Everyday Sexism: Part II

Last Thursday I attended a Guardian-initiated meeting on ‘Everyday Sexism’. The title is Behind the Headlines: What's all the fuss about feminism? and the blurb says: “Why do some women hate feminism?  What is the 'fourth wave' of feminism? Who decides what it means to be a feminist? Can men be feminists?  And, with the pay gap still widening and sexism prominent across campus and offices, where has it really got anyone?” In Part I the week before, I discussed the issues that might be addressed.

Well, it was a well-attended meeting at Red Lion Square’s well-known meeting-place, Conway Hall.  Laura Bates, convenor of the everyday Sexism group, presided, with a panel of four:

(a)  Yas Necati, 18, a student, campaigning against Page 3,
(b)  Bonnie Greer, OBE, playwright, black American feminist from Chicago,
(c)  Jane Fae, a transgender feminist, also writing on climate change,
(d)  Beatrix Campbell, Green Party, latest book The End of Equality, a call for a global feminism.

The meeting seemed very much a rally for the converted: when people referred to sexism on campus ‘which we had all come across’ no attempt was made to explain to the likes of myself, a man.  Obviously it related to some extent to gender roles and harassment, but I couldn’t get any feel for this.  None of the questions were really answered, except for a definite affirmative for the question “Can men be feminine?”

Mention was made of the men showing up, and we received a round of applause.  Thanks.  All the other men there, perhaps 20, seemed to be there with partners Coming back to the panels.  Anti-feminists might claim that feminists are a ‘load of harpies that stigmatise women for being women’. 

Er, no.  Even though Laura Bates wrote a very angry book on Everyday Sexism, she came across as a very friendly though business-like chair of the occasion.  Harpies?  I see no harpies.  I felt however a certain amount of anger at own experiences, and that heat was fuelled by an absence of light.

I will briefly go through four points arising from the discussion:

(a)  Why do some women hate feminism? 

Barely discussed, though Bonnier Greer made an aside about some feminists benefitting financially,  citing the monetary reward some movements receive for holding contrarian view. “We are developing a new narrative.”

But you only have to google on women+against+feminism to see the massive resentment of women at being talked to by women who think they may presume to know best   This may well be a matter of concern, but scarcely addresses the issue.

This anti-feminist view was clearly not generally comprehensible to most people present, at least those who spoke simply felt that anyone who has experienced either discrimination or harassment will wish to be a feminist.

(b)  Men and gender roles 

Obviously a lot was said about men, but I felt that Bonnie Greer made a very interesting remark:

“We must discuss the problems that boys have,” [Bonnie says, citing the ways they are pushed into masculine tropes, like sports.] “As feminists, we must have discussions about men and masculinity.”

I get trolled a lot by young men, [she continues] just speak to them as if they are human and it disarms them; they don't expect that, they expect a fight.... they constantly have to define manhood, not just in their houses, but everywhere, online, on the street corner: are you a man, are you a man, are you a man?

I also remember brief mention, by the Green lady, Beatrix Campbell.  According to the official blog  she said: “Feminism is very interested in men and masculinity; how could it not be?” and then brought up another audience question, about men taking on more feminine roles in the house. “Men themselves have not initiated any mass movement to enable them to take care of their children, to be parents rather than providers.”

One may note that mothers very often get the support of grandmothers, and now that men are living longer I am sure we should have a ‘Grandfathers For Justice’!  Not only would this help the fathers, but might make the grandfathers live even longer!

(c)  Sex and Page Three

I am afraid the discussion of Page Three, led by Beatrix Campbell, was so poor I wondered whether I should become a supporter of said Page.  She first shared the fact that the topless feature began in the same year the first Women’s Liberation conference was held in Britain. “It was Rupert Murdoch’s riposte to feminism in Britain. It is not about the glorification of women. We should be absolutely confident in our repudiation of [Page 3].”  It wasn’t meant to glorify anybody.  Nor do I think it was about a riposte to feminism.  We were at the tail end of the permissive society, and Murdoch was not opposed to equality of the sexes: he equally exploits everybody.  I shall put on my thinking cap, but whatever merits there are should not be stolen for an exploitative establishment.

Ms Campbell brought up the idea that feminism should ‘celebrate feminine sexuality’.  To this a Page Three fan might retort that surely Page Three celebrates sexuality in general.  Crucial to such a debate are women’s intuitions.  Is there for example a class divide in such intuitions?

(d)  Who decides what it means to be a feminist? Can men be feminists? 

To my mind, if feminism is defined as gender equality, one may if one wishes call oneself a feminist: when asked whether they considered themselves feminist, some 90% of the audience put up their hands.  I did not.  Indeed I have no difficulty with the idea that feminism stands for gender equality, and that it is called feminism rather than masculinism since women are the losers in this inequality. 

However I am not a woman and lack the intuitions of a woman, just as they lack our intuitions and therefore I would be arrogant to claim to be a feminist.  I should be more concerned with battered husbands and victims of machismo taken too seriously.  Say I as the proud owner of the local Rugby Club scarf.  ;]  

But machismo is not always an amusing ritual in New Zealand at least I understand there is a disturbing level of young male suicides and men are decidedly better-placed to counteract this.

I have no trouble with “Ich bin ein Frau.” [except the word should be the feminine ‘eine’!], but if I am asked to celebrate female sexuality, I have no useful contribution to make.

To conclude... to my mind a key issue is gender roles, and related to this is the question of the discrepancy between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.  One must indeed strive to overcome obstacles to equality of outcome, but one runs the danger of a more authoritarian approach which does indeed tell other women what to do.

I also think that many political groups, and indeed many intellectual communities, must learn to recognize that there is a limit to people’s understanding: hypotheses should not be confused with established facts.  In this regard I have written before about ‘single peg reasoning’, and I feel that this helps to remind one of the limitations of our understanding.  My single peg in regard to feminism is that the vast majority of species and human communities have gender roles.  Why?

Martin Prior

Omnipotent, yes, omniscient, yes, but omnicognizant?

It is often asked: (a) how can our almighty, all-loving and good God permit tragedies such as the holocaust and/or one’s own marriage break-up? (b) how can such a complex universe come into being without being designed by an intelligence at least as great as that of a human?

Now as far as I can tell from the Bible, the deity has infinite force at its disposal, and has knowledge of everything, at least in the present, and presumably in the past. But as long as humans have free will, not the future. Thus the deity had to destroy all humanity except Noah and his family, for being unexpectedly evil.
This leads to another issue: can the deity change the laws of logic and mathematics? To my mind, if a deity ‘wishes’ to ordain that two plus two makes five, all it can do is persuade humanity to name 2+2 as ‘five’, or something like Indo-European*phenchwe. Even then humans have the free will to take up the idea and the free will to make *phenchwe evolve into five, fünf, punch, etc. Otherwise, if the deity has the ability to change the laws of logic and mathematics, perhaps in ways incongruous and impossible, then the laws of logic attempted in this article are as of nought.

And would the deity get a First in Social Sciences?  Even if it set the paper itself.  Such involves summing up free-will activities in a way that is primarily of use to humans.  A deity cannot know the GDP of a country at midnight of the accounting period, since even if it has knowledge of all the relevant activities, judgment of what constitutes what is a matter of free will.

Mathematicians will note that some problems can only be solved by simulation: using a machine that goes through an algorithm that simulates reality and perhaps uses trial-and-error.  Perhaps the deity uses humans as such machines.  If so, how can we say that the world could only be created by an intelligent being?  Rather if there is an intelligent being, all it can do is give the world a shove and see what happens, which is really the opposite of what the intelligent being advocates are arguing.

So coming back to the first two questions: maybe the best answer is that perhaps being almighty isn’t as mighty as all that.



Martin Prior

The Stuff of Legends...and single-peg reasoning

The time has come in this season of merriment to look at the meaning of the various messages of religion, and once again we shall look at the 'Stuff of Legends'.  And last year I asked... where was the Garden of Eden? "Probably nowhere, since it was home not only to the sources of the Tigris, Euphrates and Araxes – the latter on the eastern borders of Turkey and Iran – but also was home to the source of the Blue Nile, or at least a river in Ethiopia. But maybe such things were possible in the time before the Flood!"

My answer was Lake Oremiyeh. And the second river, Gihon, would not be the Blue Nile, but the variously named Uizhun or Serid Rud, just south of Lake Oremiyeh. As far as I was concerned, this is quite a neat solution for a biblical puzzle: Lake Oremiyeh is in fact a self-contained Lake, and has no outlets to the sea. Consequently, like the Dead Sea, it is a salt lake. It is nevertheless fertile, but clearly such a self-contained system cannot be over-exploited. This led to a very plausible about the Fall being the result of over-exploitation of the apple: THE BIG APPLE?



but almost immediately I became sceptical: why?  Well, in the midst of such details about the four rivers, why no mention of the lake itself?

Now in this article I shall not attempt to solve this problem, but I shall turn to another legend, that of Noah's Ark. When linguists start studying new languages, they come across an abundances of fables and folk-lore.  And often one can verify that certain events actually happened... not just the Flood legend in Asia, but in times past Tasmania was linked to mainland Australia.  But sometimes there is a mystery, and often there are stories that are clearly 'wrong', perhaps supernatural and/or perhaps inconsistent.  How can a garden span both the Tigris and the Blue Nile?  Here we have either inconsistency or the supernatural or both.

This is where single-peg reasoning comes in.  You are trying to erect a tent on difficult terrain.  All you can do is start with the least problematic place to hammer in, and then wriggle the other ones around.

I am going to start with a very sensible and pragmatic 'peg': the waters did not rise above the level of the mountain-tops, but instead water came down the mountains after a mini-ice-age, or ground-water burst out from mountains with earth-quakes in NE Turkey and Armenia.  This has to be relevant when for example we ask about the Ark's shape or 'itinerary'.  There are two theories for each: onr the rectangular gopher ark favoured in the Bible, the other a basket-ware circular vehicle - from Mesopotamian fables.

So where did it land?  If water rushed down the mountains, then my preferred theory would be favoured: the Ark was placed near Erzurum on the watershed between the Euphrates and the Araxes, which runs into the Caspian Sea, partly bordering Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran.  The ark, I believe of reasonably robust basketware, would have sailed down the Araxes and landed at Nahchevan, actually meaning Noah's landing-place, where floods would have receded.  I think weather conditions were appropriate for around 3900BC, the end of the Ubaid Culture.  And I think there were immigrations similar to those described post-Noah.

But the alternative has Noah landing the Ark on Mount Cudi (pron. Judy) near where the Tigris flows out of SE Turkey.  This would accord with the 'rising-up' account.  And there appears to be a more-or-less rectangular edifice up this mountain, dated ca. 2900BC, perhaps closer to another min-ice-age event.

My belief is that both arks were used, ca. 1000 years apart, separated by the Uruk Culture when the Sumerians appeared.  The basket-ware boats were I believe built for river-trade, and subsequent to the 3900 flood the commercial value of the larger boats would have been realised and led to their use up many major rivers from the Danube to the Oxus (Amu Darya).

A thousand years later the gopher-type rectangular boats would have evolved, and so too would the 'rising-up' legend.  So when climate took a turn for the worse, they put craft up the mountains, and the waters did not rise but fell, immersing boats before they could float away.  This I believe is the fate of the Mount Cudi craft.

Thus my example of single-peg reasoning: it might home in very quickly on a solution, or it may lead to an interesting range of alternative hypotheses.  In other words wriggling the other pegs round.