women: if you don't post on ile's political threads, why not?

The reason I don't contribute on ILX in specific - well, often political threads just feel like platforms for grandstanding, rather than genuine political discussion or debate. People (in general, not specific) seem to have already made up their minds about not just the issues, but about other posters' perceived views without bothering to actual read what their views are.

That seems to be a common ILX trait (and yes, I'm guilty of it myself) - and it's OK when you're talking about more frivolous things like music or culture. But on political issues it's much more... upsetting to be misunderstood or have words or viewpoints put into your mouth.

So I don't, unless I'm so ironic and detached that I'm just being a cartoon, or else so empassioned that I just don't think before I post.

xpost MC, a lot of coke dealers say things like that too.

Well, I assume that's what posh army officers tend to think.

say what you like about the "singing squaddies" robson and jerome but they are both proper socialists. even if they were only acting like squaddies.

Also I am a woolly liberal and a natural diplomat and therefore find myself uneasy in the midst of entrenched views and the written equivalent of raised voices. Though come to think of it political threads are often so unwieldy not because of battling extremes but because everyone has a slightly different area of the middle ground that they are deeply committed to defending and of course they all have Logic and Reason on their side and their side only.

Also, aggressiveness or trickery from certain quartters (Blount, Ethan, Momus et al) get right up me nose.

And even more distressing when certain regulars resort to name-calling and sarcastic jibes because you don't happen to agree with their precise definition of a certain political alignment.

I do read the political threads quite frequently. I like reading Nabisco on US politics and Tom May on UK politics.

Often the threads move onto not particularily useful hairsplitting before I've had time to complete my response. Also I'd like to use the threads as a way to build a better mousetrap because as far as I can tell a few of the people posting there both know their policy and might be able to do something interesting with it some day.

blimey it's all right for some innit?

(or both, of course)

/nick talk

yes, in the music section. you can check it if you like. wh smiths in central station always stock it.

*Studies are always right.

**ie listen more, interrupt less, rate other people's opinions higher than their own, more empathy, take on board all the info, dwell on it before speaking

a) If it's about UK or US or Australian politics, I feel out of my depth.

b) Even if it's about world politics and I could participate, political threads often seem to be more about boosting your own ego ("I know/understand this better than YOU!") than trying to reach any sort of consensus, and they tend to lead to nitpicking and shouting contests and ad hominem attacks.

c) I do usually participate on political threads about the Third World, which is my field of studies, but they tend to stay short.

I do like posting on threads about more general questions of ethics and morality, because on them it's harder for anyone to claim they have the right view. I also like discussing feminist issues, but - surprisingly enough - sometimes I feel I'm rather alone on those threads. Where are all the radical feminists of ILE?

it's complicated, because it seems to me that rating other people's opinions higher than one's own isn't such a good thing and may well be a product of sexism at school, etc.

Even if it's about world politics and I could participate, political threads often seem to be more about boosting your own ego ("I know/understand this better than YOU!") than trying to reach any sort of consensus, and they tend to lead to nitpicking and shouting contests and ad hominem attacks.

i don't think that's true, and you're loading the question by assuming politics is about reaching a consensus. maybe it is, but that's for the debating. i like politics threads, so i would say this. of course they're full of nitpicking, otherwise you get wafty stuff everyone can agree with but doesn't match up with reality.

Ken Clarke looks ill to me. Hope he gets the leadership and the party rots.

I don't understand it when women say: "I don't call myself a feminist..." Why not? Why don't you? You wanna get paid less than the bloke doing the same job, do ya? EH?

The Carol Gilligan studies are a generalisation, but fairly helpful I've found. Perhaps women in general are socialised to be that way; (conversely, perhaps some woman have been socialised to argue in a different way). But it's still an interesting thing to consider.

I've found it strange that I don't really argue much on broad political threads (though I will argue on tangential or local issues which are politically spiced) when I'm perfectly happy (or at least have been in the past; I find them increasinly tedious in my old age) to argue strongly on cultural threads.

multi x-post

it's complicated, because it seems to me that rating other people's opinions higher than one's own isn't such a good thing and may well be a product of sexism at school, etc.

See, I agree with everything at the top (about my own particular arguing style) *except for* the "rate other people's opinions higher" bit. So I think that might be something (more) socialised than the other bits.

she's a funny girl, though

So I'm wondering what this thread would be like if the gender was reversed. (probably just the same. Sigh.)

x-post

The UK doesn't *really* get the US's race issues in the same way that the US doesn't *really* get the UK's class issues.

(And being hahlf and haff I have a pretty warped take on both.)

Doesn't mean you shouldn't express such a stance, obviously. But it puts me off because I'm a wuss.

I don't like shooting my mouth off about things I don't feel comfortable that I understand at least partially. (Or have at least made up my mind on.)

x-post.

I am a feminist, I am absolutely 100% a feminist. However, I'm not a Radical with regards to anything. Radicalism, in general, turns me off. And most of the Radical Feminists that I've met or had to interact with have succeeded in making me feel so awful that they almost made me feel guilty for being a feminist at all.

Like Anna, I have to live in the real world - and that means deal with, interact with, sometimes sleep with men. Which does tend to make one more pragmatic. And I resent being made to feel like a Bad Feminist for being pragmatic.

But that's another kettle of fish. And this, I'm sure, will X-post again.

-don't post to music boards
-don't post to baseball boards
-don't post opinions on politics

....or you'll get stalked and blackballed.

Don't believe it? Well, fuck you. I'm long past deigning to prove
anything from a bunch of beneficiaries of 'the club'.

I have the evidence, and I'm moving forward.

Don't cough it up - risk losing all your money and
possibly ending up in prison.

Or is that it? A Radical Feminist is actually a man?

Radical feminism is a branch of feminism that views women's oppression as a fundamental element in human society and seeks to challenge that standard by broadly rejecting standard gender roles. "Radical" (from Latin rādīx, rādīc-, root) in radical feminism is used as an adjective meaning the root; radical feminists seek the root cause of women's oppression. The traditional Radical feminist standpoint may be expressed as viewing the division in all societies as that between men and women and stating that men are the oppressors of women[1]. These concepts were first developed in the late sixties as a significant part of second-wave feminism.

perhaps my suggestion/example was radical as opposed to Radical.

x-post

Uhh.. what the hell?

I don't like to participate much on political threads because they feel largely like shouting matches and circle jerks. It's hard enough to have meaningful political discussions with a few people you know in real life without things getting chaotic and charged and totally useless, let alone on ILX. Also, as mentioned by others, I don't always want to read 500 posts before I can say something, though I doubt that's gender-specific.

To give you some idea, I've muttered aloud that, for cruel-to-be-kind reasons, it might not be such a bad thing if China were to replace the US as the dominant world power, and rather quickly at that.

This isn't the sort of perverse internationalist realpolitik that my wife or daughters much care for.

That seems to be a common ILX trait (and yes, I'm guilty of it myself) - and it's OK when you're talking about more frivolous things like music or culture. But on political issues it's much more... upsetting to be misunderstood or have words or viewpoints put into your mouth.

This is very OTM, I think.

sorry would you prefer bush appointed a justice who aint no joke? meirs is basically a big sloppy kiss to dems compred to gonzales or a scalia with tits

wtf? ILX politics threads are like the best (i.e. worst) example of how hopelessly deluded & head-up-ass 70-80% of people here are.

Yes, that's it exactly. Thanks Laura.

It always reminds me of the Socialist Worker types who claim that working class people will only ever act in an un-socialist way because the evil corporations and capitalist media tell them to.

The biggest problem with this hypodermic approach is that it requires someone to say "but obviously I'm so clever and well-informed that it doesn't affect me". Which, as I say, is rather patronising of everyone else.

I always *ROFL* when I see those comments - that women shouldn't dress up - because it seems such an *antiquated* idea.

uh, what ally said. mostly.

But isn't it curious that the only two social groups who still espouse such ideas are:

a) radical feminists who claim to be left wing and know what's best for women

and

b) Daily Mail-reading Mary Whitehouse-type "moralists" who are proud of the fact that they hate feminists.

But I rarely have anything to add to them, at most I have requests for clarifications.

So Nabisco unsurprisingly OTM.

Not that I'm a woman or anything. But I tend towards whatever type of feminism is anti-gender, that isn't interested in having big distinctions between men and women, anyways.

How often does this happen in 2005? There isn't enough radical feminism in the world, if you ask me.

But the problem I have with this theory is that it implies the person complaining about it somehow resistant to the problem, and hence that any woman who allows herself to be indoctrinated by society in this manner is ignorant or weak. Maybe it's just the way I see it. I'm not a woman anyway.

How often does this happen in 2005?

Pretty much every time Julie Bindel puts pen to paper, certainly.

is it the pretty lady, happily going about her slightly-less-well-paid business and picking up nibbles for Him, or is it... the feminist, in her dungarees, putting the world to rights

Oh, please... I refer you to the people above who said they don't post on political threads because they don't like people putting words in their mouths...

Yes, and we're all hanging on Julie Bindel's every word aren't we?

I'd rather talk about the workings of neurology, about women in gaming, about writing, about shamanism; anything BUT dry old politics, I guess :(

But the problem I have with this theory is that it implies the person complaining about it somehow resistant to the problem, and hence that any woman who allows herself to be indoctrinated by society in this manner is ignorant or weak. Maybe it's just the way I see it. I'm not a woman anyway.

well, obviously this can't be ignored, but the same argument can be used against unionisation, or in '60s america the civil rights movement etc.

*at uni i said a lot in the tutorials because i had done the reading whereas i often havent kept myself informed about american or british politics
*at uni nobody will make personal attacks on me if they don't agree with what i say, but that fear is present on ile! although by actually typing this right now i'm beginning to realise its a pretty silly fear
*on ile i respect a lot of people's opinions and i don't wanna look dumb in front of them! for some reason i don't have this problem at uni, and it's been very helpful to be able to air some pretty dumb ideas of mine and get them sorted out. fear of looking dumb just holds you back from being set straight if your ideas were wonky in the first place
*as mentioned above the threads on ile move pretty fast and get really big and cumbersome quickly, at uni you might have to talk over people to be heard but you will, eventually, be listened to (y'know, by the people who actually do listen) and the debate will halt for you
*at uni the tutor often has to get everyone to get familiar with the basic boring stuff at the start, which sucks sometimes but it means everyone's on an equal footing. on ile everyone just usually jumps right in and a lot of assumptions are made. this is good in many ways if youre up to the level of debate thats being made but if youre not it's intimidating, nobody wants to be that nerd that stumbles in and says 'dancing queen, classic or dud?'.

Heh heh

No, but she's the most vocal proponent of one of the strands of so-called feminism I was complaining about in my original post. You know, the one where I said I find "some strands of feminism" a bit patronising. Not where I said, "They're all a bunch of lesbians, and who gave women the vote anyway?", which is how some people seem to have read it.

"at uni nobody will make personal attacks on me if they don't agree with what i say"

Lucky you — I was once accused of being a Nazi by my fellow students in a tutorial for saying I thought elections were better than mob rule.

I read it more as an attack on a bunch of irrelevant people who no-one takes any notice of anymore

This is described well in Christine Smallwood's Salon article Girls Gone Wild about Ariel Levy's book "Female Chauvinist Pigs". Levy talks about something she calls "raunch culture": "essentially misogynist, callow, simplistic and ubiquitous, [it] breeds women-hating-women who angle for power with men and propagate more raunch under the deceitful guise of feminist empowerment."

Like a coalition party too keen to do a deal with the big party rather than ensuring its own distinctive agenda gets heard, "raunch culture women" (think Suicide Girls) have abandoned the project to deconstruct patriarchy and instead identified themselves totally with patriarchy, then passed this off as "empowerment".

But the problem I have with this theory is that it implies the person complaining about it somehow resistant to the problem.

Not really. If anything, the idea that you would need this imaginary resistance to the problem before discussing it is more insulting, like saying you can't discuss England unless you're standing in France.

Fair enough (altough I don't quite get the France/England simile).

But I see it more as woman A saying Woman B has been conned into living in a certain way by society, a mistake woman A has clearly not made since she has chosen to opt out of it. Therefore woman A takes it upon herself to teach woman B that she need not live the way she does, regardless of whether woman B is happy with her lot or not.

I suppose you could say that woman B should be given all the options and then be allowed to make up her own mind, but the very aggresive brand of the F word that some people adhere to (and hey, maybe I've just been warped by growing up surrounded by social workers and very few people actually act this way anymore) always seems to imply that woman A is right and woman B is just wrong, rather than ill-informed.

An old (female) friend of mine often complains that she's letting down her gender when she totters out in big heels, little skirts and lots of make-up, mainly because of people like woman A.

As far as this friend (woman C?) is concerned, she dresses the way she does because she wants to, and she sleeps with blokes from time to time because she wants to, and everything she does in her life she does because she wants to. Yet people who are supposedly on her side often tell her that she's setting women back 40 years by having too much sex and not wearing enough clothes.

second-wave feminism has that interesting trajectory, though, kind of growing out of/reacting against super-"sexualized" the hippy-u/g-counterculture. i can't help connecting the archetypal 'stokey lesbian' side of feminism Sunshine is talking about with the other stuff that happened to the counterculture (which, naturally, went batshit-puritan circa 1971) -- but i don't know how it connected to the actual political/legal advances that were made in the 60s and 70s.

in other words, i don't think the 'it's okay to be hott' thing should be dismissed as a betrayal of second-wave feminism, because the history of the movement was hahahaha 'overdetermined' (stokey leftists in-joke, cheers) by all this other stuff, much of which militated against all sorts of things (consumerism, beauty, 'bourgeois culture') which were not necessarily obvious enemies of 'feminism'.

I like to think they're being more critical of how shallow men are in Dontcha... But then I think music's greatest feminists are Helen Love, so my opinion is probably not worth that much.

"stoke newington"

D'oh!

I thought for a millisecond or so that this was a reference to Stokely Carmichael - not exactly a feminist hero, to say the least!

It was in the press release. I threw it away in disgust, so the exact quote escapes me.

“It’s all about being who you are, having fun and being confident… and feeling hot,” says Nicole Kea, lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls.

Isn't that exactly what the Spice Girls claimed Girl Power was all about. After they nicked the phrase off Shampoo, of course. Who nicked it off Helen Love in the first place...

"It’s all about being who you are, having fun and being confident… and feeling hot"

that's how i roll, anyway.

Yeah, sister, *real* solidarity there.

x-post

What she is, by dint of getting her kit off is richer

This sense of pathos re 'it's too bad you picked the wrong woman' being conveyed better in Alamaze's more 'soulful' voice, but though she sounds forlorn she doesn't win much sympathy what with her accompanying arrogance (which the PCDs maximise at the expense of everything else).

There are eejits too, mind, naturally.

Or so someone might claim, anyway, if their version of "female empowerment" weren't this vague pop-talk "I'm not afraid of the fact that you want to have sex with me, in fact I'm making money off it" stuff.

This has been a sticking point for the feminist project, obviously: what does "equality" with men mean? There are areas where feminists rightly point out male "privileges" that many women would not actually be interested in claiming for themselves.

(a) Part of the feminist project becomes, once again, trying to stop men from behaving in certain ways, or to cede privilege -- a big, difficult project that's probably less fun than dancing around and having people think you're sexy.

(b) There will always be women who genuinely do want elements of these male privileges or opportunities or whatever -- women who think that everybody should have them, instead of nobody. And then there's the equally no-fun prospect of (as above) some feminists sometimes telling other women that they're just "wrong" about, well, women.

(And Archel, I think there are sticking points where the different-people-with-same-opportunities idea doesn't quite get over this, most of them relating to actual sexual behavior. This is why I tend more toward kinda post-gender thinking, which maybe allows characteristics and behaviors to still be assigned to both genders, but also allows individuals to pick and choose among them as they're inclined; there's less of a risk of telling people how they "should" serve as part of a gender group.)

"Radical feminism"'s idea that you shouldn't wear makeup, that women are exactly like men, is a completely antiquated feminist ideal that I believe (and hope) most active feminists would disagree with. A more current portrayal of feminist belief would probably be along the lines of "men and women are not the same and have different abilities; because of this, women should be allowed to compete on equal footing with men because their different viewpoints/abilities will be beneficial to everyone."

Unfortunately, society-at-large still enforces the concept of feminists as angry, fat lesbians who hate men--not exactly an appealing label to young girls. So this myth of the over-sexualized-yet-empowered woman was created to keep women in their "proper" roles in a more subtle manner, still in keeping with the legal and social progress women have made.

Overall, however, women are still fairly legally disadvantaged (abortion rights are still threatened, unequal wages, etc.), and that should probably still remain the greatest goal of feminism (instead of gender role definition). So to preoccupy ourselves with whether or not Sex and the City is good for women isn't so important.

Oh, and I don't post to political threads because they take a long time to read.

"Prgnancy won't stop 'Alias' star from being adventurous, even sexy"

Yeah, I pretty much agree with this. Funny how I'm often agreeing with Momus.. (Not an attack, I just see things differently of late.) Suicide Girls, uh, I don't know what to say other than, girls are dumb. The Pussycat Dolls are tacky and dumb too, and can't sing. The Tori Alamaze original version of that song sounded lovely, though! I liked that one quite a bit.

Somebody got a source on the owner of the SG website treating the girls like crap? I'm not surprised at all, I'd just like to read more.

If that's true, I'll cancel my subscription.

Anyway. Yeah, did you see what I did there? I started a political thread. Only to find out that the topic had already been raised. So now I probably won't contribute as much for fear of spoiling someone else's thread.

Then again, the discussion of lots of things on ILX is a joke, such is the nature of ILX. The attitude of ILX is no more or less hostile than many other environments in the "real world" and cyber worlds. Hence my pragmatism - it's better to try to act in a feminist way than to just grandstand about it.

Suicide Girls: More Sad Tales (there is a link to the original article in this follow-up one).