Just another day on r/mensrights, dealing with the terrible injustices facing men today in a thoughtful and compassionate way.
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We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The MammothJust another day on r/mensrights, dealing with the terrible injustices facing men today in a thoughtful and compassionate way.
And the incident is written up in at least one book!
http://glamourousrags.dymphna.net/reviewjeffreys.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=mg4CnbiN_rMC&pg=PA120&lpg=PA120&dq=Chain+Reaction+lesbian+night+club&source=bl&ots=GJ9S2fc0tt&sig=2q8uYfwvUlUIoZG1eLKDaMvv9dw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YuUhT_ipCMfbgQeLiYyOCQ&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Chain%20Reaction%20lesbian%20night%20club&f=false
http://fetchmemyaxe.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html
The incident, and Jeffreys herself (whom I had not heard of) is clearly related to the “feminist sex wars” that have been written up in various places:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_Sex_Wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_Sex_Wars
Your claim that there are no academics writing up ‘negative’ stuff about feminism is so much piffle–it’s just there’s a whole lot of different feminist topics, and (surprise surprise despite the MRA claims that academia is dominated by feminists) not that many feminist historians.
Feminist historians: these won’t be all of them of course.
I know some of them because when I became a feminist in 1981, I started reading all the feminist publications I could get my hands on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Feminist_historian
And since like most trolls you seem to think in universals, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that “women’s history,” “feminist history” and “lesbian history” while connected are not all the same, and contain great areas of disagreement:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Journal+of+Feminist+History&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
And the idea there’s not much out there on men and feminism: ahahahaha
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=eE8OAAAAQAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=men+and+feminism&ots=HQJUluJq9I&sig=sJEXd7ZX4Kl6zvBQtZ_YIKaWMq4#v=onepage&q=men%20and%20feminism&f=false
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09574049008578023
http://www.menandfeminism.org/
http://www.nomas.org/node/122
Google search; “critiques of feminism” limited to site:edu
http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=critiques%20of%20feminism%20site%3Aedu&pbx=1&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&fp=e082afedeaa7888e&ion=1&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=e082afedeaa7888e&biw=1040&bih=867&ion=1
“he incident, and Jeffreys herself (whom I had not heard of)”
You;’re lucky. She’s still kicking and the bane of trans women and sex worker’s rights in Australia/NZ
vicious, vicious woman.
“zhinxy: sort of. Being more involved in the movement isn’t terribly practical for various reasons ”
Any of those being that you’re, maybe, just maybe, more of a fetishist than an ally or activist?
And re radical feminists and transphobia: that is actually true, BUT to assume that all feminists share that is, again, ridiculous oversimplification. Many feminists have spoken out against the radical feminists’ bigotry and oppression, especially in regard to actions taken by the Womyn’s Music Festival
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Trans
Ten minutes of googling, and look at what I found. You expect me to believe that it’s just oh so hard for you to find proof for your halfassed assertions?
Right, yeah, uh-huh.
@ithiliana: I’m not sure whether to thank you for introducing me to a whole new world of things to read, or curse you for introducing me to a whole new world of things to read when I’m already committed to reading more than I’m ever going to get through in three lifetimes.
…No, I take that back. Thank you. Trying to cram more knowledge into my head is always a good thing. 🙂
*G*
You can do both! My students often do!
I read a bunch of the radical feminists back in the day, and I had to work very hard to dismantle the transphobia that became more and more apparent over time in many of their writings.
The Feminist Sex Wars are particularly fascinating to read (Joanna Russ has great stuff on them in “Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts.”
http://books.google.com/books/about/Magic_mommas_trembling_sisters_puritans.html?id=JwUqAAAAYAAJ
*ducks hurriedly*
Zhinxy: the bane of trans women and sex worker’s rights in Australia/NZ
That ticked a brain cell into place and I realized that Roz Kaveney is the author of that first review a number of us linked to, and she has written about Jeffreys and other transphobic feminists, and how much of this current trans-hatred is replaying issues that came up during the 70s and 80s (I would say the racism in the white feminists online is replaying a lot of the same issues that came up during the 70s and 80s as well).
http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=384
So I had read of her, but I have a lousy memory for names, and Sheila Jeffreys doesn’t get the coverage Germaine Greer does.
I have a nasty sneaking suspiscion that part of the reason Jeffreys and all the other trans-phobic feminists attack trans women so much is that they can, safely, utilize their cis privilege.
“Naira: the difference between making a snap judgement and women’s intuition is the idea that the latter shines a light on some underlying truth. If a man says he doesn’t like someone, well that could be for any of a number of reasons many of which are quite daft, the problem is the idea that if a women knows that someone is intuitively “creepy” it means there must be something fundamental about him that means he should be perceived as creepy.”
And you’re already showing gender biases: “If a man says he does like someone…”
How about: “If SOMEONE says s/he doesn’t like someone…”? A woman is equally capable of what you are attributing only to men. If I, a woman, say I don’t like someone, I can have any number of stupid or logical reasons to say so as well. Calling it “women’s intuition” and dismissing it as a flighty, irrational, or assuming that I mean it as a deep, enduring truth about the person is, well, sexist.
Oddly enough, men are totally capable of women’s intuition in the way you describe it: Those stupid feminazis are pure garbage. Those human toilet feminists. I’m sure one can easily find more along this line and worse on MRA sites and blogs. Manboobz has reported worse.
This is often spoken as a total truth of all women who claim to be feminists. No room for interpretation, no room for them to be people. It is the deep, revealing truth that you are describing: all women are evil, grubbing sluts trying to suck men dry.
There isn’t some secret cabal. If I call a guy creepy or, let’s be specific, his behavior “creepy,” I haven’t revealed some deep, underlying truth about him to the rest of womankind or even the women I tell my analysis to. I’ve said that, in my view, his behavior/demeanor/vibe was creepy. End of report. People who assume this is the Gospel Truth about the man in question and aren’t willing to acknowledge that this is MY analysis (bounded by time and context) have the problem. Not me.
@makomk
More selective sympathy for Hugo, I see — when feminists go after him for almost killing a woman, suddenly you’re on his side. I don’t care enough about H.S. to decide whether he deserves forgiveness or not, but I don’t approve of online witch hunts, they’re ugly and always make the side they’re on look bad.
In the last post on Manboobz you can see MRAs got together to harass a rape survivor for not saying “no” loud enough, so I don’t think you have a lot of room to criticize mob behavior. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
2nd link – Yeah, we know RadFems are transphobic. There’s not much we can do about that, we’re too busy having fun.
Ironic and hypocritical /mensrights thread of the day (and there really is a new one every day):
Adult females sexually exploiting adolescent boys are malefactors — not benefactors.
Using their own logic, it seems there are a lot of malefactors on /mensrights, otherwise they would welcome the UK legislation. Why risk accidentally exploiting an adolescent?
Some definitely are. Some of us are disgusted with the rest for that jackassery. Fucking intersectionality.
Sorry rutee, I should have known there was disagreement in RadFem circles. My fault for believing any of the BS MRAs spout like gospel.
ozymandias42: I was mostly referring to transphobia in the UK feminist community, though based on past experiences the odds of this blog eventually spectacularly failing at trans issues, then failing to do something about it when called out on it, then driving most of its trans regulars away are probably fairly high. Would be even higher if the MRA community was less horribly, virulently transphobic itself of course.
ithiliana: Roz Kaveney’s book review was actually the best reference to the incident I’d found. Notice how both the blog post and book you link quote it, presumably because they couldn’t find any other source for the information either. Also, part of the reason this was originally of interest to me was because it seemed as though modern populist feminists – and in a way Wikipedia too – were massively downplaying how nasty the Feminist Sex Wars actually were, claiming that name was just media sensationalism and it was just a minor disagreement. (For example, notice how they don’t talk about what the information passed out by anti-porn feminists outside the Barnard Conference on Sexuality said; it actually accused the organizers of supporting child rape, and contemporary media coverage appears to have made a big deal of this.)
By the way, there’s a fun exercise you can do on Wikipedia. Look at the pages on sex-positive feminism and anti-pornography feminism – each starts off with a list of prominent members of the faction in question. Count how many people from each are described as feminist in the lead paragraph of their own article. Not sure what it means, but it’s quite striking.
Xardoz: errrm, sympathy for Hugo? He’s a complete and utter asshole in just about every possible way.
Also, it’s not so much that all feminists, or even all radical feminists, are transphobic or hold any particular viewpoint – it’s more a question of who’s prominent and influential within the movement, which viewpoints get heard and which get ignored.
zhinxy: “more of a fetishist than an ally or activist”? Bwuh? Not even sure what that means, but no, it’s mostly that actually getting involved is really bad for my mental health and frankly that’s absolutely none of your business anyway. (Though of course, it’s impossible to completely get away from activism once you’re actually invested in the issues; sooner or later one of them rears its ugly head and you’re the one in a position to call someone out or point out something important.)
makomk: I’m not sure who you’re referring to specifically, but as a feminist residing in the UK (and with a lot of UK feminist friends and acquaintances) I can tell you that transphobic views such as those expressed by Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer are widely and publicly reviled by other feminists — they are certainly not the norm (in spite of the widespread influence of people like GG).
Incidentally, not everyone who identifies as “radical feminists” are transphobic. C.f. this blog:
http://lashingsofgb.blogspot.com/
Which includes posts by transwoman Sally Outen (anyone in the UK should check out her stand-up comedy shows, they are fantastic!)
http://lashingsofgb.blogspot.com/2011/06/my-gender-identity.html
Basically, Lashings are trying to reclaim the term “radical feminist”.
Your baseless speculation is noted.
It seems like you’re making a circular argument. “Feminism is rampantly transphobic. I know this, because there are a minortiy of spaces that are obviously transphobic, and the rest of the spaces are probably transphobic disasters waiting to happen. I know this, because feminism is rampantly transphobic.”
I’ll just leave this here.
@Viscaria: Yep he is.
Which is one more reason to call TROLL.