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Feminism 101

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08:55 / 18.03.06

That sounds atrocious Mordant! You have my sympathies. It's fucking horrible when the people in authority don't do anything to help.

School seems to be where a lot of the hatecrime gets rolling, simply because so little is done to address it outside of assemblys on tolerance (which do sweet FA as far as I recall of my school), so the pupils think it's acceptable behaviour.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

08:56 / 18.03.06

Oh, and I'm not sure they'd have had the same issues with a guy. A lot of the stick I got related to my studying a "male" subject.

miss wonderstarr

09:07 / 18.03.06

I really don't want to seem like I'm dismissing any aspect of your experience, Mordant, but do you see what I mean when I suggest that these people were using gender as the most convenient hook they could find, because you generally didn't fit in with them? It seems from what you say that you were an odd person out in a variety of ways (nationality, class, dress) as well as being in the minority as a woman. I mean, I was called a queer at school too, but that's because my mum was more middle-class than theirs and bought me (for instance) nice pencil cases, which the mini-gangsters immediately stole, scribbled over, chucked down three flights of stairs and stamped on. As in your case, the homophobic insults I got were stupid and inaccurate, but it was just a convenient way for them to deal with someone who made them uncomfortable.

Anyway, this is perhaps confusing the issue and I really don't want to... challenge or seem to undermine anything you've said. My suggestion is perhaps that though this is misogynist abuse, it was their best way of attacking someone who offended them by not conforming, rather than an attack on someone for being a woman per se. But maybe any young woman, however she dressed, would have come in for the same thing, or a slightly different form of it (a girl they found attractive would no doubt not have had it any easier).

Less searchable M0rd4nt

09:14 / 18.03.06

Well, I see what you're saying, but I think I would definately have come in for less of that if I'd been a bloke. Like I say, I was resented by quite a few people for studying a 'male' subject (some of the people harrassing me made reference to "taking a place away from a man,") for instance. I think the fact I couldn't have defended myself physically was also an issue, as was the fact that I was not in a relationship.

miss wonderstarr

09:18 / 18.03.06

I think the fact I couldn't have defended myself physically was also an issue, as was the fact that I was not in a relationship.

So again, there were other things they had a problem with about you, but I fully accept that you being a woman was the biggest factor.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

09:22 / 18.03.06

The relationship thing was only an issue because I was female. Guys were expected to be sexually active, women to be in relationships. Having one wandering around loose seemed to upset people rather.

09:23 / 18.03.06

miss wonderstarr, not being able to defend yourself physically is related to be a woman. For even a physically imposing woman, the tone of threat is there in a way that it is not for small men generally, even if somebody can produce a particular very frail man who has felt physically threatened.

miss wonderstarr

09:29 / 18.03.06

miss wonderstarr, not being able to defend yourself physically is related to be a woman. For even a physically imposing woman, the tone of threat is there in a way that it is not for small men generally, even if somebody can produce a particular very frail man who has felt physically threatened.

I'm reluctant to argue about this because to do so seems as though I am quibbling with Mordant's experience in some way. I think you're suggesting two different things here --

i) that for even a physically strong woman, physical threat = potentially sexual threat

and

ii) most women are less able physically to defend themselves against most men.

I agree with the first, but being physically weaker than bullies is something both young men and young women can readily experience at school.

10:00 / 18.03.06

do you see what I mean when I suggest that these people were using gender as the most convenient hook they could find, because you generally didn't fit in with them?

But that in no way ameliorates the fact that - as you do say, miss wonderstarr - this was misogynistic abuse. They might not have been abusing Mordant because she was a woman, but they were abusing her as a woman, specifically as a woman - and don't you think there's something pretty fucking scary about the fact that this (extremely gendered threats of gendered and sexualized violence) is 'the most convenient way' to abuse someone who happens to be a woman?

In fact, I'd pretty much say that that's what misogyny is. It's reaching for the huge arsenal of woman-hating language and behaviour that's just lying around in our culture for anyone to use, whether or not the actual target of your hatred is sort of 'purely' someone's womanhood. The point is that if someone is a woman (or even if they're not, cf calling men 'pussies' etc), you don't have to go very far, or think very hard, to find a way to denigrate them, do violence to them, make them feel like shit. We don't have the same arsenal for, say, tall people: if you want to victimize a tall person, you'd actually have to think of some way to make them feel bad about being tall. If you want to victimize a woman, you can just open your mouth and let the misogyny-program of our culture pour through you.

This attempt to say that 'it's not just about Mordant's being a woman' feels like an attempt to blame the victim (for not being the right sort of woman, with the implication that if she'd 'fit in' properly she wouldn't have come in for this abuse?). I don't think you mean it like that, but it feels very much like it to me, and I wanted to raise it so that you'd know what I was reading in your argument. Because of course no-one is ever 'just' a woman - it's impossible to separate out the bits of yourself that are 'female' from the bits that are middle-class/working-class, white/brown/black, gay/straight/bi, abled/disabled, young/old, tall/short...

10:14 / 18.03.06

Hmm. I seem to be on a slow-boil-anger about the idea that this experience only counts as 'misogynistic abuse' if it can be proven that no single detail of it could ever have happened to a boy or could be compared to other things that do happen to boys. That's just not true. That's not how misogyny works. So, to put my previous post in other words:

Threatening to cut people up for being lesbians* is misogynistic and homophobic.

If we can't agree on that after seventeen pages of 'Feminism 101' then I fucking give up.

*From Mordant's post: stuff about cutting up lemons, cutting up dykes

And Mordant, dude:

I would also say that I was subjected to homophobic abuse. I feel awkward saying that because I'm not actually gay

No, you were subjected to homophobic abuse, and there is absolutely no need to feel awkward about saying it. I suspect being on the receiving end of homophobia has different effects for straight people, bi people and gay people, but it doesn't make it not-homophobic, or not-abuse, or not scary, or not violent, or not harmful.

(Anecdote: I actually got a lot more homophobic abuse on the streets before I was gay than I do now. People were much more inclined to shout 'Dyke!' at me when I was tronking about on my own than they are these days, when I go round holding hands with Tangent and snogging her at bus stops etc. I think that a lot of homophobia is more about policing the boundaries of heterosexual gender - men making it clear to women that they will be punished if they fail to conform to certain standards of appearance and behaviour - than it is about homophobia. People seem to mind a lot less that I look like a dyke when I'm doing identifiably dykey things on the street.)

miss wonderstarr

10:22 / 18.03.06

This attempt to say that 'it's not just about Mordant's being a woman' feels like an attempt to blame the victim (for not being the right sort of woman, with the implication that if she'd 'fit in' properly she wouldn't have come in for this abuse?). I don't think you mean it like that, but it feels very much like it to me, and I wanted to raise it so that you'd know what I was reading in your argument.

This is one of those cases where I have to thank you for raising a possible connotation of my posts that I certainly didn't intend, and would step away from in shock.

I did constantly try to make it clear that I wasn't undermining or dismissing in any way the experience Mordant describes, and that I would also call this misogynistic abuse.

In a post on this page, I suggest that a woman these boys found attractive would probably not have had an easier time, though she might well have had a different type of abuse (which they might have felt was some kind of compliment).

I agree with what you're saying, as I understand it. Say, if a black student riles others because he's conspicuously hard-working and eager in class. If the other students fire racial slurs at him because he annoyed them <-> because he made them feel insecure <-> because they're not as bright, it is still tapping, as I think you suggest, into a vast armory of racist terms and prejudices. His ethnicity might not be the actual thing they're pissed off about (as with Mordant, there may have been other factors they couldn't deal with) but because he's black, they have this fuck-off Matrix-style rack of weapons to fire at the guy, immediately in place and immediately devastating in their effects.

If the same guy was white and wore an Arcade Fire t-shirt, sure they could take a shot at him, but with, comparatively, pop-guns.

miss wonderstarr

10:31 / 18.03.06

NB. Deva, I'm not clear from your earlier post whether you feel I was unconvinced that this was misogynistic abuse -- but I did say so pretty firmly:

though this is misogynist abuse

11:07 / 18.03.06

If the same guy was white and wore an Arcade Fire t-shirt, sure they could take a shot at him, but with, comparatively, pop-guns.

Yes! Exactly!

12:28 / 18.03.06

Mordant, I'm sorry to hear about all that. I too had a hard time in high-school (not conforming to norm and all - which was pretty easy to happen in a all-white higher class catholic school), but, being a relatively big guy, at least I never had to feel physically threatened like you did. Kudoz to you for surviving and growing up to be the admirable person you are now. Some of the best people I know had the worse time in their formative years.

03:59 / 19.03.06

hullo.

christ. i finally get the chance to register here, since applying in November and somehow I get sucked into the "misogyny" thread right off the bat.

this is encouraging, as this topic wouldn't normally set off any alarms for me. thank you for being so (generally) well informed for a bunch of plonky intellectuals.

My attitudes on misogyny and feminism are not well formed and exist mostly as a collection of emotive reactions.

I just wanted you to know you've piqued my interest.

-GIMJ

*

06:07 / 19.03.06

MC, that's really serious. It's clearly had a lasting effect on your life. I feel sad and angry that you've experienced this. It reminds me of some of the gender-based abuse I came in for myself in school, although I think it was never as prolonged or as organized, and was certainly never as condoned by authorities, as what you've described. And it does make me wonder about the comparatively higher incidence of self-harm, including eating disorders, in girls than in boys.

I respect you immensely for having the courage to put something like this out on Barbelith. I venture to hope that the atmosphere is becoming more safe for self-disclosure of this sort, and that the real work being done by yourself and others who have contributed to this thread is furthering that tendency. On the other hand, I think the environment is not yet so good that many people will share your courage.

06:28 / 19.03.06

I personally feel this is in line with the course of the thread, but if anyone disagrees then I'll happily ask a mod to remove it.

Just read this on the Guardian site and wondered what people think about it.

It's an extract from a book by a woman called Norah Vincent. She spent a year investigating the het dating game disguised a man. I found some of what's written in the extract quite familiar from my own perspective.

One particular line struck me:

Every man's armour is borrowed and 10 sizes too big

Seems to resonate with what I've read in A Room of One's Own. The thought that men use mysogyny because it makes them feel superior, and the lack of it would mean that they'd have to deal with themselves openly.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

07:44 / 19.03.06

Well, I've had it on order from my library so will hopefully soon get to see it, to see whether we're living in stereotype city or not. I'm hopeful it will be better than getting Rebecca Loos to dress up as some balding paunchy middle-aged male Esther Rantzen for a Channel 5 show.

08:23 / 19.03.06

Flowers - Tangent's comment on the Guardian extract yesterday was 'God, that Norah Vincent is an idiot.' So I wouldn't hold out too many hopes.

miss wonderstarr

09:09 / 19.03.06

I think there's some STRONG TRUTH in this. Maybe it even deserves another thread.

If you have never been sexually attracted to women, you will never quite understand the monumental power of female sexuality, except by proxy or in theory, nor will you quite know the immense advantage it gives us over men. Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no.

I passed in a man's world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Eventually I realised that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room. It was hard being a guy.

Ex

09:35 / 19.03.06

Possibly good to start another thread, as I'd like to take issue with almost all of it. '[D]ash me with a fingertip'? I'm hoping this is a striking set-up for a better investigation, but it just seems to be glamorising that idea that women hold allll the cards, sexwise, and that this is a Powerful kind of Power. When a) it's a phenomenally double-edged 'power' b) it's applicable only to a small minority of women c) it's bollocks.

I can see that it might be intended as a skillful ventriloquising of the opinions of chaps. I just hope it isn't a woman author bowling in to say 'DUDE! They're RIGHT! Women are FIENDS! And cruel partners in the game of l'amour...'

The stuff about masculinity and masking seems more interesting.

09:43 / 19.03.06

I found it interesting, with nuggets of 'yes, I can see that', but extreeemely flawed - and I'm slightly suspicious of her motives. Someone ought to start a new thread.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

10:51 / 19.03.06

the world of men was a masked ball.

And the world of women fucking isn't, I suppose. Stupid wanker.

miss wonderstarr

11:02 / 19.03.06

And the world of women fucking isn't, I suppose. Stupid wanker.

I thought the idea was that the author already knew that about the world of women -- it is a less common and widely-voiced idea that this is also true of masculinity.

Tryphena Absent

11:41 / 19.03.06

Clearly she didn't know about the world of women if she had to be a man to understand "the monumental power of female sexuality". Over-dramatising much?

miss wonderstarr

11:44 / 19.03.06

Yeah, fair enough, it is wildly melodramatic, and based on not-very-startling revelations that masculinity is a performance and that within some social contexts and rituals, women have a kind of precarious power.

I should have said MILD TRUTH instead, I think.

miss wonderstarr

11:46 / 19.03.06

It was hard being a guy.

This limp moral in particular belongs in some glum men's group manual from the early 90s.

11:52 / 19.03.06

Clearly she didn't know about the world of women if she had to be a man to understand "the monumental power of female sexuality".

To directly experience its effect in the specific context of male/female 'dating', however, arguably she did.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

11:53 / 19.03.06

Didn't Fay Weldon write a book with that title?

Tryphena Absent

12:17 / 19.03.06

To directly experience its effect in the specific context of male/female 'dating', however, arguably she did.

That assumes that every experience of heterosexual dating follows a specific gender pattern primarily effected by female behaviour. By supporting the notion that this is how women experience power in this context- by becoming men- you are supporting the supposition that what she is saying is accurate. Sentences like this are lazy: I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating because they begin with that assumption and end with a string of "they" that conveys all women behaving in the same way. That she highlights this as misogyny makes no difference because she says that this is female power. Well that's bullshit because their is no victim here, their are no fingertips, simply the othering of people who you're meant to engage with. She made herself into a teenage boy with gender issues and I suspect it's because her perception of men was sexist to begin with.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

12:36 / 19.03.06

Yeah. To me, that whole article just reeked of someone who'd gone in with a metric shedload of preconceptions and come out again with a metric shedload minus one or two items.

12:45 / 19.03.06

That assumes that every experience of heterosexual dating follows a specific gender pattern primarily effected by female behaviour. By supporting the notion that this is how women experience power in this context- by becoming men- you are supporting the supposition that what she is saying is accurate.

Okay, so there's a good bit of overgeneralising on her part, and some on mine too. I'm wary, however, of saying her experience is invalid because it's overgeneralised - and my point was, in order to have any direct experience of being a male in that particular 'dating' situation (and yes, I fully accept that her situation may well be highly specific) she had to become 'Ned'. I think her experiment, such as it is, is extremely flawed, but I'd hesitate to discard everything she says on the grounds that some of it is overgeneralised hyperbole. I'll be interested to read her book when it comes out.

All Acting Regiment

13:46 / 19.03.06

I'm coming late to this, but Modant, wow, it's incredibly brave of you to post that stuff on here.

As a male it's made me realise that a lot of the stuff I've considered to be terrible attacks against my person were actually a lot better than what a woman in my position would have got: I remember my own sports bags-thumpings and gauntlet runs, but bloody hell, they don't seem that bad when I consider that as a bloke I was technically allowed to use force to defend myself, if not in the immediate environment then in the culture as a whole. Much respect to you.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

11:37 / 21.03.06

Something I'd like to come back to right now because it's a concept that crops up on this board quite frequently: the idea that feminism is in some way counter-revolutionary.

At its crudest, this manifests when a male-identified poster has made a sexist statement or expressed a sexist opinion and has been challenged on it, and has then resorted to accusations of censorship, of 'being silenced', sometimes going on to imply that his being challenged is an example of some insidious oppressive force that stifles creative thought and impedes necessary fulfilment.

More subtly, it manifests as a tendency to sort of sideline the female, not deliberately but as a side-effect of not quite including the possibility of femaleness being in the set of characteristics that make up a theoretical person-figure.

F'rexample, I see this on and off in the Temple. The Magician seems to be a figure with a lot of traits in common with the Revolutionary, including that of being automatically male in many minds. Sometimes the possibility of a female reader isn't given any thought, with explicitly and pervasively sexist texts being linked to or discussed without mention being made of their sexist nature. Anyone challenging the text is invited to 'just ignore' the sexist elements, regardless of how intrinsic they are.

Is this just me? Anyone else think this?

13:42 / 21.03.06

Is this just me? Anyone else think this?

I completely agree. It's something I've noticed a fair bit - a lot of anarchists for instance, have got machismo and hatred of authority mixed up with being revolutionary (Class War springs to mind).

More later, but BTW, I'm really glad you posted youryour story above. I think it was really brave of you.

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