It was revelatory, while working at Mumsnet, to witness first hand, in parliament, the extent to which so many politicians wrap a mediocre intellect inside an absolute, bouncing, head-girl or boy self-confidence. You think you know this already - but you don't… [thread 🧵]
Or at least, not the full extent of it. You would be astonished at the paucity of ability, experience and insight in many of those who have a meaningful hand in making our laws, and at the casual, will-they-won’t-they process by which they may - or may not ! - engage with
2/-
critical evidence. Most of all, you would be *astounded* by the extent to which they are unaware of - or worse, aware but unphased by - the disjunct between their own abilities and the grave decisions with which they are charged. 3/-
These Durham girls are 19-20. One of mine is 19. They are *children* in almost every way. What the fuck is wrong with this woman, seriously. Her cool girl shit overrides her desire to protect children like hers?
This is not your posh girl Belle de Jour fantasy @zoesqwilliams . This isn't something on the side for a bouncing jolly-hockeysticks girl with a healthy appetite for sex. This OVERWHELMINGLY impacts working-class/previously abused/addicted/indebted/indentured girls and women 1/
..who have to suck off unwashed men, one after the other, for the survival of themselves/their kids or to service their addiction to unglamorous, shitty street drugs. The kind of women you've made a living off, like a fucking parasite, but have never met. 2/
Some young women seem genuinely unable to understand the argument against 'sex work is work' - they just don't have the same jolt of horror and empathy at the thought of a woman's vagina or anus being rented as a receptacle for his semen by a man. 1/..
Perhaps they don't recognise the scenario as a totalising act of objectification because they no longer recognise objectification at all. Two decades of porn saturation has been so fully internalised that it's engendered a kind of habitual auto-objectification. 2/..
They no longer contemplate the purchase of a woman with an empathy borne of their own experience (to varying degrees) of having been commodified by men, because, at an individual and societal level this system of porn screens out men as the agents of women's dehumanisation. 3/..
It's not by chance that identity ideology constructs middle-aged women as the enemy, is it? It's all *about* mothers - rage at the mother, repudiation of the mother, mother-hate.
Gender theory is a post-truth fantasy of self-generation, of giving birth to one's own Self. Unbodied/post-bodied - technology-born, all evidence of the blood and guts of birth erased;
human physicality/biology edited until it's reduced, essentially, to sex; pure libido, liberated at last from female-enforced limit.
If, as the Irish government proposes, it becomes illegal to say out loud that the man who raped you with his penis is the man who raped you with his penis - regardless of what he's wearing or what he tells you about his 'gender' - we are all utterly fucked. All of us.
/Thread/
Please, don't soothe yourself with the idea that this is an extreme scenario or straw man. It's happening already. It's the institutionalised psychological abuse of women, and it's leading to the institutionalised sexual abuse of women, in prison and elsewhere. It will only grow.
And don't soothe yourself that we are not all fucked because this is happening in the justice system (for now) and you're nice and won't ever be in prison or a refuge. Or because you're not female so, you know, it's no biggie.