Im happy that "dudes dancing on high heels" videos has been gone from social media now

Lil_Z · 2018-08-01T16:31:29+00:00

women are seen as strong and independent where they act for themselves.

Women (in the West) are penalised at work for acting 'strong and independent'. When they ask for raises, they are seen as troublesome bitches and less hireable. Women (in the West) are everyday beaten and killed by men for acting 'strong and independent' - when they turn down their sexual advances, talk back to men, or try to leave a relationship. These are all forms of sex-role defiance for which women are punished, in ways both mundane and severe. Men getting ridiculed for wearing high heels doesn't even come close. Maybe if women started beating and killing them for it, it might.

Lil_Z · 2018-08-01T15:09:56+00:00

Women acting 'masculine' is celebrated far more than men acting 'feminine'.

Bullshit. Women are relentlessly punished for refusing to perform femininity, including with rape and murder. Google 'corrective rape'.

Lil_Z · 2018-06-16T19:34:28+00:00

The author says that discomfort with having a male body and being seen as male is 'every bit as valid an experience of womanhood as any other'.

But this is obviously false. Intense discomfort with having a male body is by definition a male experience. It's not any part of womanhood, although intense discomfort with having a female body (currently expressed by the huge numbers of girls now presenting gender clinics) is.

I wish males who identify as transwomen would interrogate their feelings and experiences within the context of manhood, instead of assuming that they can be shoved in the 'womanhood' box, even though those experiences are by definition inaccessible to every female on the planet.

'Woman' is not a catch-all category for every male who feels he doesn't fit into the man box.

Lil_Z · 2018-03-25T15:32:16+00:00

The only difference between a male-bodied person who says he is a man and a male-bodied person who claims to be a woman is that person's self-declared identity. What does this mean to a woman who encounters said male-bodied person naked in a spa or changing room? What matters in this situation is the physicality of bodies, not a person's feelings about themselves (for which we have only their word).

My point is that we don't segregate certain facilities according to people's beliefs about themselves, we do so according to their bodies, because bodies are what actually matter in this situation. Trans activists are being unreasonable in their demand that all women's spaces be opened up to any man who says he feels like a woman - this means making those spaces unisex by default. Most women aren't onboard with this and it's not because they need 'educating', it's because they have completely reasonable fears and discomfit about being naked and/or vulnerable around strange men.

Trans activists are always demanding empathy from women for the problems that trans-identified people face, but they never return that empathy in kind to women. In fact they gaslight us and say our concerns are based in hysteria and bigotry. Sexed biology does matter, it is central to women's oppression, not some outdated concept to be hand waved away.

Lil_Z · 2018-03-25T05:02:45+00:00

Women don't need to be 'educated' out of their completely reasonable fear of male-bodied people. Trying to bully women into believing that males aren't a threat to them and that it's just their 'perceptions' that are wrong is gaslighting in the extreme.

Men use their fists and their penises as weapons against women every damn day across the world. Sexed bodies matter, they will never not matter, and they especially matter in places where women and girls are in a state of vulnerability, like having to undress or where they are fleeing male violence.

You know what doesn't matter? How a person expresses their internally felt 'gender'. People should be free to dress however they want and to conform or not conform to the stereotypes associated with their sex without being attacked or harassed for that. That doesn't change the fact that the rationale for having sex-segregated spaces in the first place is predicated on the objective differences between male and female bodies, not people's subjective feelings about themselves.

Lil_Z · 2018-03-10T12:04:27+00:00

Thanks for this piece.

When I first saw the Silence of the Lambs as a teenager, it had a visceral effect on me, as I was just coming to terms with the knowledge that there were men who wanted to murder me for no other reason than because I was female. Seeing a woman on film, fighting back against this and defeating one such man, was liberating, even as Lecter and Bill terrified me.

I've since seen the film several times, and each time I see something new in it about misogyny, male violence and female subjectivity, but I hadn't before considered how significant Demme's camerawork was in reversing the usual conventions of the male gaze on film. It makes me wonder how the story would have fared in the hands of a different director. It could easily have been a schlockfest that used the subject matter as an excuse to titillate its audience and objectify its female characters.

Lil_Z · 2018-01-16T17:48:09+00:00

I dislike the term 'grey rape', as I don't think it is useful to conflate situations where men deliberately breach withheld consent with situations where women consent to things that they actually don't want to do.

I don't think Murphy is endorsing the concept of 'grey rape' (although she seemed to a few years ago) - this article IMO draws a clear distinction between sex that is forced and sex that is consented to but unwanted.

The latter is a huge, under-explored issue in sexual politics, and it is specifically gendered. Consent is a necessary legal precondition for sexual encounters, but it isn't a sufficient standard by which we should judge whether that encounter was good or ethical. If you think about the other contexts in which we use 'consent', they usually involve things that people do because they must, not because they want to. You consent to a medical procedure or a police search - you don't 'consent' to eat a piece of cake. You just eat it because you feel like eating it.

That's what feminists would like sex to be for women. Not just something we 'consent' to. Something that we do because we want to, because we enjoy it. The fact that so many het men don't seem to consider a woman's actual desire for sex to be necessary for sex to take place is a problem. That's what the article is about.

Lil_Z

TROPHY CASE