Maximum confusion
Does she understand anything?
If it were true that nobody’s body is a threat then rape would not exist. There would be no word for it because there would be nothing for the word to name. If it were true that nobody’s body is a threat then physical violence would not exist.
On this one I can’t even guess what she thinks she’s thinking. It’s not that she doesn’t know that rape exists, but her next step in the reasoning eludes me.
Also, perception of a threat is not contempt. It’s more like the opposite. Perception of a threat is fear, it’s not contempt.
Near as I can make out, Penny seems to think “partly due to physical factors, men are statistically more violent and dangerous than women” is some kind of mean-girl judgement that men have morally inferior bodies. This strange interpretation is no doubt fueled by her assumption that mean-girls are gatekeeping womanhood and the Woman’s Room based on whose bodies fail to measure up.
Her statement sounds like she’s scolding a group of bullies teasing someone for being a fatty.
Has she never felt uncomfortable with a bloke in her vicinity – in a public place, in a private place? I was going to start listing all the commonplace incidents that happen to lone young women – jogging in a park, sitting on a park bench, walking along a street in the eve – oh I can’t be bothered with this idiocy.
“Nobody’s body is a threat?” Jeez – what is she on?
Of course male bodies are threats. And, when men deliberately invade spaces where women are supposed to be safe from male bodies, and they premeditatedly expose themselves to women and girls, the threat is immediate. It’s literally nothing other than a threat. They have already violated women’s privacy. They are broadcasting their intent to assert their primacy in women’s spaces. And now Penny wants to blame women for responding to the threat.
So, what is her understanding of why we have separate men’s and women’s facilities in the first place?
I think it’s the words “her understanding” that are misleading you.
Hell, I’m a male of somewhat larger than average size, and I sometimes feel threatened by male bodies. And it really doesn’t bother me to hear that in certain situations women may feel threatened by my body; I try to avoid those situations as much as possible.
On the other hand, she has a way of leaning her chin on her hand and staring into the camera so thoughtfully, so I guess she must be right.
Nobody said that anyone’s body was “morally superior” to anyone else’s. No. So I don’t know why you are even bringing that up.
But certain bodies — male bodies a great deal of the time — are physically superior to other bodies, such as women’s bodies. It’s physical danger, not anything to do with claims of moral superiority, that matters to women being threatened by men.
Politically, Penny’s position is like saying Guns don’t kill people, people kill people as an argument against laws regulating guns.
She can replace guns with bodies, and replace kill with sexual assault, then she has an argument against single-sex spaces regulating bodies.
Philosophically — or cognitively — for Penny to think this way, she’s thinking the opposite of Maya Forstater’s position that I transcribed on this thread. Maya explained how sex matters and said,
I imagine Penny got to this point by finding Cartesian dualism intuitive — implicitly, without realizing it — and Cartesian dualism is fertile ground for the gender identity movement to sow seeds of dissociation of the body from the mind.
That could be it. I think Jane CJ has talked about the way dualism gets people thinking in this silly way about the reality of idennniny versus the irrelevance of bodies.
But then where the “worthy of contempt” bit gets in, let alone the “essence of supremacist thinking,” I really don’t know.
A lot of my friends – even the liberal ones – are very uncomfortable with the idea of a body that is run by our brain, and no soul. Dualism is very strong with a lot of people. A lot of my friends say “I suppose you think it’s all chemicals and electrical reactions.” Yeah, actually I do, though they manifest in ways that science can’t always explain. Like, love. That’s the popular one. We can simulate a lot of these feelings in the lab, but we can’t tell you why love happens between two particular people. I’ve seen hypotheses, but none of them particularly convincing, and most of them haven’t held up under robust testing. So people dismiss science. “Science doesn’t know everything”, a reasonable proposition, turns into “Science doesn’t know anything”, which has some philosophical soundness, but in the real world, there are some things we are willing to express confidence that we know.
For a lot of people, those gray areas give them room to stick a wedge and force silly ideas into. Goop? Yep. Trans dogma? Yep. Anti-vax? Yep. Bigfoot? Yep. If what you think is real is real, then anything goes.
It dawned on me, very belatedly, what her probable reason for saying this nonsense was: the issue women have with treating trans women as literally women in allcircumstances, no exceptions allowed, has to do with male bodies. We don’t want male bodies in the changing rooms with us, and we don’t want male bodies intruding in women’s sports. BODIES, geddit? We’re being bodyphobes, and Laurie Penny is schooling us on the shame of bodyphobia.
In addition to the Laurie Penny tweet above, in the last 7 days, Meghan Murphy has published a video where she says, she wants a alpha man as a partner, somebody who could dominate her and a man who would not let her dominate him.
Also Rachel Cunliffe editor of New Statesman has said “I’d actually be OK hiring someone who had sex with dead chickens, as long as he didn’t do it in my house. And obviously I’d rather not know about it – but I’d rather not know about the sex lives of most people. I don’t want to think about what my postman gets up to with his wife.”
Has there even been any other oppressed group whose leading advocates reward their oppressors in this way?
https://twitter.com/RMCunliffe/status/1410894850245935104
@12
with Meghan Murphy you mean the feministcurrent.com one, right?
Where is the video?
(I was scanning the captions in sped up video)
The Same Drugs: Danielle Crittenden Frum on feminism, marriage, and gender roles in the modern world
https://youtu.be/rhPwmmhU-a8?t=3685
she references it:
listen yourself!
really hard to … listen to and transcribe, like, all those likes, right, like, constantly
anyway, I think you put a little spin on it all, with a dash of interpretation
I ain’t gonna defend anything, I just find the different receptions of “messages” in peoples’ heads interesting
Fair point I think. Saying you’re attracted to domineering men is quite different from saying you want one as a partner. It’s not all that unusual for attraction to be sharply at odds with what one wants in a partner – one of the many difficulties of life. From the bit soogioh transcribed it looks as if she could have been saying just that.
“I just find the different receptions of “messages” in peoples’ heads interesting”
soogioh #13 / #14
I take your point, I do remember it, as being more depressing then you show it here. But sadly this also means that certain men will be able to takeaway the message that fits their behaviour.
Do you not agree with the general impression that men are not under pressure to change their behaviour because most women and even their leading advocates will make allowances for men’s behaviour in various flavours as has been witnessed for the last couple of millennia?
Dworkin made this observation 30 years ago, seems nothing has changed and with TWAW, men have arguably even found a way to increase the oppression.
Yet another example of a women’s rights advocate making allowance for a man’s behaviour.
“Please don’t respond to @JohnAmaechi angrily. He is a giant of E&D, and I am hoping that courteous and thoughtful replies will get him reflecting on the nuances of the issue, even if he continues to disagree”
https://twitter.com/AudreySuffolk/status/1415245706856632325
The man with previous on this issue.
The last so many years has opened my eyes to realising that when a man is considered a giant of human rights etc, most likely he was only triggered in his advocacy because of the suffering of men. I have not seen a single giant of human rights take the side of women on the trans issue.
Snap, I too was following the John Amaechi “disagreement.” So annoying.