Posts by TracyMac
-
Hard News: WOTY: The Kindness Scandal, in reply to Moz,
So what do you call self-described radical feminists who deny that transwomen are women? That's why the term was coined.
I agree it's not a great term, because there are plenty of radical feminists (which has a very specific meaning I'm not going to get into here) who are not trans-exclusionist, and there are plenty of other feminists of different types who are trans-exclusionist.
In the context of social history, though, the most vehement anti-trans opinions have been expressed by radfems like Shelia Jeffreys, Jan Raymond et al. They still vehemently express those views, so I think that's why the term has stuck.
I still think it's useful to have a term for trans-exclusionist feminism. I also think it is more than FINE that those views are robustly critiqued - frankly, I feel that these days, it's on a par with Jim Crow racism.
Should people be automatically slapped with a label and subjected to voiciferous levels of abuse if they express a milder form of these views? Not necessarily, and my observation is that the feminist or trans-ally nature of the worst abusers is often pretty questionable. I know many people personally and well-known feminist and trans personalities who detest the views of Jeffreys etc (and one friend who has a very justified personal dislike of the woman) - yet I've not seen or heard one of those people descend to personal abuse at all, much less the kind that has been uttered by a small minority.
We all know about Russian and right-wing astroturfing in left-leaning contexts. I truly believe some of the attempts to conflate the criticisms of trans-exclusionary feminist views with the actual harm that those views have perpetuated on transpeople could definitely be part of such a campaign. Or just trolls who are enjoying a pile-on to stir up the SJWs.
Anyway, sorry for the derail. To sum up, I don't personally think there should be a problem criticising something as being trans-exclusionist, and I don't have much patience for people saying it's an "ugly" term when the sentiments themselves are ugly. I do agree that TERF itself is not particularly useful or accurate.
I do vote for more of our no. 1 word, a little more #kindness.
-
Really enjoying the whataboutism here, not. And it always, always happens when it comes to discussions of violence against women.
Let's put it another way. How many women commit sexual assaults against complete strangers? How many non-femme men feel anxious walking along a quiet street at night?
-
Up Front: It's Beginning to Look a Lot…, in reply to Moz,
Not to fan any more flames, but I did say that recusing yourself is a valid strategy, and did make it clear that my personal strategy was my own. (Also, my family dynamics have changed dramatically in the last 30 years, thankfully.)
The passive-aggressive remark was more about individuals in general who participate, but complain and refuse to share the labour (and it was definitely gendered), not you personally.
-
Interesting piece of history, thanks.
Regarding the "miasma" stuff, I know if people in my grandparents' generation who muttered about "bad air" and so on. They certainly knew and believed in germ theory - scrubbing everything with boiling hot water and strong disinfectants was a feature of any illness.
But folk theories can persist in parallel with scientific knowledge for a very long time. I wouldn't be surprised at all if people at the beginning of last century hedged their bets by considering both. And quite possibly, marginally-educated people would not be that aware of germ theory either.
-
Up Front: It's Beginning to Look a Lot…, in reply to Moz,
You're eliding "willing participation" and "being asked to help".
If you're not a willing participant, then I'd suggest not participating at all. It seems better to me than being an unwilling participant and going on passive-aggressive strike when asked to share the labour.
And I say this as someone who dislikes most of these ceremonial events and who has seen plenty of unnecessary and martyred behaviour around them.
A gracious thing to do when recusing yourself from them is to offer some kind of alternative to the host (if you're actually invested in maintaining a connection, and these events are important to them). "Sorry, I don't think I will come to Christmas lunch this year, but can I drop off the kids' presents the week before and take you to dinner/lunch sometime instead?"
An alternative strategy is to propose it's done a different way. Some people have the whole thing at a restaurant. We have a potluck in the park.
Personally, I've decided that pitching in once a year isn't too bad in the greater scheme of things, since (frankly) it's less labour than trying to maintain connections individually. It also helps I don't outright detest any family members and our gatherings are more awkward than drama-filled.
-
I think Pinker is often a wang, and the "eat your dinner, there are starving children in Africa" and "whinging feminists should try living in Saudi/Iran" is pretty much the epitome of wangness in argument.
We may be doing better compared to 30 years ago, but we *should* be. We should be better than 5 years ago. And it's easy enough to go backwards - I personally feel Australia is half a generation behind NZ now.
-
Hard News: Protecting privilege in Epsom, in reply to Russell Brown,
Regarding the effect on pepper-potting on urban Maori communities, yes, it makes a significant difference when the faces you see around you are mostly brown, and the culture is embedded in THE community culture as a whole - not just the "other" or a token. I'm not at all surprised their experience wasn't that great - obviously pakeha cultural dominance is just that, even with variations due to class/economic difference.
There's a simple but cool site (http://ncase.me/polygons/) that animates the Schelling model of segregation. It's purely mathematical, with only one variable and all the avatars having the same tolerance levels. But it came up with an interesting notion that while higher tolerance for difference leads to less segregation, it needs to be coupled with an intolerance for a lack of diversity in a community to create a lasting effect (not that minority groups have much choice about their tolerance levels either way). The model also emphasises in one of its examples that when moving avatars around to achieve a good mix, they should be moved in pairs - not alone. Isolation, even in the attempt to "improve" things, is not good. Interesting how a simple model can point to some truths.
In reality, I do feel that there are definite tipping points before a community can be properly inclusive (and by "inclusive", I mean where cultural differences are not subsumed - the "salad bowl" rather than the "melting pot" of optimistic metaphors). In the old model of pepper-potting, where the housing was sometimes a bit denser than the surroundings, but not that much, it would not have reached those thresholds very often.
The best school experience I had in that sense was at AGGS. The catchment area wasn't too gentrified yet in the 80s, and a lot of girls from Queen Vic went there for their Bursary year. As a poor pakeha, I felt a bit daunted by the Old Girls and historical context of the school (like the Madrigal Society!), but the fact there were plenty of people in my boat - all the state and council housing in Freeman's Bay - made it fine once I noticed. And it was really diverse in terms of ethnicity.
Maori and various Polynesian cultures seemed to get a lot of prominence and celebration - I hope those students felt so too. Maori and Poly students certainly had strong pride, but I don't know to what degree they felt it related to the school. Ironically, I didn't realise just how competitive the secondary schools' kapa haka events could be until I was at AGGS. Or, that there was really such a thing as "middle-class Maori", other than a few teachers I'd had previously. That woke up a lot of my ideas.
So yes, these new public housing efforts must ensure there are enough people around "like them" to make a strong community without running into the issue of ghettoisation and "sink estates" a la crappy places in the UK/Europe. A challenging balancing act, but I do feel it's possible.
-
Hard News: Music: The Noisy Library…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Thank YOU, Simon. For the whole enterprise.
I totally get it re timing "retrospective" articles on active acts/scenes, but I'm really glad you're covering that one off imminently!
-
Congratulations on taking up your studies again. While I hope you will be able to follow up with an academic career, even doing your current research and writing, and publishing a dissertation, will make a big contribution to the body of knowledge on a significant number of people in our society.
-
Up Front: A Word About Safety, in reply to Craig Young,
In my experience as a member of both, the BDSM communities are not as fragmented as the queer ones, at least in Australia and NZ.
Of course, yes, there are sub-communities with particular interests, and leather men tend to be very much into their own scene (not many public kink events go in for sex on premises, whereas of course gay bathhouses facilitate it l. And each town tends to have their own prevailing micro-cultures and "influencers".
But there's more mixing in general compared to the more "parallel play" of queer communities (although that has definitely been undergoing change itself over the last several years in terms of being more cohesive - at least that's my impression).
My impression of the SF scene - not that I have ever participated in it - was that there were two factors that splintered things a fair amount.
One is that if there are significant numbers of people into so many arcane things, they're going to tend to glom onto the particular speciality scene that is particularly to their taste. There are SO many kinky scenes in SF- why would you spend significant time with old school leather men if you were an egalitarian vegan lesbian Japanese rope nerd? (I'm not exaggerating very much.)
Whereas in at least one town in NZ, there were so few "good" tops/doms around that the otherwise-inclined formed a group where they would take turns taking care of business for each other. Everyone had preferences and no-goes, but they also adapted to various things that may not have been 1st on their menus. And I think that's still a significant ethos for our smaller communities - there's more mixing and matching. We don't mind sharing space, in general.
Secondly, in SF, there was a huge impact from the "lesbian sex wars" and the anti-porn (which generally conflated to anti-sexual-violence) branches of feminism, particularly during the mid-80s to mid-90s, when Califia started getting published more prolifically.
Those influcences hit NZ as well - ironically, I was put off kink for many years by a certain bunch of women in Auckland who might have taken Macho Sluts a little bit to heart in their behaviour at vanilla parties. And the overly puritanical side was also in force - I remember some very earnest debates on whether penetrative sex (not even with strap-ons!) was "unPC". Funnily enough, everyone I actually shagged seemed quite keen on the act.
But my impression was that those debates weren't quite so polarising and long-lasting as they were in the US. There were a hell of a lot less people in NZ who'd done gender studies or whatever at university in NZ, and had that much time or energy for the more rarefied debates. Although debates WERE had.
Finally, I think the combination of the smorgasbord environment and socio-political disputes had a synergistic effect in SF - the latter widened the small cracks that were already there.