[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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Men’s only groups in the past was often a place where real decisions for power and profit were made.
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.
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.
"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.