver and her ilk can be understood, but they can’t be accepted as being right about everything. As was suggested earlier, perhaps the best way of thinking about them is to see them as the output of traumatic experiences. I don’t think there’s anyone here who wants to see their vision of society enacted.

What we all want is a live-and-let-live society, where nobody can be legitimately harmed by others base on their sexuality, ethnicity, lifestyle choices or cultural allegiances. Where teenage boys are free to masturbate if they please (and they will), where we’re all a lot more honest about sexuality and the realities of life and where there’s no shame in just doing what comes naturally to us. This means that a lot of tolerance and empathy will be required. What’s notable about Biting Beaver is the apparent lack of empathy in her understanding of her son’s behaviour, but anyone who dares to criticise that has to be willing to expose themselves to scrutiny of their own lack of empathy.

Basically, we all need to get off each other’s cases a bit and stop judging. We need a philosophy that says that it’s OK to be yourself, placing an emphasis on personal freedom. We could call it something like “liberalism” maybe?

Penny @ 34, to her hypothetical teenage son:

‘If you feel like you need pornography to get off (cue: AW, MUM!), why don’t you take a look at some more niche sites and explore what else is out there? I’m not going to direct you sexually, but I want you to understand that there are other options, and other ways of looking at sexuality that aren’t abusive or degrading to women.’

True – and some of it might even be produced by men (gasp!) who are capable of that level of sensitivity and creativity, let alone by women who want an alternative to mainstream crap. (Then again, wee Jimmy may already have discovered his ‘niche’…but I don’t want to get into a discussion of ‘kink’ for fear of derailing the thread even further). As always, the answer to bad/misogynist/sexist creative work is to produce something that isn’t any of those things. Unfortunately, for some people (some feminists, and an awful lot of cultural/political/religious conservatives) the answer is always to ban things they dislike as a way of targeting people and behaviour they disapprove of.

I laughed at “Let’s call him little Jimmy”. Playground, but funny.

All this radical feminist-hating is pretty pathetic. It seems like some people here will only side with feminists who have overlap with a traditionally liberal moral outlook, and then try to play socialist feminists off against radical feminists on the assumption that they (socialist feminists) have more in common with you than they do with radical feminists.

If you can’t see how much radical feminists have contributed to feminist thought that clearly and rightly has a deep influence on socialist feminists who disagree with them – if you can’t see that then you’ve made no effort to empathise and imagine feminism as a movement arising out of real experiences, only as a philosophical tradition of thought.

I’m not sure I agree with Laurie that radical feminism is necessarily extremist, although I don’t think it’s helpful to view Malcolm X as a more extreme Martin Luther King either. (I’m actually a bigger fan of Malcolm X than Martin Luther King although both had their part to play.) Of course some radical feminists can be extremist, but there are people wearing any and every label who are extremists.

This conversation is totally bizarre. I don’t know James, but I’d be willing to guess that he’s a reasonable person. He doesn’t seem to be mysoginistic in any way that I can tell, and he seems to be disagreeing with the OP mostly because he thinks that radicals undermine the feminist cause.

Absolutely.

It is impossible to have a feminism so inclusive that it includes both BB, Twisty, Ginmar, Allecto and men. You must pick one or the other, because the former are a set of bigots that despise the latter. They sustain the binary as much as any chauvinist and they are not the allies of anyone attempting to loosen its malign grip upon this society.

All this radical feminist-hating is pretty pathetic. It seems like some people here will only side with feminists who have overlap with a traditionally liberal moral outlook, and then try to play socialist feminists off against radical feminists on the assumption that they (socialist feminists) have more in common with you than they do with radical feminists.

I’ll only side with the feminists that aim to destroy the gender binary via means likely to achieve it, because that is what I am interested in doing.

If you can’t see how much radical feminists have contributed to feminist thought that clearly and rightly has a deep influence on socialist feminists who disagree with them – if you can’t see that then you’ve made no effort to empathise and imagine feminism as a movement arising out of real experiences, only as a philosophical tradition of thought.

They’ve had a massive and almost entirely malignant influence. The only contribution of any merit is purging the biological essentialists, which really needed doing. Although some radfems are bioessies, of course, crypto- or otherwise…

I’m not sure I agree with Laurie that radical feminism is necessarily extremist, although I don’t think it’s helpful to view Malcolm X as a more extreme Martin Luther King either. (I’m actually a bigger fan of Malcolm X than Martin Luther King although both had their part to play.) Of course some radical feminists can be extremist, but there are people wearing any and every label who are extremists.

…Right. So we should treat them like we do Islamist extremists, then?

No, James, you’re wrong. We men just have to get over ourselves a bit and stop telling women they have to make choices between alliances between different kinds of feminists or some feminists and men. If we’re the ones forcing them to make that choice then actually we’re confirming a lot of what some radical feminists say!

#56 was a reply to #54.

As for “treating them like Islamic extremists” – are you suggesting radical feminists go around killing people?

Timf, someone’s going to start talking about the poor little fetuses any time now, I can just tell.

*grits teeth*

Like Rob i’m a bit taken aback by your attack on ‘males with ponytails and ketchup on their tshirts.’ I guess it didnt occur to you that the internet has represented a bit of a safespace for geeky boys whose interests and lifestyle choices are met with quite poisonous derision in the physical world.

Oh, of course it did! And I’m not suggesting that geeks don’t need their safe spaces too. But sometimes, geeks also need their prejudices and their privilege questioned.

james if you’re going to act like a precocious little sectarian brat, then by all means rant away at feminists. And you did generalize above, and then wilfully ignored that. But, whatever, i’m getting bored by this circular discussion. You’re typical of men who think women should only argue on their terms rather than trying to understand where they’re coming from.

I object to the majority of porn that’s out there on a political level.

And therein lies the problem. Porn is not intended to be responded to on a political level. It is intended for the sexual arousal of the viewer and it cannot stand close examination in terms of its political correctness. Responding to porn on a political level is like responding to a painting by listening to it.

Pornography is made for an almost exclusively male market which is probably why you can’t find any that you can respond to, Laurie. The reason for this is that male and female sexuality are fundamentally different. We are programmed differently and most women are just not tuned on by male porn- some erotica perhaps but……

Further, the pornography that is produced is pretty much a direct reflection of the sexual proclivities of its male audience. It has to be because if it were not doing its job it wouldn’t sell. The idea that teenagers are somehow corrupted by it and are encouraged to see women in a different way because of it is nonsense. They seek out that which they respond to. It is as it is because that is how the consumer wants it to be.

I’m sorry that the porn does not chime with your political agenda and I can understand why, as a feminist, you are outraged by it. I also concede that the way the world is seems less than ideal- that we have two sexes whose sexual agendas often seem disfunctional when put together. But don’t blame Jimmy.

Blame God if you believe in her.

On the Malcolm X and MLK analogy – it isn’t about a choice between the two. Both approaches are necessary and important. That someone who supports the Green party doesn’t understand the need for radical voices just illustrates who politically immature James is, too me.

Fair enough penny – though group prejudices can be prejudiced without indulging in mainstream stereotypes about said group. Anyway i realise I am being rather pettie given the issues at hand . And you are basically right – self identified females do get a lot of shit on message boards and the blogosphere from men who relish the chance to ‘take them down’. Arguably the way that the internet works is such that safe spaces are not really a viable option. As such your more properly revolutionary approach – namely for people from marginalised groups to be about, stay about, and speak loudly enough that they might influence the tone of things – is absolutely the way to go.

On the question of pornography – and at the risk of sound like a pomo – i often think that important questions of reception and meaning are ignored. The key point is that when men or women use porn they are very consciously engaging in fantasy, and this in turn shapes its impact upon their mental world. As such any attempt to draw a straight line between the way women are portrayed in pornography, and the way in which women are viewed within society at large, is problematic.

#63

That’s true, Sunny. Rather than making a choice one way or the other I was trying to point out that Malcolm X wasn’t just a more extreme or more radical version of Martin Luther King. They had completely different worldviews & it’s too easy to pigeonhole Malcolm X as an extremist who gave MLK mainstream cover, allowed him to present as more “reasonable” etc. Malcolm X helped a lot of people to purge negative self-image, he gave people the confidence to self-organise and he had a different view of the causes of structural oppression and its solutions which in some ways I find more appealing than MLKs.

Not saying you – or Laurie – don’t realise all that, but it is kinda relevant to this debate in that many radical feminists are also marginalised by claims they are merely extremists whereas actually they have a lot more to offer than just providing cover for supposedly more acceptable feminists.

@62, while I’m anti-censorship, you’re clearly massively overstating the libertarian case: kids, actually and empirically, do copy what they see, and do allow what is presented to them as normal to colour their view of what is normal.

I think the correct way to respond to that is through better parenting and better education on sex issues, not by banning the availability of porn (or having some kind of progressive-liberal filter on porn so it’s only available if it promotes healthy and sane attitudes towards sexuality… although on the plus side that would make it so dull that even teenage boys would lose interest).

But suggesting it’s not even an issue in principle is a bit hard to defend.

@65: and adults, who’ve fully discovered how friendships and sexual relationships with the opposite sex work, are able to understand the fantasty/reality split. But 13-year-old boys? Really?

I see your point.

“I have male friends who’ve been extremely shocked, the first few times they slept with a girl, that the girls didn’t seem to like them pulling out and coming all over their face and breasts. It didn’t particularly bother the boys either way, but they were embarrassed and ashamed – because their only handbook for how it works had been porn, they thought that that was what they were supposed to do!”

Those male friends of yours sound like idiots. I can’t believe anyone with access to mainstream porn (i.e. the internet) wouldn’t have had the chance to access real information about sex. I mean, it took me minutes when I was curious around age 14 to bump into this: http://www.scarleteen.com/

My problem with many radical feminists, and some of the apparent implications of socialist feminism, is the ambivalence with quite a lot of queer sexuality (if it doesn’t fit their idea of resistance, its not valid), and the fact that people (men and women) have to be condemned for their sexuality when it just happens to be mainstream. I mean plenty of people ENJOY being objectified and objectifying others, and they have the right to do it (consensually), and even to produce media about it if they so want so long as they keep it on the top-shelf.

I was interested to see that a couple of organisations that were affiliated to Liberty (Then NCCL) did take the Libertarian case into the realms of kiddy porn. Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action For Liberation. Harriet Harman ( then a senior figure in the NCCL) supported some softening on the availability of sexual images of children . NCCL wanted he age of consent lowered to 14 and incest decriminalised. I would be horrified at any such measure

At the other end of the spectrum I get a comment deleted because I was trying to be funny…. sigh…

Tim @#66. I agree, though I see it more as a matter of progression. You cannot get an Obama without the other approaches that does end up including segregationists, the ‘self empowerment first’ crowd and all the rest.

I think laurie has a tricky line to walk. There is the overwhelming online culture that statesb feminists are just complaining all the time. Within that she has to bring forward feminist views without men feeling she’s just trying to hate on them. I’m still unconvinced that online spaces, where it’s far too easy for ppl to detract into stupid side debates, is where this can work.

No, James, you’re wrong. We men just have to get over ourselves a bit and stop telling women they have to make choices between alliances between different kinds of feminists or some feminists and men. If we’re the ones forcing them to make that choice then actually we’re confirming a lot of what some radical feminists say!

Dood, Tim, they hate you. The radfems really, really do. That’s a major distinguishing feature. Why would you team up with bigots? They don’t even want you in “their” movement!

As for “treating them like Islamic extremists” – are you suggesting radical feminists go around killing people?

I’m suggesting that the connotations of “extremist” are hardly all that rosy…

james if you’re going to act like a precocious little sectarian brat, then by all means rant away at feminists. And you did generalize above, and then wilfully ignored that. But, whatever, i’m getting bored by this circular discussion. You’re typical of men who think women should only argue on their terms rather than trying to understand where they’re coming from.

Sunny, they’re coming from a structuralist standpoint. You don’t need to be a member of any sect to notice that (and personally, I’m not). You just need to notice the heavy emphasis upon a single model as a means to understand the world, in this instance the Patriarchy. That’s a pretty definitive feature of structuralist thought.

And yes, it’s generally true of all feminism. They hitched a ride along with the PoMos and the PoStis, but that’s not what they’re about. Those groups try and tear down definitive frameworks, feminism is dedicated to building one up and then “educating” people about it. Consequentially there’s apparently one word for everything from the plight of young girls in Somalia to here in England, where women are not only allowed to gain employment but have to in order to pay their rents or mortgages.

And yeah, I think that a word that vague and all-encompassing is next to useless. “Patriarchy” is ill-defined and of little use to me, but central to pretty much every strand of the ideology in question. Which is why I’m not a feminist.

On the Malcolm X and MLK analogy – it isn’t about a choice between the two. Both approaches are necessary and important. That someone who supports the Green party doesn’t understand the need for radical voices just illustrates who politically immature James is, too me.

Have fun teaming up with bigots, sweetheart.

I’m checking out Scarleteen and it’s one awesome website, btw.

Oh, and since when was I a supporter of the Greens? I think that it’s good that there’s a left-wing party kicking around, but I’m hardly a member. Personally I don’t think that they’ll get anywhere due to having isolated all their political scientists. You might be thinking of Douglas? And regardless, we both hate the GP’s pet “radical” Derek Wall, Douglas with a shuddering vehemence which is quite a wonder to behold. He is the potential ruination of the party and anyone with a brain stem can tell that.

Get informed about me before you try any ad hominem take-downs, please.

“Dood, Tim, they hate you. The radfems really, really do. That’s a major distinguishing feature. Why would you team up with bigots? They don’t even want you in “their” movement!”

For those who that’s true for (and it’s certainly not all radical feminists – in fact most would be very happy for men to play a supporting role within certain parameters) – I’m fine with that. That’s up to them. It’s a decision for them. I’m not going to hate on them because of it, I’ll just get on with doing other useful stuff. This is what I mean by men have to get over ourselves. It’s possible to have a movement which does good stuff without men having to run it, you know.

Also, just because many feminists choose to write predominantly or exclusively about patriarchy does not mean they do not accept the effects of other structures eg class.

For those who that’s true for (and it’s certainly not all radical feminists – in fact most would be very happy for men to play a supporting role within certain parameters) – I’m fine with that. That’s up to them. It’s a decision for them. I’m not going to hate on them because of it, I’ll just get on with doing other useful stuff.

So misandry is acceptable but misogyny is not?

This is what I mean by men have to get over ourselves.

You mean we have to accept bigots amongst the ranks.

It’s possible to have a movement which does good stuff without men having to run it, you know.

*sighs* Tiresome, simply tiresome…

Also, just because many feminists choose to write predominantly or exclusively about patriarchy does not mean they do not accept the effects of other structures eg class.

Why do you think that the Third Wave happened?

It hadn’t occurred to me that I could look at porn and masturbate at the same time till I read this thread but apparently it’s just the same as genocide in any case.

Looks like my priest was right: every sperm is sacred.

<3

James @73:

The problem is that while it has frequently been used this way, ‘radical’ doesn’t mean ‘extreme’. Neither does fundamentalist, though ‘religious fundamentalist’ in any religion of the Book pretty much does mean that.

A religious fundamentalist is one who wishes to impose pre-Rennaissance interpretations of their faith on a post-Internet world. To think that way, you pretty much have to be an extremist, so the two concepts get conflated.

A fundamentalist is someone who looks at the simple, basic elements of whatever they’re doing as the most important thing. As a basketball coach, for example, I was a strict fundamentalist; I made sure kids learned how to look, move, and think before I tried to teach them to shoot.

A radical is one who returns to the root of their philosophy or principle. This does not necessarily imply extremism; if there were a few more radicals in the Labour Party Blair and Brown could never have neutered it.

As a result, use of the term ‘radical feminist’ creates immense misunderstandings. TimF @53 refers to the contributions of radical feminists to the theory, politics and practice of the movement, and it’s incontrovertible: radical, i.e. rooted feminists are the ones who formulated the modern politics of gender equality.

It’s misleading, because in the same era, and right up to now, there are also people in the feminist spectrum to whom ‘radical’ == ‘extremist’. For example, those who would tell me that because I am a straight man, every sexual encounter I’ve ever had is a rape. I’m inclined to disagree with them, if nothing else because that argument presupposes that my partner has no sexual agency or is incompetent to give informed consent. Anyone I’m prepared to sleep with would get immensely angry at such an implication.

So someone who wishes to argue against TimF can easily assume he’s talking about extremists, and someone who wants to agree with him can easily assume he’s talking about Dr. Susan Brown and her cohort.

Unfortunately, I also have to agree with James on one thing: it’s not me who can’t cope with being in a feminist alliance with the radical feminist arm. It’s the prejudice which means they cannot accept me as a legitimate entity with a right to life, love and the pursuit of happiness, nor can they accept me as a willing ally.

There’s a lot of people like me out there.

timf:

All this radical feminist-hating is pretty pathetic. It seems like some people here will only side with feminists who have overlap with a traditionally liberal moral outlook, and then try to play socialist feminists off against radical feminists on the assumption that they (socialist feminists) have more in common with you than they do with radical feminists.

Given the class-informed analysis of socialist feminists, I would think they would have a least a great potential to form alliances with sympathetic socialist men than with radical feminists whose entire analysis regards men and women as two separate classes into which everything else (economics, sexuality, sexual behaviour) has to ‘fit’. If such an alliance isn’t possible, then the likelihood is that socialist feminists will forever trying to develop a class-based politics in a movement where the radical revolutionary feminists don’t want to know about such things. Sure, they might team up over, say, abortion, but employment rights? Low pay? Trade union recognition? The only thing, say, Sheila Rowbotham and Mary Daly have in common is their gender – and most (left-wing) men would respond to the former more positively than the latter.

As for the legacy of radical feminists: it depends on whether how much you liked your sexuality being policed by a bunch of self-styled ‘prefects’ during the 1980s and ’90s.

“So misandry is acceptable but misogyny is not?”

I can see how you think the two are equivalent, given your views on structuralism. But it’s exactly the kind of comment that makes me despair at the pointlessness of the tradition of liberal thought. You’re focussed on the process of discrimination, rather than on the distribution of power and its effects.

“we have to accept bigots amongst the ranks.”

Whose ranks are they? (Come to that, the ranks of what?) Who is this “we” that’s doing the accepting? Get some perspective. The world does not revolve around you.

@80 Defining terms such as radical feminism with reference to the etymology and decontextualised meaning of each component word is clearly ridiculous. ‘Radical Feminism’ is a thing in its – whose meaning has been established at a cultural and political level. Simply suggesting that it refers to ‘rooted feminists’ is insufficient.

A great post by Q.

I can see how you think the two are equivalent, given your views on structuralism.

I haven’t really expressed my views on structuralism, I’ve just said that feminism is an instance of structuralist thought and it occurred to me that possibly the reason it misses some stuff is as a consequence of that. I wouldn’t be comfortable calling myself post-structuralist, or anti-.

But it’s exactly the kind of comment that makes me despair at the pointlessness of the tradition of liberal thought. You’re focussed on the process of discrimination, rather than on the distribution of power and its effects.

The two are the same thing. They both need to be fought tooth and nail, without relent or hesitation.

Whose ranks are they? (Come to that, the ranks of what?) Who is this “we” that’s doing the accepting? Get some perspective. The world does not revolve around you.

I’ve already told you that I’m keen on a broad anti-binary movement (not least because there is no other form of movement which can attack the binary effectively: the meekly obedient course advocated by most radfems only supports it). That’s what I am after.

Watch it mo’fos, this is going to be one hell of a comment…

Laurie…

Good piece, even if the comment thread has taken a rather nice train and hurled it off the tracks.

Pagar…

“Further, the pornography that is produced is pretty much a direct reflection of the sexual proclivities of its male audience.”

Well, those “sexual proclivities” aren’t innate or they wouldn’t vary so wildly between societies or time-periods. They’re informed by context, and if a young person is widely and repeatedly exposed to images of young, shaved, stick thin women being forced into various eye-watering contortions, that’s likely to shape their “proclivities“…

“Professor Jennings Bryant, a US psychologist, wanted to discover what happens to men when they are exposed to massive amounts of porn. His test subjects quickly shifted from being happy with vanilla porn, and started to seek out more and more extreme strands. Men who before had said they found violent or rape-fantasy porn unacceptable were soon eagerly consuming it.

At the next link in the chain, Canadian psychologists James Check and Ted Guloien exposed men to massive amounts of rape-fantasy porn, and discovered that they became more and more likely to agree with statements like “rape isn’t so bad”, “women complain about rape too much” and “some women enjoy being raped” as they were exposed to more and more porn.”

When attitudes towards women (or men) are being altered, let alone rape, it’s political.

Tim…

We men just have to get over ourselves a bit and stop telling women they have to make choices between alliances between different kinds of feminists or some feminists and men.

All “we” men have to realise is that “we” are not a monolith.

Incidentally, you’ll have to show James where he’s “telling” rather than simply commenting, because “telling” implies paternalism, and shouldn’t simply be asserted.

Sunny…

You’re typical of men who think women should only argue on their terms rather than trying to understand where they’re coming from.

And that’s typical of the ad hominem that maligns the motives of a rhetorical opponent by baselessly associating them with bigotry.

That someone who supports the Green party doesn’t understand the need for radical voices just illustrates who politically immature James is, too me.

There’s nothing inherently good about “radical voices” (defined in your comment, I assume, as extremism, beyond the norm etc.). I don’t know much about the “radical” feminism that James is attacking – though I’ve come to realise, the stupid way, the “radical” can be used just as a pejorative term – and so I’m not inclined to comment on it, but the fact that they’re loud/passionate/aggressive isn’t necessarily an arbiter of their worth. Their arguments couldslip into – Ooooh, I don’t know – incoherence or generalisation.

Nor do I know this “Biting Beaver”, though that piece was just stupid. Her passion for being a “radical womyn” was such that she jumped from “exploitative porn encourages the degradation of women” – it does! – to “and that means he’s obviously going to rape someone!”. Unfortunately, this logical leap made her wish that she hadn’t inflicted her son upon the world, which is ludicrous. Doesn’t mean the rest of her work wasn’t interesting, though, and certainly doesn’t justify the treatment she apparently received.

John Q. Publican…

Fine comment, sir.

Rob…

“Basically, we all need to get off each other’s cases a bit and stop judging. We need a philosophy that says that it’s OK to be yourself, placing an emphasis on personal freedom. We could call it something like “liberalism” maybe?”

Huzzah!

Whoever deleted Newmania’s comment above at 19 should be ashamed. I can’t imagine a more modest and good-spirited takedown. If even that form of disagreement is more than you can bear, why on earth debate on blogs at all? Pathetic. And “You’re typical of men who think women should only argue on their terms rather than trying to understand where they’re coming from” is an incredible comment. Are you actually saying you think there are different standards of rationality, evidence and logic for men and for women, and that men can’t hold women to the same standard? That is about as sexist and patronising as it’s possible to get.

I also feel sorry for James – the poor guy has some very deserved criticism of some plainly loopy views and is jumped on and insulted gratuitously for it, and by exactly the people who would be most angry at the same person if she were, say, a Catholic and behaved in the same way. In all this debate about whether ‘radical’ voices are welcome for tactical reasons, is it not worth asking at all if their frivolous comparisons to genocide are morally and factually correct? God forbid James or Pagar suggest that maybe the wisdom of this offensive nonsense should be evaluated on its merits.

James is to be commended for highlighting the intellectual vacuousness of the notion of a patriarchy. This is almost by definition chiefly a conspiracy theory, and where it does touch on real phenomena – such as women preferring more family-friendly, less lucrative professions than men or men being especially attracted to images of busty, young women – reams of modern science suggest the cause is our evolved natures rather than any kind of easily malleable cultural standard. But as he also notes, once one accepts this, one has rejected the defining principles of the gender politics of people like Laurie Penny or Biting Beaver. How is a coalition then possible? Maybe that’s why Sunny Hundal is so eager to crack down on anyone who tries to shine a bit of daylight into Miss Havisham’s attic.

I was Bitten by this Beaver once, and I didn’t enjoy the experience one little bit. But I wouldn’t wish death threats or hounding from the internet on anyone.

Ooooh I’m a structuralist! That’s a killer put-down. Once you’ve finished sociology class and started addressing my point I’ll takeit seriously

Bensix – I explicitly think radicals are useful for movements and obviously support them in specific contexts. That applies to malcom x, applies to rad fems and to others. This is why I wrote in support of john pilger on this site.

But I must remember that all feminists are evillll, according to James, even though I blog for the f word. I’m sorry but I’m not taking that school boy sectarianism bullshit seriously

Larry @87, oh Christ, I remember that one. Yes, once again, from her behaviour that time round I’m sceptical that it was *solely* demented anti-choicers who forced her offline.

Peter @86, what you’re doing there is taking the premise that the patriarchy is a conspiracy theory, and using that to prove that people who talk about the patriarchy are crazy. This breaks down if, for instance, there’s an enormous mass of historical evidence of a widespread and systemic effort by powerful men to discriminate against women (and black people, and less powerful white men, and powerful white men whose ideas threatened the power structure) in order to maintain their power. Which there is.

Another example of why anti abortionists should be laughed at……and why the Catholic Church should be viewed as a bunch of bastards….

“A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication of the mother and doctors of a nine-year-old girl who had an abortion in Brazil after being raped.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Catholic church’s Congregation for Bishops, told the daily La Stampa on Saturday that the twins the girl had been carrying had a right to live.
‘It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated,’ he said.
…
The regional archbishop, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, pronounced excommunication for the mother for authorising the operation and doctors who carried it out for fear that the slim girl would not survive carrying the foetuses to term.
“God’s law is above any human law. So when a human law … is contrary to God’s law, this human law has no value,” Cardoso had said.
He also said the accused stepfather would not be expelled from the church. Although the man allegedly committed “a heinous crime … the abortion – the elimination of an innocent life – was more serious”.

JohnB, even as history what you say is dubious evidence for a patriarchy – but as an argument for the persistence of it into the modern Western world, in which just about everyone accepts notions such as hiring based on merit and the right of women to vote, it’s just not germane. Please note also that I wasn’t describing it as only a conspiracy theory. Much of what are carelessly blamed on a patriarchy are real phenomena that evolutionary science can explain, if radicals could be bothered to read it rather than dismiss it because nothing so lethal to their gender-based politics could possibly be correct. By the way, I don’t actually think belief in nonsense proves someone is crazy, and I didn’t use that word.

Sunny, do you care at all about what is true and what is false? Or perhaps to put it in terms that might interest you – do you see no way in which cultivating believers in mumbo-jumbo might actually be problematic for building a popular and successful political movement? I actually think there are so few radical feminists that you’re probably correct if you simply cynically view them as useful idiots who can always be relied on to join whatever protest you want them to without really deterring moderate and grounded people, so it’s daft to criticise them. But your neglecting to comment at all on where you think the truth lies on these issues suggests you fundamentally don’t care – that you think a liberal coalition based on patent nonsense would be as successful as one based on evidence and reality, as long as it frames the debate correctly or whatever.

Often patriarchy is used interchangebly with sexism or male privelege, yet it is in fact a far more specific and, in my opinion problematic concept. The idea that ‘rule by men’ is the principle which chracterises society is hard to reconcile with the reality that the vast mass of men – like women – are relatively disempowered and disenfranchised.

Laurie – have you read any John Gray ?
He states:
“In a world shown to us by Darwin there is nothing that can be called progress. To anyone reared on humanist hopes this is intolerable. As a result Darwin’s teaching has been stood on its head, and christianity’s cardinal error – that humans are different from other animals – has been given a new lease of life”.
And;
“Darwin teaches that species are only assemblies of genes, interacting at random with each other and their shifting environments. Species cannot control their fates – we do not speak of a time when gorillas or whales will be masters of their destinies – why then humans ?

I suspect any social engineer, be they feminist, capitalist, liberal, conservative, or socialist would do well to keep Gray’s astute observations in the back of their (collective) minds.

Also, I have noticed how censorship often goes hand in hand when claims are made for the moral high ground.
We have already seen examples of this sort of mindset on this thread – for anybody with integrity it tends to be a deal breaker.

Reuben, the alternative terms you describe have the same problem as ‘patriarchy’, though.

As far as I can see, belief in feminism, the patriarchy and so on can in some cases mean merely the belief that historically women have been denied the vote and discriminated against in law and in hiring, and that this was wrong. These are things that not only JohnB but just about everyone believes. I would accept it, Laurie would accept it, George Galloway would accept it, Margaret Thatcher would accept it, and so on. It’s difficult to see anything particularly meaningful about so expansive a definition of feminism.

On the other hand, it can refer to the belief that all sex is rape, that Einstein’s E=mc^2 is a sexist equation, that male preference for busty and slim women can be explained not so much by evolutionary psychology as by the power structure of society. These beliefs are absurd and where they can be submitted to empirical scrutiny tend unfailingly to be demonstrably false.

What is difficult to find is any definition that rejects blatant mumbo jumbo while still being sufficiently demanding that it doesn’t simply describes almost everyone you and I have ever met.

Good post.

I used to read Biting Beaver too and felt much the same when i found out that she had left her blog – and the reasons why.

Reuben @92:

The idea that ‘rule by men’ is the principle which chracterises society is hard to reconcile with the reality that the vast mass of men – like women – are relatively disempowered and disenfranchised.

Very, very true. However, I don’t think that there is a simple two-dimensional scale of power on which it is easy to say that some have more than others. For example, as a fairly typical geeky male, I’ve never been the most socially popular of people and, in particular at school, I was never at the top of any hierarchy. But these days, because I have a brain and the stuff I can do is actually pretty useful, I’m reasonably paid for what I do and have happily taken up a position somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy and am content to mock those above me and pity those below.

This gives me a problem. My background gives me a natural sympathy to the underdog, the oppressed, those who don’t “fit in” to society’s diktats, those whose lack of certain physical or social characteristics makes them outcasts. But most of those outcasts don’t seem to reciprocate my good wishes; the only thing I ever hear from feminists is how I need to be challenged to examine my privilege, as though I’m ignorantly unaware of the gross unfairness that leads some to be able to dominate others without any merit.

Bizzarely, what is lacking here is any sense of collective unity or solidarity. I and others are perfectly willing to open up our support to those who are willing to do the same for us. The extremists will not do this, so we have no choice but to reject them too. If mainstream feminists can’t understand why that’s the case, then I’m very puzzled and regretful at that, but I don’t see what more we can be expected to do.

(93): Gray’s an anti-Enlightenment prick whose misunderstanding of Darwin is an embarassment but I agree with you on censorship.

I’d also agree with Reuben’s earlier point that to understand pornography you have to understand how it is consumed: those who can’t tell a hand-shandy from the Holocaust tell us more about their own debased thought processes than about wankers themselves.

This is symptomatic of all totalitarian thought: the obssessive search for the most offensive possible reading of a text, irrespective of the actual meaning produced by the consumer.

What I meant to point out above is that it’s possible to be powerful on one level – e.g. physically more powerful than others, but less powerful on other scales – e.g. intellect. Claiming that anyone who has power on one scale is automatically privileged doesn’t really work, because those people are typically all too aware of their weakness on the other scales. This hyper-rationalist approach of trying to create a model of how society functions is doomed, especially as it appears to have no place for basic humanity and communal, dare I say it, love for one’s fellow human being.

Good post Rob. The way in which difference from of social hierarchy relate to one another is more significant than is often imagined. It is not simply a case of them being layered on top of each. Rather the affect of one axis of difference upon the individual is in fact dependent on a whole load of other variables governing their social position.

Take the role of the male breadwinner. For the well to do middle this can be excellent – it can enshrine him with dominance in the home, and it can give his money seeking and career building a great halo of moral altruism.

At the same time, this powerful cultural was used viciously by the Tory government of the 1920s to attack and humiliate male workers who had gone on strike – on the basis that they were failing to provide for their families. In this respect, the Historian John Tosh makes a crucial ppoint when he writes that gender can structure hierarchical relationships not only between men and women but men and men.

Oh, and Rob I would man the barricades. Its pretty much a rule of the political blogosphere that whenver somebody mentions a determinnat of status or inequality which fall outside the big 4 (homophobia, racism, class, sexism), about a million people jump in and start playing the hierarchy of oppression game, and then deride you for comparing your minimal worries with the holocaust.

‘Patriarchy’, interestingly enough, does not mean the rule of men. It means the rule of the father – the rule of patriarchs in the most literal sense of the word. And that’s how I use it, that’s how most feminists use it. Hence, there are a lot of men who are disempowered by patriarchy too!

I read something more embarrassing to left wing politics generally than this thread this week, on popular US progressive site Alternet…

http://www.alternet.org/sex/83459/why_i_agreed_to_be_a_bend-over_boyfriend/

…Although I think you’ll agree, it’s probably marginal.

But that’s even worse! My father is a really nice bloke who has never oppressed me or, so far as I can tell, anyone else.

In my experience, the real oppression is to do with status and power rather than fatherhood or maleness (though fatherhood and maleness might be correlated with status and power, I admit – though of course correlation is not causation). Bullying and intimidation are about power imbalances, about some people being stronger and more able to exert force on others. Amongst children, this is almost always about physical strength. Some time around the mid-late teens, the returns to physical strength begin to diminish, and social skills become more important. Beyond that point, intelligence begins to play a role. Severe weakness in any of these areas can undermine strengths in the others. And beyond this, it really does begin to be about money to some extent too, which is where inherited privilege can be a trump card.

None of this is exclusively about maleness or fatherhood. To the extent that I agree with feminists, it’s because I can see that they’re just grasping a different part of the problem, seeing it through a gender prism whereas I see it through a prism of power and status. For my part, I tend to think that I’m seeing the fundamental root of the problem whilst feminists are seeing a narrower set of symptoms, but maybe that’s my straight white male technocratic egotism talking

Reuben @83:

I’m well aware of the Radical Feminists. I refrained from capitalisation to indicate I was making a point about how one can be a radical, (and thus also a Radical), feminist without also being an extremist one. The Radical Feminist movement contains rational, practical thinkers and campaigners, as well as those who froth. I just wanted to make some points about how sloppily people tend to think about terminology (semiotics is different from semantics): apologies for my self-indulgence

Reuben @96:

The idea that ‘rule by men’ is the principle which characterises society

It’s not often enough commented that patriarchy isn’t the rule of men, it’s the rule of fathers. It’s only relatively recently in our history that the majority of men could look forward to fathering children legitimately within the bounds of societal and economic constraints. Second sons in the pre-Industrial era were just as excluded from power and security as any woman, more so than most: the only route for such men to any kind of economic security was through socially structured violence on behalf of old men.

Laurie and I have talked about this one at length, particularly in the context of the culling the patriarchy has always exerted on its potential competitors (i.e. young men, often through land wars).

*reads upwards*

*notes Laurie@101*

You type faster than me…

Laurie,
I’ve been doing other things and then Livejournal seems to have stopped working just when I got back to looking for the links I wanted! (Most of the conflagration has been on LJ.) Anyway, I thought it would be relevant to what you were talking about; tho’ this thread’s been derailed a lot since then.
Supposing you’re interested in what’s going on right now in an intersecting field of anti-oppression activism and refusal to listen by the privileged, I’ve found links that I think are the right ones, but can’t check while LJ is misbehaving:
What started as a debate about Cultural Appropriation has grown and mutated into something difficult to describe, including the sorts of abuse you referred to; there was a sub-imbroglio about the use of pseudonyms, which turned nasty (see http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/901816.html).
The whole thing is being documented with more links than the mind than comfortably conceive by LJ user rydra_wong (try http://rydra_wong.livejournal.com/tag/gcadod+09).
A new safe space is being created at Verb Noire. What they’re going to build with the pieces is a small press.

Arn’t any of you worried about this man hating beaver womyn raising 3 men?

To me its the scariest aspect of this whole post and discussion.

Furthermore Laurie, in the whole time I’ve been reading your posts and subsequent lengthy discussions you have enever once conceded where you may have been wrong or in denial of the other viewpoints. I don’t think that you are alone in this phenomenon – I think people see what they want to see, but I have this phantasy that you youth who blog here will somehow get to places of decision making and it saddens me to see another generation of leaders so comfortable in their black and white, wrong or right world.

If there are any exceptions to the above and I have missed them – please point them out anybody?

I’m more then happy to admit I’m wrong.

Ooooh I’m a structuralist! That’s a killer put-down. Once you’ve finished sociology class and started addressing my point I’ll takeit seriously

I didn’t intend it as a decisive finisher. I really don’t know why you interpreted it in that way.

What I said was that it provided a limitation, as all structuralists struggle with stuff that won’t really fit into their model. They have to bend over backwards to reconcile their preconceptions with what they encounter, trying to fit reality into their expectations instead of the other way around.

I don’t really think that you’ve addressed any of my points and so far as I can tell for the most part your “arguments” consist of insults directed at me and the claim that people who reinforce the binary with misandry are offering us assistance in destroying it (purely because they’re “Radicals”, and thus just like Malcolm X, rather than like Mein Kampf, like all heterosexual porn is). If that’s your point then I think its somewhat self addressing.

But I must remember that all feminists are evillll, according to James, even though I blog for the f word. I’m sorry but I’m not taking that school boy sectarianism bullshit seriously

You’ve misrepresented my point so completely that I’d be amazed if you actually read my comments here, Sunny. I never once said what you allege I did, or anything remotely like it. I don’t know whether this stems from an urge to distort or a basic lack of reading comprehension skills, since given that others on this thread have understood my points I am disinclined to presume that I’m being unclear.

Read what I’ve written again & stop shoving strawmen in my face, please.

If patriarchy is the rule of the father (and I sincerely hope you are not demented enough to fall back on the psychobabble of Lacan) is seems strange that Patriarchy is either hanging around public buildings dressed in a Spider-man outfit or else absent entirely.

^

Patriarchy, however, continues to whine and squeal about that on practically every feminist thread I’ve ever seen. Despite the fact that one F4J guy killed his kids last year.

The entitlement of rich, older father-figures to domination and ownership – of families, governments, economies, institutions – is what is being broken in this century, piece by piece. The right of families not to have a father is part of that struggle.

*ducks under the parapet, cackling madly*

On the main topic of derailment: the Radical Feminists were scary when I was a baby feminist in 1974. The ones now are different. Also, not all the same (Laurie presumably knows this, but other people here, not so much). The ones who seem to shout loudest have an ideology where they attack transgender activists for “reifying the gender binary” while doing that gate-keeping of “women-only spaces” that some of you were complaining about above. They’re no allies of mine, and if I had a feminist club-house they wouldn’t be welcome. Here’s the thing: they don’t speak for Radical Feminists in general. Neither do the extreme anti-porn campaigners (I gather that the anti-trans and anti-porn groups overlap a lot but are not identical). I’ve read posts by self-identified RadFems explicitly rejecting the anti-trans line – and I generally avoid RadFem blogs; I expect there’s a lot more dissent that I haven’t seen, including people trying to reclaim the term for actually radical approaches, as described by John Q. Publican.
*whoa, look at the time*

Despite the fact that one F4J guy killed his kids last year.

…

What the fuck happened to you, Laurie?

This has been a fascinating thread to read, I’ve never yet met anybody, male or female, who thinks along the sort of lines expressed above by the radical feminists/socialist feminists/whatever you want to call them.

Look, a guy who was in contact with Fathers 4 Justice, a group which I found highly dubious to begin with, *murdered his two infant children last year*. I don’t see what shocks you about my mentioning that.

I believe that children have a right to contact with their fathers if they want it. I don’t believe that it necessarily, automatically, always works the other way around simply by dint of biology. Nobody has ‘a right to’ their own children. Children, like adult men and women, are their own fucking people. That’s what I really object to about F4J.

The ones who seem to shout loudest have an ideology where they attack transgender activists for “reifying the gender binary” while doing that gate-keeping of “women-only spaces” that some of you were complaining about above. They’re no allies of mine, and if I had a feminist club-house they wouldn’t be welcome. Here’s the thing: they don’t speak for Radical Feminists in general.

– precisely, thank you.

“The entitlement of rich, older father-figures to domination and ownership – of families, governments, economies, institutions – is what is being broken in this century, piece by piece.”

Really? Most girls still refuse to marry “below” themselves. They want a wealthy husband, not only for status but to provide for any children.

“The right of families not to have a father is part of that struggle. ”

Well I don’t know about you but I’m glad I had a father. I wonder how many children growing up without one wished they did.

Well if a father killed his kids I suppose they must all be guilty – but then women disproportionately kill children rather than adults so maybe child-rearing is best left to the wolves.

Laurie, there’s an awful lot of hate in you.

THAT’S your identity.

“Look, a guy who was in contact with Fathers 4 Justice, a group which I found highly dubious to begin with, *murdered his two infant children last year*. I don’t see what shocks you about my mentioning that.”

It’s just a silly fallacy. Unless you can connect those killings to the group – either directly, or by ideology – it just poisons the well.

Laurie, there’s an awful lot of hate in you.

THAT’S your identity.

Here’s a fun idea – let’s not baselessly apply characteristics to people! Yeah, all the kids don’t do it!

I don’t think fathers are all guilty. You referenced Fathers 4 Justice; I retorted.

Child-rearing is best left to whatever is best for the child; beyond infancy, that’s whoever the child wants to live with. Fathers 4 Justice isn’t about the rights of the child, though. It’s about fathers’ right to see their children whenever they want, whatever has been decided by the courts. And I’m just not sure it works like that.

Oh, and by the way? If I had kids with my current partner, and if we then split up, I’d want him to have the main share of custody. Because he’ll be a better parent than I will. With some people, you can just tell.

Can we please not get into how much hate I have in me *yet again*? I have a worrying feeling that this thread is going to descend – like others have in the past – into a discussion of MY supposed ‘issues’. Would I be accused of having issues with hate if I expressed a radical viewpoint that wasn’t feminist?

BenSix – thanks, and good comment. Yes, the guy was only tangentially involved with the group. But it does make me question the emotions which lead men to join in the first place! Clearly whatever the emotions and thoughts were that led the F4J guys to suggest he join them, they were ones we should interrogate – because a few days later that same man killed his seven year old daughter and three year old son. The guy also regularly battered other family members.

However, I open my hands up to accusations of ad hominem there!

The thing is that all the girls I know, while they certainly wouldn’t want to return to the status of women decades ago, would be horrified at bringing up children without fathers. They want a career but they also want to settle down and get married. The idea of open relationships would also raise quite a few eyebrows.

The more serious point is that this great sexual revolution supposedly on the march happens to coincide with a growing Muslim Asian population which, unless I’m mistaken, tends to have a much more conservative viewpoint on sexuality. Interesting times..

Laurie, there’s an awful lot of hate in you.

LOL is about the only thing I can say in response to that.

James: and the claim that people who reinforce the binary with misandry are offering us assistance in destroying it

jeez, I did say finish your sociology class first but clearly you only exist in that mode. I haven’t bothered spending ages fisking your reply because I have more important things to do than waste time trying to tell a sociology textbook that life is rather different to theory.

One day I’ll write a defence of why I think Malcolm X was important, but you could do better than asking people who followed him rather than simply accusing everyone of bigotry and mysandry and structuralism and whatever else. It makes not one iota of difference to me. I stopped paying attention ages ago.

As for your point that I didn’t read your points above, I point to this:
I think that feminism struggles to get its head around the fact that men suffer, and tends to be pretty dismissive of the notion. It’s the standard problem for any ideology which relies upon rigid structuralist modelling.

And more generalisations which basically say feminism isn’t a broad movement that can incorporate different and sometimes contradictory (especially on censorship viewpoints).

Please don’t bother responding back because I’m not interested. You sound exactly like a school boy sociology geek who puts people into boxes while claiming he wants to break down these barriers, without actually understanding how people behave or react to real world events. Malcolm X existed and became popular for a reason. If you think the only reason that made him popular was the inherent racism of black people against white people then you’re stupider than I ever thought.

‘One day I’ll write a defence of why I think Malcolm X was important’

I would love to see that. I imagine our views on the matter are very similar.

Laurie…

Yeah, it might be instructive for them to study where the anger of their members is directed and how it manifests itself. Not because they’re all – or even mostly – vengeful or misogynistic but because if some are it’s really silly to give the platform. But, then, there’s a limit to how much any organisation can probe.

It’s about fathers’ right to see their children whenever they want, whatever has been decided by the courts. And I’m just not sure it works like that.

Not sure that’s quite fair. Without knowing much about them they’re more interested in reforming family law (which, again, I know little about. God, I am a mine of bland sniping).

Sunny to James…

If you think the only reason that made him popular was the inherent racism of black people against white people then you’re stupider than I ever thought.

Yeah, James. And if you think that feminists are only angry because they’re women you’re more of an idiot than I thought. And if you think that the Gaza conflict exists just because of Jews you’re more racist than I thought. And if you think that there’s a giant, half-man, half-duck called Aarstfargle who will, ultimately, return to rule us all, you deserve to be sectioned. Of course, you’ve never said any of those things or even insinuated them but, what the hell, they do make you stupid/nasty/stark raving loony by association…

Look, a guy who was in contact with Fathers 4 Justice, a group which I found highly dubious to begin with, *murdered his two infant children last year*. I don’t see what shocks you about my mentioning that.

How is that relevant to anything??

I believe that children have a right to contact with their fathers if they want it. I don’t believe that it necessarily, automatically, always works the other way around simply by dint of biology. Nobody has ‘a right to’ their own children. Children, like adult men and women, are their own fucking people. That’s what I really object to about F4J.

Same for mothers, right?

jeez, I did say finish your sociology class first but clearly you only exist in that mode.

And yours appears to consist of systematic misrepresentation and scurrilous ad hominem.

I haven’t bothered spending ages fisking your reply because I have more important things to do than waste time trying to tell a sociology textbook that life is rather different to theory.

No, apparently you only have enough time to hurl trite insults.

One day I’ll write a defence of why I think Malcolm X was important, but you could do better than asking people who followed him rather than simply accusing everyone of bigotry and mysandry and structuralism and whatever else. It makes not one iota of difference to me. I stopped paying attention ages ago.

Clearly.

And Malcolm X isn’t at all like the radical feminists. I’ve never attacked Malcolm X, I’ve simply attacked your baldly ahistorical lumping of him with the radfems.

As for your point that I didn’t read your points above, I point to this:
I think that feminism struggles to get its head around the fact that men suffer, and tends to be pretty dismissive of the notion. It’s the standard problem for any ideology which relies upon rigid structuralist modelling.

And more generalisations which basically say feminism isn’t a broad movement that can incorporate different and sometimes contradictory (especially on censorship viewpoints).

Uh…Yeah, it’s a broad movement. A broad, structuralist movement. Despite its diversity, a cohesive factor is the stressing of Patriarchy. And it does struggle. Occasionally it succeeds (PR has many such instances on her blog), but it struggles.

Please don’t bother responding back because I’m not interested.

Then stfu.

You sound exactly like a school boy sociology geek who puts people into boxes while claiming he wants to break down these barriers, without actually understanding how people behave or react to real world events.

No Sunny, I do want to break down those barriers. And my criticism of the radfems is solely that they’re utterly incapable of managing that. You can’t establish a movement which is obedient towards the binary (only women allowed) and expect it to destroy the binary. And why are you constantly referencing sociology? I’m neither particularly interested in it or aware of why you see the claim that I am as such a devastating put-down.

Malcolm X existed and became popular for a reason. If you think the only reason that made him popular was the inherent racism of black people against white people then you’re stupider than I ever thought.

Right, so Malcolm X = Radical Feminism. That’s a self-evident truth. And I really hate Malcolm X despite having never said a word against him, either on this thread or anywhere else. Ok then.

Or: TRY READING MY FUCKING ARGUMENTS INSTEAD OF INVENTING ONES YOU FIND EASIER TO TAKE APART.

I say: the world is getting colder and meaner

No, it’s not. It’s always been this way, it’s just now we have the ability to find out just how cold and mean it truly is due to access to information.

“Child-rearing is best left to whatever is best for the child; beyond infancy, that’s whoever the child wants to live with.”

Laurie,
If you believe that children of 3 are capable of making this kind of decision, surely further rearing is entirely unnecessary?

If we live in a world in which familial rights, responsibilities and love are actively undermined by government we’ll all suffer from greater alienation and unhappiness in order to protect the right of a small minority to do as they please.

timf @ 53 Spot on.

Laurie

“Some women, BB amongst them, have been abused so consistently and repeatedly by men that they become misandrists, and/or violently anti-porn radical feminists. I don’t agree with that viewpoint, partly because I’ve been lucky enough not to have suffered that level of abuse, but I can see totally and completely where it comes from, actually. I can accept that hatred and try to differ myself from it.”

How does this kind of comment differ from the online misogynistic shite that women like BB have had to put up with over the years? This is the “rad fems are just a bunch of fucked up bitter old man-hating femnazis” line of argument surely?

How about some of us just have different opinions, and we’ve arrived at those opinions through many different routes…..

James @123:

The more serious point is that this great sexual revolution supposedly on the march happens to coincide with a growing Muslim Asian population which, unless I’m mistaken, tends to have a much more conservative viewpoint on sexuality. Interesting times..

Hmm. You are aware that the total Asian and Arabic population of Britain is currently circa 4%, and of those, only a very small percentage are even orthodox, let alone militant, muslims. All the more so since that 4% includes the Indian Hindus.

People who shout a lot get airtime. The Asian immigrant population, and the Arabic one, have had a need to do a lot of shouting: particularly the East African Asian immigrants of the 1970s, who had to put up with a lot of shit. Eventually some of them got Established enough to make some noise. That raises their apparent political an issue profile by disproportionate press exposure, but most of it is exactly the same fight the Feminists are in: trying to break down Established discrimination.

That section of the British population, however, is not the one which will determine the cultural texture of the next twenty years. Even if you believe the entire non-White population, which I understand is somewhere between 7 and 8%, is in some way going to undermine the social evolution of Britain I suspect I’d back the other 92% of us. Representative democracy is a numbers game, and we’ve got the numbers.

“I believe that children have a right to contact with their fathers if they want it. I don’t believe that it necessarily, automatically, always works the other way around simply by dint of biology. Nobody has ‘a right to’ their own children. Children, like adult men and women, are their own fucking people. That’s what I really object to about F4J.”

So here we have a case of responsabilities (Pay for the Kid) and No Rights (for contact) – now thats a very novel concept for liberals – but you can see clearly that something isn’t right here!

I also don’t see any research that this lack of “dint of biology called a Father” has no adverse effects – which means Laurie thatyou’re plainly asking for Ad Hominem attacks as you are only giving your opinion.

Finally – the only reason why a child would not want to see their father (besides him being abusive in any way) is if their mother was slagging him off – this I believe is a massive problem with massive ramifications to children – and its not aided by your “fathers unnecessary” propaganda!

http://www.coeffic.demon.co.uk/pas.htm

“I believe that children have a right to contact with their fathers if they want it. I don’t believe that it necessarily, automatically, always works the other way around simply by dint of biology. Nobody has ‘a right to’ their own children. Children, like adult men and women, are their own fucking people. That’s what I really object to about F4J.”

Now here’s something novel for liberals – Responsabilities (pay for the child) but no Rights (to contact)

Laurie, when you give your opinion on things you have no experience of or know nothing about without providing any evidence – you leave yourself wide open to Ad Hominem attacks as there is nothing else to attack.

I believe your propoganda of fathers as “dints of biology” is evidence of Parental Alienation – and I’d love to know who put these ideas into your head!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_alienation

John Q – Just to clarify, Richard said that, not me. As far as I’m concerned the Steyn Thesis is a load of ademographical hogwash that only exists to smother the realisation amongst the American Right that Europe is filled will nations that have mixed economies and strong welfare states as well as populations far more likely to describe themselves as happy and far less likely to keel over from deadly diseases. None of that matters because these “expensive welfare states” will have to be supported by the Dreaded Muslim Scourge, so US right-wingers can sigh with relief and commend themselves for letting the poor starve in the gutter. Only way to stop the Islamic Overthrow, after all.

Additionally, I agree that noisy people get paid most attention to. This is amplified by the worrisome tendency of the media (and, to a lesser extent, the government) to seek “Community Leaders”. This is best understood as truth distorting laziness: so far as I am aware not a single one of these “Leaders” reached that position through an election. They are, uniformly, middle aged and elderly reactionary men. Accordingly their capabilities as representatives are highly dubious, but it’s far easy just to give them a call than actually perform any journalism, so it all gets swallowed up.

James @134: Goodness, I do apologise for the mis-attribution.

This is amplified by the worrisome tendency of the media (and, to a lesser extent, the government) to seek “Community Leaders”. […] so far as I am aware not a single one of these “Leaders” reached that position through an election. They are, uniformly, middle aged and elderly reactionary men.

Hmmm. Well, now, this is a can of worms.

To start with, the definition of ‘community leader’ cannot be made dependent on democratic recruitments system, if you have communities which are self-determinant but are also non-democratic. If a person has the ability to stop a riot, they’re a community leader, regardless of how they got that way. If the only ability they have is to start one, they’re a fraud.

Next: assuming we’re still speaking largely about the Sikh, Pakistani Muslim, Hindu and Arabic Muslim communities here: the range of ‘community leaders’ is quite large, as there are quite a few distinct and frequently feuding communities within each of these ethno-religious categories. There are functional, growing and effective organisations of moderate Muslims, for example, whose specific brief to their leaders is to counter-act the impression that the majority of British Muslims are psychos.

Their leadership tend to be educated, business-entrepreneurial men: because their constitutents are happier following middle-aged men who’ve proved they can work and make money. That’s one of the Five Pillars, so that ain’t gonna change, and most of the organisations which are any good are actively trying to get more women to the front of their image, and finding recruitment hard.

Further: the problem is much less to do with the fact that the media lens focuses on community leaders than the fact that it focuses on cities. I live in London, and until I started looking at census data a few years back I genuinely believed that between 25% and 40% of Britain’s population were non-white immigrants of between first and fourth generation. This is, of course, completely wrong: the total number of non-whites in the UK seems to be about 8%. I had the skewed impression because of the basic demographics of immigration: if you live in a big city, your anecdotal experience will be that a third to a half of the people on your street are not white. Because the vast majority of television cameras, news and drama, are concentrated on London, then Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and the Premiership football stadia, the impression is formed that the Asian, Arabic and Afro-Caribbean populations are much larger than they really are. Contextualise that with the active campaigning to raise the profile of their community issues, at which they are massively more effective than the liberal left to name but one such coalition of interests, and you can see how it becomes easy to make the error Richard made.

Their leadership tend to be educated, business-entrepreneurial men: because their constitutents are happier following middle-aged men who’ve proved they can work and make money.

For the most part that is a good enough post, but how can you tell? Have they had an election? Have they been given a survey which asks if they are happy with the people who purport to be their mouthpiece? I would suggest that we should instead realise that terms such as “Muslim”, “Woman” “Goth” and so on are so broad that it is ludicrous to imagine that they are “Led”, let alone represented, by solitary individuals who claim that they are without any genuine mandate.

Great piece, Laurie. I certainly hope you keep posting.

And I can see where Biting Beaver is coming from. Rape and violence against women is not taken seriously even by many of the men posting on this forum; witness the unwillingness to focus on the problems reported by Amnesty in recent threads. BenSix’s post demonstrating the direct link between violent porn and inability to empathise with women – to the extent of minimising the damage rape does – came as no surprise. The outrage on the other threads, with a few honourable exceptions, was *all* reserved for the ‘misuse’ of statistics. Most posts didn’t even contain a token acknowledgement that the disputed statistics did not magically cause the very real and widespread problem of domestic violence and rape to disappear.

If I was raising such a young man, I would wonder if it had been worth it, too.

[troll]
Mooska – I’m glad that my mother wasn’t a wingnut of the sort that you clearly are. I imagine that it would have turned me into a rabid anti-feminist.

BB didn’t say that her son was watching rape porn, just porn. Not all porn is rape porn, in case you failed to realise. And if you imagine that the best way to advance women’s rights is to lie about the scale of the problem they face, then you are awaiting a rude awakening. If people can not trust your figures, they will not trust your solutions.

Sunny – I believe you’ve disemvowelled the sensible post at 138, instead of the idiot at 137. Pls to reinstate?

*sighs*

Mooska – I’m glad that my mother wasn’t wingnut of the sprt that you clearly are. mgn that it would have turnd me into rabid anti-feminst.

BB didn’t say that her son was watchng rape porn, jst porn. Not all porn is rape porn, in case you failed to realise. And if you imagine that the best way to advance women’s rights is to l exaggerate the scale of the problem they face, then you are wrong. If people can not trust your figures, they will not trust your solutions.

This disembowelling is childish. Are you afraid of open debate?

This is simply astonishing stuff. It’s one thing to have far out comments on a blog, and it’s one thing to have a stringent policy of censoring comments… But a stringent policy of censoring the comments of mainstream voices who disagree with the crazies in a measure and reasonable way is something else entirely.

Okay, James!

“And if you imagine that the best way to advance women’s rights is to l exaggerate the scale of the problem they face, then you are wrong.”

Rightio. So what IS the best way to advance women’s rights?

Peter, Porrit & John – First they came for Newmania, but I was not a trolling Tory…

Mooska – As you point out, just because the abuse isn’t upon the scale that Amnesty distorted it to look like it was, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist or isn’t terrible. I think that there are probably some people that don’t care, but they’re a minority. What ought to be done is a campaign that only cites quantitative stuff when it knows that it’s being stringently accurate.

This stops you looking like you’re using Daily Mail style tactics. Accordingly you’ll get the unqualified support of a lot more people than you’d gain by using wonky stats and getting called on it. I agree that it was pretty annoying the debate got honed in around that fake figure, but Amnesty could have expected that. You don’t have to be a raging anti-fem to get annoyed by such things, and raging anti-fems are the only ones such a campaign won’t really get on board.

I’d also add that we really need to raise awareness that men too are victims of domestic abuse, because that isn’t something which our culture has really wrapped its head around yet. Just imagine how many men haven’t come forwards and talked about their suffering due to cultural reasons. Just imagine how hard it is for women and then add onto that the stigma of “Getting beaten up by a woman”. So I’d advocate a campaign which attacks all domestic abuse (that to be found inside the LBGT community, as well) rather than one form of it.

I think it’s important to be open and transparent about how the numbers were arrived at – we all know it’s a serious problem, so let’s be exact.

And all this rubbish about wishing sons had been aborted because they looked at porn – grow a spine, you maniacal nutters. All boys look at porn.

Porritt, Porritt, we’ve been through this. If your son grew up to be a Harold Shipman or a Heinrich Himmler, you would wonder where you went wrong, too. A radical feminist considers a son who grows up to find the naked female body a turn on to be no different from a son who heads up the SS. Don’t you see where they are coming from? Can’t you appreciate the intellectual contribution of this kind of feminist thought? Consider the value of such radical voices and please take your criticisms elsewhere – as if there were any!