One is not born but rather becomes a non man
The Greens again. “Non-men” again. The Independent:
Feminists including leading activist Caroline Criado-Perez have attacked an invitation to “non-men” by the young women’s arm of the Green Party.
“Women/non-men who are Young Greens can find and join our Facebook group ‘Young Greens Women’”, they tweeted on 26March.
But on Friday Ms Criado-Perez, who led the campaign to keep a woman on English banknotes and co-founded feminist media website The Women’s Room, called the tweet “the most anti-woman anti-feminist ignorant bullshit I have seen in some time”.
“Women are not “non-men”, she tweeted, urging the Greens to “sort your shit out”. “You do not include people by establishing men as default human,” she added.
Ms Criado-Perez later took to rephrasing well-known feminist texts.
Rewriting Simone de Beauvoir’s famous sentence, she tweeted “one is not born but rather becomes a non man”.
“For most of history, anonymous was a non man”, she added, recasting Virginia Woolf.
Under the hashtag #greenpartyfeminism, other Twitter users joined in, substituting “non-man” for “woman”, “girl” and “mother” in famous song lyrics.
There’s a lot of good mockery and rage on that hashtag.
Scarlett Brown, PhD gender reseacher at King’s College London, told The Independent: “You can interpret the tweet in two ways. Firstly, that they are emphasising, without even realising it, that we live in a society that defines by not being a man. That’s been a big feminist critique for a long time.”
“It depends on what you determine the slash [between women and non-men] to mean. If you think women and non-men are the same thing, that’s not on. That’s what most of the criticism is about.
“But if you read it as ‘the people we want in our group are women and non-men’, then what they’ve done is include a non-binary category. If that’s the case, that’s an important thing and I fully support that. It’s just they’ve done it clunkily and haphazardly.”
Wait. Why? Why is it an important thing, why does she fully support that? Why are women – and women only – expected to “include” people who say they’re not women? Why are women, and women only, expected to keep redefining themselves every five minutes? Why are women, and women only, under constant relentless pressure to stop organizing as women?
Scarlett Brown doesn’t say.
I am non-man, hear me roar!
The insidious, ongoing ways that women are asked to give themselves away are remarkable in how unremarkable they are. It’s all just so common, so ordinary, that even PhD’s who should probably know better are telling women that they need to take a backseat to literally every other priority, that it’s important to do so.
This shit will never stop, will it?
I regret being late to this as ‘Scent Of A Non-Man’ came immediately to mind but when I checked two people had already tweeted it. (sad clown face)
Well I don’t know – judging by the comments on Green Party Women’s Facebook page, this is not going down well. Some of this shit may stop.
Why do they identify as the *Green* Party? Don’t they know colour is a spectrum?
Author, zomg!, you’re right. I hadn’t even thought of that! It’s the Not-Redorangeyellowbluepurple Party. (Or, really, the Not-Radiomicrowaveinfraredredorangeyellowbluepurpleultravioletxraygamma Party. Humble apologies for the rods-and-cones privilege.)
Goddam magentaphobic cis-color bastards.
“Don’t they know colour is a spectrum?” is the funniest thing I’ve read on the internet today. Brilliant.
Well, that’s Author for you. :D
“Why are women – and women only – expected to “include” people who say they’re not women?”
The rationale behind spaces for women only is partly that women are an oppressed gender under patriarchy. But given that other genders are oppressed too — including non-binary people — that rationale justifies their inclusion as well. Something similar happened with the shift away from gay spaces to LGBT spaces, and from organizations for black empowerment to organization for the empowerment of people of colour. Of course you might resist against these moves and claim that there is more to be gained by having distinct movements and spaces for the different groups, but you should know that this is the reason. As surprising as this may sound, it isn’t a misogynistic conspiracy.
Men are in fact expected to cede space and not allowed to have their own spaces, to an extent greater than woman are. The fact that these ‘non-man’ spaces are framed in terms of the exclusion of men is an example of this. I don’t support the use of ‘non-man’, but not because I think it’s male-centered — it’s absolutely not, and the accusation that it is is an example of Social Justice Warriorhood and lack of charitableness, IMO –, but because it excludes trans men, who are also a group that faces gender-related oppression.
::snort:: Non-binary, my arse. All that boils down to is speshul snoeflakes who confuse gender with personality, and rely on the presence of all the mundanes who are just, y’know, men or women, to stand out. In other words, stay in your gender straitjackets while the Speshuls “change” their gender when they change their clothes.
But I don’t know of people of color all getting lumped together anywhere.
Universities have a Black Studies program and a Latino Studies program, a Black Student Union and a Hispanic Student Union, and I know of know that have a Non-white Student Union. Where are you, that the disadvantaged races have given up identifying with their actual group and all united under a single banner, rather than working as allies?