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My ideas about exclusion? Like RAW's system, it should be based on the behaviour of individuals in space-time. I.e., if a bloke goes to a pub, hits on all the women and generally behaves at some point in time and in a particular space in the manner of a complete twat, he should be excluded from occupying that space at any future point in time, possibly with extreme prejudice
I first read this as a suggestion that we should look at this from the point of view of WWE RAW, and see if Triple H could reasonably be excluded from a face bar face bar face bar.
But anyway. The question then is whether one can extrapolate from that and say "this is not a judgement on you as a person, here as a space or now as a time, but we would like to create a space that does not involve you, because *regardless of your behaviour* your presence would be in itself disruptive to how we want to act"?
Which is an awkward one. In a sense, it certainly *is* exclusive, by definition, but is it justified? For example, journalists might be excluded from a particular event, regardless of their intentions, in order to create a space where everybody could behave without fear of their actions being recorded. Rudegirls in London creates a space where, regardless of who they are, men are not invited, in order that the participants can create a specific space which, although public, is also exclusive, and allows women to interact in a specific way. The Savage club does not allow women in as guests outside certain clearly defined times, because they want to be able to interact in a purely male space.
To the modern metropolitan, the Savages might make less sense, because we do not stratify our interrelations along gender roles - we hang out with men and women, largely unchaperoned and primarily without discrimination of action. But should we own that by the same token the women of RudeGirls should suck it up and abandon their prohibition because if men should want to participate at such an event they have every right to, or is the demand to attend a space created for women to interact in a space predicated on the absence of men an act of intrinsic twattery?
Or, to put it another way, it's a bit more complicated than that...
I'm thinking of cult religions as an example - the thesmophoria or bona dea were spaces designed specifically for women, and the cultural impact of having men present in that space was not apparently enough to justify the presence of men, even in societies that might be identified as far more boycentric than our own. Was that a sop, a tool of general subjection or an acknowledgement that some women's spaces are useful and the advantages of opening them up were outweighed by the problems (to cite Capulet500, who appears to be living in fear of armed bands of radical feminists roaming Milton Keynes, what is the profit in demanding access to a previously women-only gym session if there is another gym session in half an hour and a de facto male-oriented gym down the road)? |
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