I’ll certainly try to, even if my views are found to be lax in reason and substantiation. Only then will I learn.

Ben

It needs to be talked about, as I’m just a tad concerned that it’ll get lost in the more general discussion about interaction when, as you say, basic solidarity should carry this one forward.

Once you look at it, its a bit of no-brainer from a ’should we be pushing this’ POV

Give it half an hour and it should appear…

To me, the issue is one of basic solidarity.

I know I’m put off writing about rape and domestic violence, and to a lesser extent abortion, on my blog partly for that reason.

Artificial, yes, but it matters because because floor targets influence resource allocations – one thing that someone should get onto an monitor, given that 75 councils have put up DV as a target, is what those councils do and how far they allocated resources to their chosen priority.

I think you need some refresher lessons

Actually, it was always ‘girls’ at their insistence – and the youngest was in her mid 20s running through to a couple in their late 40s.

As for why, IIRC, it was a favourite in-joke because it seriously pissed off most of the middle class tourist left-wingers who used to come over with all the over-earnest liberal guilt trip stuff.

Basically the gag was that these poor sods would get all the standard respect stuff drilled into them by the younger feminists and then get up the courage to run a scouting mission to try and befriend the LGBT crew only because ‘it ‘was the right thing to do’, only to get ripped to shreds because everything they said would turn out to be the wrong thing.

Like I said, a fierce crowd but frighteningly intelligent and funny, a complete bunch of iconoclasts.

ha ha! and the thing is, I can actually see this materialising.

Look, I think we’re being rather excessive over this navel-gazing to be honest. I made several points during the panel debate that bring the other side of the argument:

1) I have actually tried to encourage feminism and feminists to write here but its been very difficult.

2) There is a fair amount of walking on egg-shells too, which make male lefties less willing to write about feminist issues… especially because they could be attacked both for sticking their oar where it doesn’t concern them or ignoring it.

3) People blog about what they feel comfortable with. I can’t force them to blog about feminism.

4) This is not the F-Word… so the range of issues being covered here will be different and sometimes there will be a dearth of feminist blogging and sometimes a lot (especially around the HFE bill).

I think the main thing to take back from the debate was that there lots of feminist blogs out there that people should be reading. Now can we please stop this navel gazing.

With the what?

I think you need some refresher lessons

This is a lot of fun, you gotta admit.

What’s needed is:

a) for feminist bloggers to do what they’ve been doing all along, which is write with intelligence and passion about the things they care about, and

b) use the facilities of LibCon to exchange information and get their POV into plain sight.

In other words, don’t worry about what male bloggers might make of a sudden outbreak of feminism on LibCon, just do it and be yourselves and you’ll find an audience.

This /\/\/\

Isn’t this business about “priorities” rather artifical? It’s not as if a council is only able to do one thing at a time.

No, I’m suggesting you just hang it all out there and go for it, and if that pisses a few people off then it’s more often than not going to be with good reason and that’s always been good enough for me, so there’s no reason to expect otherwise from anyone else.

I don’t know where other got their feminism 101 but I got mine over copious amounts of alcohol with the girls from the LGBT soc at the university I went to, and they were about fiercest and least politically correct bunch of feminists you could possibly encounter, not to mention by far the best conversationalists you could ever debate with over several pints.

And their command of the withering knob-gag put down was surpassed only by their storehouse of thoroughly unrepeatable dyke jokes, most of which would frighten a marine.

If I seem a touch combative its only because I’m well used to operating in a combative environment and no holds barred debates, and I much prefer the honesty of such situations.

I’m making two points here.

One, which is tactical, is that finally the parameters of the debate, which were pretty much dictated by parliament when it choose to stick to the science to address the abortion debate, are shifting in a direction that no longer excludes women from the main thread of the debate by its narrow focus.

40 years ago, when abortion was legalised, women were central to the clinical/scientific debate because the key medical issue at the time was backstreet abortions. Today, backstreet abortions are almost unheard of, certainly in the UK, such that the clinical debate becomes one in which the foetus takes the central role and in which women, due to the general exclusion of rights and ethics, other than medical ethics, from consideration in the main strand of the parliamentary debate, are implicitly pushed to periphery in terms of public perception.

The access debate, which is where this goes next, is intrinsically women-centred and should, if we’re not distracted by Dorries’ spoling tactics, place women back at the centre of the debate, and its that we need to capitalise on to shift the balance of the debate back onto women and abortion rights.

The second point is not that you should blog about what I tell you to blog about, it simply acknowledges that empathy place a major part in shaping public perceptions in this debate, which is why an abstract rights-based line of argument is likely to prove somewhat unattractive outside those who’re politically engaged in the debate.

What works is putting a human face on the arguments and putting over rights as part of a package with a real live human being at the hub of the issue and, as I see, there’s no great secret to doing that or, indeed attracting the attention of male bloggers, here.

What’s needed is:

a) for feminist bloggers to do what they’ve been doing all along, which is write with intelligence and passion about the things they care about, and

b) use the facilities of LibCon to exchange information and get their POV into plain sight.

In other words, don’t worry about what male bloggers might make of a sudden outbreak of feminism on LibCon, just do it and be yourselves and you’ll find an audience.

Gender is immaterial in this case – any blogger who pulled the same kind of stunt would get dogpiled, and, in the context of that last post, so is the main run of the abortion debate, which sits in the background, as some of the material that the PSC has inquired about is related to this debate, although other material included as evidence is of more generic nature.

In anthropological terms, the internet evolved as a medium pretty much without external regulation with the result that it took up what looks to be, from studies of evolutionary psychology, more or less the human default position for regulating ethical behaviour, a combination of reputation and punishment. As physical interaction is not a feature of the medium, punishment is effected by way of loss of reputation, ostracism and, in a medium that allows considerable scope for anonymity, the outing of someone’s real world identity in the case of the worst transgressions, which would be anything from serious and persistent trolling to the worst transgression of all, taking a dispute offline and into the real world.

You could say its a bit of primitive culture out here in that sense.

So far as the abortion debate goes, Dorries has re-injected herself into it by trying to reintroduce the 20 weeks amendment and despite the ‘Mad Nad ‘ jokes it would an error to write that off too glibly as an act of dumb insolence or denial.

Dorries can have no real expectation of carrying that amendment, having lost at the committee stage. It’s back as a spoiler, in part to try and misdirect support away from the liberalising amendments and back into a re-run of the 20 weeks debate.

It is also, I think, a clear pointer towards the element of the debate that the anti-abortion lobby fears the most. As the Marie Stopes poll, which came out on the day of the abortion votes shows, public attitudes to late term abortions are rather different from the views elicited by the push-polling of the anti-abortion lobby and people are generally much more sympathetic in their view of late term abortion when given the chance to consider why women might be seeking a late abortion.

The key issue here is/seems to be empathy – the anti-abortion campaign is predicated on selling the image of a foetus as human being deserving, if not demanding of our empathy while reducing women to, at best, an anonymous cipher.

Putting a human face on the women that would be affected, either adversely or positively depending on the amendments, changes the parameters of the debate because people then have the opportunity and ability to empathise with real women and the real choices they make.

In that sense, debates about rights are a little unattractive to most people because ideas don’t attract the same kind of emotional pull as human stories – the right argument can seen a little clinical when viewed from the outside because many, women and men, don’t internalise the rights argument in as strong a manner as, say, most feminists do.

That’s not a criticism per say, merely an element of context that’s sometimes too easily forgotten nor is it necessarily a feminist thing, its a function of most strong ideological beliefs, as much as it for strong religious beliefs.

“So now you’ve taken the subject as far as you want and hogged it for months, we women should do what you say and blog about what you tell us to blog about now, should we, Mr Patriarchy?”

Oooh, I’ve got my cynical head on tonight. Best not say any more…

I agree, Cath. We should have the best access to abortion that we can get and argue for and that should be the top of the agenda.

I think I’ve said that already tonight. I’ll probably say it again so that there is NO CONFUSION.

Even better in that case, Cath.

The next natural ’stage’ in this process – if you want to call it that – is to bridge outwards from abortion rights to a wider narrative in terms of the visibility of the feminist sector and there’s no time like the present to start to plant the seeds of that narrative.

But no worries, I think any publicity for the liberalising amendments has got to be a good thing. We should try and sneak in a mention any time an opportunity presents itself

By happy coincidence, I just left an arsey comment on your Dorries post that might get the ball rolling.

I observed that I was tired of seeing Dorries at the top of the agenda – I dislike her greatly myself, and have certainly written a great deal to that effect – but I resent the fact that attacks on her continue at the top of the agenda when it comes to the abortion debate.

As you say, there are other equally important amendments being tabled for the report stage of the HFEB and they are the ones that Abortion Rights and female writers want to focus on. Nonetheless, scoring points against Dorries remains a blogging obsession. I’m trying to understand why that is – is it simply because this is a left political blog, and readers/writers on it welcome the chance to put the boot into a Conservative politician, or is it because that sort of sustained attack is a male inclination? I’m not sure about that – I’m pretty inclined to sustained attacking myself.

Still, I know that on these threads and in some of our emails, other women have expressed concern about attacks on Dorries and what they see as women-bashing.

Dunno what’s more important to readers and writers here – putting the boot into Dorries ad infinitum, or campaigning hard to improve access to abortion, or a happy combination of both? Don’t know what the blokes around the place think of it all.

Haven’t thought this through properly, so will come back.