[a sign reads FEMINIST CONFERENCE next to a closed door, a blue character shrugs and says…]
I don’t care
[next to the same door, the sign now says RESTRICTED FEMINIST CONFERENCE WOMEN ONLY, there are now four blue characters desperately banging on the door, one is reduced to tears on the floor, they are shouting]
DISCRIMINATION
SO UNFAIR!!!
LET US IINN!!
MISANDRY
2 & 3) We should birth fewer boys. It sounds like everyone would be happier.
Men believe that women “dominate conversation” whenever women take more than about 30% of the speaking time.
Do the following:
Scientists have done this. What they find is that men will be utterly convinced that the women are dominating the speaking and conversation time, even if 2/3rds of the time is actually given over to men speaking.
Men do this without even realizing it. You probably do this without even realizing it.
If you really want techniques on how to end “passive gendered segregation,” then you need to adjust the character of cis men so they don’t feel that they’re being discriminated against at the exact same time they’re actually dominating things. Masculinity as practiced is performative and fragile.
Never said they didn’t.
I don’t know if you lack the ability to understand that these four points were made in the context of why women might want a meeting without men or something else. Either way, I’m don’t think you belong in this conversation.
Okay.
The goals of feminism.
I suppose my point is that exclusion of any group or category of person effects what is said. So it doesn’t really matter. Its not a good enough reason.
Making a group explicitly exclusionary implies a perspective that the excluded group is an out-group, and thus an adversary.
Men who formed explicitly exclusionary male only spaces, boy’s clubs, etc. in the past almost certainly feel some level of disdain for women. And men who enforce soft exclusion, like guys who do litmus tests to see if a woman is earnestly interested in whatever the club is about, aggressively disgust me.
This is not a feeling I apply with gendered prejudice.
I wasn’t being a smart ass. (well, mostly) I’m a soft anti-natalist, my suggestion was a half joking gendered version of what I actually believe. I think that, if you have given information on what a person’s life is going to be like you should be honest in your assessment if they’ll live a life worth living and make the world a better place by being in it. I just have a much higher bar to clear than most people.
My view is that, if society is to give birth to 100 people, if there is a chance 1 of them will live a life so miserable that they are driven to suicide, regardless of reason, you should probably birth none of them. Guess what the global percentage of people who die of suicide is?
Its a good thing you don’t get to make that decision then, asshole.
There are many kinds of feminists and forms of feminism. I assume you don’t care to elaborate on specifics because you think you’d show me I’m right to view exclusionary spaces with some level of suspicion and disdain.
I didn’t address this directly because you didn’t do the work to show you were actually interested in the conversation. That’s why didn’t have the right to be there. This response is more serious and worth giving you my attention and energy. Had you provided the context and thinking you provided in this response in the first response, I would have considered answering especially if you were able to support it’s relevancy.
I won’t be addressing the anti-natalist because I don’t see how it’s connected and it seems like it’s emotionally charged for you. Emotionally charged politics are important, but only if they are connected to the topic and if I judge that I have any relevant position to make any intervention. So I won’t be sounding off on that.
That leaves the first point where you started in your first comment “Men do the same.” and gave your thinking in this last comment. On the face of it, an out group is not an adversary. If I attend a cancer survivor’s group and people who never had cancer show up, it changes things. People who never had cancer are not my adversaries. My goal isn’t to fight those people. I want to connect with others through a shared experience.
Men’s only groups in the past was often a place where real decisions for power and profit were made. This is radically different from a the support some women may get in a women’s conference or the strategy and tactics developed from shared seed experiences for the political project of over throwing patriarchy.
I don’t normally post on weekends but I left my lunch in the office fridge and your response has been a grain of sand in my brain. Figured I’d finish up writing my response.
It wasn’t clear how I could have responded to pull out the counter arguments I wanted to get to. I want to skip to the core of the discussion because if I used up time on initial 101 arguments, statistically the person I’m responding too gets bored, suspicious, or tired of the argument overall. Also, being flatly and snarkily blunt about a specific thing without additional details gives a chance for someone to reveal what they actually think in anger without tactical obfuscation of their actual beliefs, wasting time.
Its doesn’t work often but it has every once in a while. The alternative almost always seems like I get the same old same old boilerplate.
Its emotional to be natalist as well. Its connected to the discussion at a fundamental level, to be natalist means you value certain things as an axiom that lead to a certain derrived perspectives, one that I think is arguably similar to yours. Which is why I brought it up.
I stated it more to identify if this is a fundamental difference in our views. Something irreconcilable. Its a lonely feeling to have it confirmed. Very few have a conscious belief on the matter, pro or con. And default absent minded to natalist perspectives largely due to religion and cultural inertia.
Segregation foments adversarial attitudes. Even with trivial or made up differences. It widens the empathy gap, creates perceived out-group homogeneity, and a sense of moral superiority. Group polarization absolutely can and probably will manifest in your suggested cancer survivor group, especially with an explicit ban on people joining who are not survivors of the disease. The goal is irrelevant, the result is what matters.
Statistically very true. Not a hard rule though, and to say there is no power in a woman’s only group that couldn’t further disenfranchise a dis-empowered non-woman would be disingenuous.
“Over throwing patriarchy” is a vague goal at best though. What does that actually entail? Much like the rapture, the inevitable communist revolution, or judgement day this is just an in-group meta narrative, not really a goal at all.
I’m going to skip the meta-conversation and tactic you used. I don’t think they clarify or further the discussion about why women would want a conference without men.
Regarding natalism, I skipped it not because it was emotional, but it was tangential and unclear in how it was related to the specific topic. Again, I have nothing against emotions playing into one’s politics.
This is only true if you fail to understand the internal needs of the segregated group. In this case, it is to regain power in themselves and through connection to others who get it. This subverts any empathy gap that could happen. When a cancer survivor group meets, I don’t ever know what it was like having had cancer. But I can provide an empathetic space to understand that:
If the only result you care about is how it effects out-groups, then you misunderstand how healing and political movements are created at the earliest stages. How do you think political movements are formed if not in small groups meeting privately?
Women are historically oppressed minorities. Patriarchal systems caused their oppression. Who are the dis-empowered non-woman that are being disenfranchised?
Much of this particulars are covered in the long history of feminism. Recounting it all would take several books. Staying with in the confines of one or strain will help guide the discussion. What feminist literature have you read? Who are your guiding lights in the movement? That will dissipate the vagueness. There may not be one single definition, but the contours for disagreement move from a blob to specific corners of concern. I’m asking for these because if you view these goals as ‘religious,’ it suggests you are unfamiliar with the specific, material policy work and labor history that defines the movement. There is nothing inherently wrong with not being familiar with the field in specificity.
So in sum, I’d like to hear:
No, its a documented and highly scientifically backed effect.
Its not the only effect that I care about but I do care about it.
Political movements are value neutral, or at least subjectively perceived as good or bad depending on who you ask about which movement.
If you want to say that the harmful in-group & out-group effects are a worthwhile sacrifice to achieve other ends, that’s one claim I could see as understandable but I would want to know the specifics of what the actual end goal(s) is/are before I’d support it. Further, the main way a political movement actually grows and achieves positive things is to broaden their support typically. If they lean into leveraging power they might have over a majority they’re using might makes right logic. I can certainly see the utility of that if you view the majority as stupid or evil and I’ll even admit these days its hard not to feel that way given the state of my country. At that point though I don’t even see the point other than cynical power games.
NB’s & men who fall into disenfranchised categories like bipoc, lgbt, homeless/impoverished/working class, and probably most relevant to gender issues is the neurodiverse male population. Not to mention that creating an exclusively women space can attract TERFs, where they can spread their bullshit more efficiently by leaning into the in-group & out-group effects.
Women’s issues is gender issues. Gender is like any social construct, its defined by relationships and collective beliefs.
My feminism? I was critiquing the feminism you are defending that would justify an exclusionary in-group. I’m suspicious of why you’d want to ask.
If you must know, I tend to agree with Xenofeminism. Its the form of feminism that embraces rationalism, any consistent Xenofeminist would agree with me here.
I need to address the structural failure of this conversation. For our dialogue to be productive, it must engage with the thesis presented.
I have presented a specific thesis on restorative spaces as a material necessity for movement-building. This has been consistently ignored or reframed as “exclusionary antagonism.” I understand that you reject this as it widens empathy gap between in-groups and out-groups. However, you never engage with the interior possibility for it result in healing for the oppressed in-group.
I asked a direct question regarding how political movements form in the absence of private, strategic meeting spaces. This was met with a response addressing how they grow and not how which is a refusal to engage with the history of labor and policy work that defines these movements.
I presented a clear statement, “This is only true if you fail” and your response seemed to interpret my statement as a rejection to the initial and not the subsequent. I have no doubt that this phenomena is real or scientifically supported. Rather, I was pointing out how empathy for the in-group is a analgesic to the pain of being an out-group.
Finally, and arguably the most perplexing, despite my forthright and honest comportment, there has been a persistent reticent to grant me good faith and continue to view me with suspicion. You are treating my request for feminist framing as a “trap” rather than a legitimate effort to ground the discussion and find common language. Both of these I stated at the time of the request.
So in a attempt to meet you with the language of Xenofeminism, I will, to the best of my ability relate my response in the verbiage of the text you provided. Since I am new to the school, please grant me a little grace as I fumble through it and keep in mind that I’m trying to meet you where you are while still honoring the lived experiences of an oppressed minority.
I suspect we are actually arguing about the mechanics of liberation rather than the goals. Xenofeminism (XF) is a project of rationalist engineering. If we treat social organization as a form of “technomaterialist” construction, then we must recognize that every effective tool requires specific environmental constraints to function.
My thesis of restorative spaces is the social wetware terrain in which control is wrenched from the hegemon. A laboratory requires a sterile environment to produce a pharmaceutical , an oppressed group requires a sterile social space to re-engineer the “memetic parasites” of patriarchy. It is the pre-production phase of a mesopolitical project.
Restorative spaces are the necessary pre-production phase of the mesopolitical. They are the modular laboratories where we develop the new language for sexual politics that XF calls for. You cannot bootstrap a new world into existence while still using the corrupted operating system of the dominant gaze. This is the site where we experiment with different modes of ‘directed subsumption’. It is the protected environment where we develop the very procedures intended to seep into the shell of the patriarchy and dismantle its defenses from the inside out.
It is the site of “multiple political bodies”. It’s not a site available just for women. But also for men to do the same. It is a site for BIPOC, for asexuals, for trans and for neurodivergent people. If “a hundred sexes should bloom” , we must allow for a hundred different social affordances. Just as a neurodiverse person might need a specific sensory environment to thrive, women and the marginalized groups you mentioned require specific restorative environments to build the unselfish solidarity necessary for the long game of history.
Universal solidarity is not a spontaneous event, but a synthetic construction that must be meticulously engineered across distinct sites of struggle over large time scales. Solidarity must be engineered between these distinct sites of restorative labor. Moving toward a true mesopolitical scale requires us to treat these individual ‘laboratories’ as modular nodes in a larger network. We do not build a universalist project by flattening our specific needs into a vague, horizontal mass, but by establishing robust protocols of transit between our specialized spaces, both externally and internally. This coordination is the necessary ‘boot-strapping’ phase—linking our local ‘social affordances’ into a cohesive, technomaterialist front capable of challenging the hegemon.
I am not arguing for a “shrine to nature”. I am arguing for the freedom to engineer the social conditions of our own healing. If we are to engineer a future beyond the binary, we must first defend the right to construct the specialized environments where that future is actually being built.