How should women talk about competing rights, female bodies, legitimate concerns, male violence etc. now that all of these phrases are deemed "dogwhistles" for whatever personal prejudices 'progressive' men are busy priding themselves on swallowing down?
They'd listen to us, obviously, if we had legitimate concerns. It's just that when we use the phrase "legitimate concerns" it's a red flag that we don't have any legitimate concerns.
It's the next level of the "talk about women's rights without mentioning the word 'woman'" game. You're allowed to talk politics as long as you don't use *any* of the vocabulary you require. Mime is also not permitted.
If you scour the twitter histories of 99% of men doing this policing, you'll find derogatory words to describe trans women, which they'll dismiss as something "everyone" was doing 10 years ago (no, we weren't). Yet now they're judging women for phrases like "female bodied".
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One of the reasons I know I get so angry about men policing women's speech is because I grew up trying so hard to "crack the code" of avoiding violence. My teenage diaries are full of this obsession with "getting it right next time". >
When I look now, I can see there was never any "right answer". Perfectly sane behaviour could be deemed crazy one day, normal the next. The instability and changing rules were kind of the point, but I still felt such a failure for not finding the magic key. >
I see echoes of this in the way women twist their phrases, rephrase, concede parts of language, politely ask to keep hold of others, but no, the rules always change - because the central rule is, you will always end up in the wrong. >
Whenever people declare there needs to be "less heat, more light" in debates on sex and gender I think of JK Rowling's very carefully worded essay and the response she got. How much more "light" are women meant to offer? I suspect the only acceptable "light" is total silence.
Rowling is now viewed in the context, not of what she wrote, but the response she received. Like an abuse victim might be viewed as being damaged, troubled, in a "volatile" relationship - tainted by what is done to her, so ultimately complicit in it.
That aura of "well, she must have done something" - women know that however reasonable, rational, careful, compassionate they are, they cannot control other people's responses so are always at risk of becoming someone "involved" in a "heated" debate, "lacking in nuance"
I honestly think a lot of female MPs and journalists see women on Mumsnet as the plebs who'll get their hands dirty with all the campaigns they don't want to sully themselves with, then they'll breeze in afterwards and say "see? There was never any problem"
Members of the "waffling pretentiously about Judith Butler" class see risking being called certain names as beneath them. There are the lower orders who can deal with than.
Feminism's cannon fodder, who can be denigrated for being so uncouth as to fight when they could have stayed home and postured