The trouble is that that’s not true – never has been, never will be – unless you have the good fortune to be born male, white and relatively privileged.

Would you say that someone who was Prime Minister for over a decade found their way in society?

Shatterface, libertarian geeks, other thickies. It helps if you read the article and then engage with the points in it, rather than having a good old Don Quixote at the (rather tattered now, actually) straw feminist in the corner, you’ll note that Laurie’s not been claiming that gender is the only site of oppression or the single paramount societal issue, merely a hugely important one that’s often mishandled. You’ve been kind enough to present a good deal of evidence for this, and for that, thank you all very much.

I, myself, don’t regard myself as a “geek”, though I have tendencies in that direction, and while elements of my self-presentation caused me a fair (HA HA) number of problems in my (all-boys) school, I’ve been lucky enough to avoid the worst of it. But not so lucky that people around me haven’t been damaged, in some cases in ways that are extremely long-term. The degree to which conventional masculinity was policed by both students and staff in that school and any number of others I’ve heard of was extensive, and characterised by violence, exclusion and appeals to public opprobrium. This took place primarily in the form of homophobia, and any infringement of, again, masculine gender norms was an invitation to, at least, public mockery, often with the acceptance or even participation of staff, or, at worst, repeated subjection to serious violence without hope of recourse to wilfully ignorant authorities. The training required for young boys to become men is a lengthy course in the power of intimidation and physical violence. In an establishment of education, boys (and indeed, no-one) should not have to learn how to fight in order to defend themselves and others from their own peers and those in authority over them. Nevertheless, this is the case, and it’s hurt every young man I know in some way or another. We need to stop doing this shit to ourselves, in short. It’s not there /for/ anything.
Sunny, I respectfully disagree, though I recognise the validity of your point. In context, I would argue that the form that gendered socialisation of children in this country can be characterised as fascistic: a group of people with very little power or self-determination are compelled into a variety of roles involving child-bearing or violence with a variety of coercive tactics, up to and including the persistent threat of violence from authority figures and peers, for goals that I perceive to be at best vestigial and at worst reactionary and malign. I’m not sure what better word to employ.

At my girls’ school (11-18), there was a fair-to-middling amount of bullying, some physical and most verbal. This obviously wasn’t to do with gender in the direct competition sense (no-one to be competitive to). And thinking about the bullies and the bullied, it was by no means clear that the most feminine girls bullied the least feminine. There were two main divisions that I recall – physical size and geekiness. Little, delicate girls and geeky girls got picked on, big girls and non-geeky girls did the picking.

Now, a physically intimidating non-geek is supposed to be the male pattern of perfection, not the female-as-handed-down-by-the-patriarchy. You could still, I suppose try to link this into a fairly tortuous model of the “alpha” girls somehow imitating the male form of bullying (from what example?), but it’s pretty tenuous. Logically, if the bullies were seeking to conform to the patriarchal gender stereotype and bullying those who didn’t, they’d have conformed to the pink bow in hair and eyeliner one.

In fact, I think the way bullying works at single sex schools demonstrates (a) that physically well-developed non-geekism is a *human* perfection pattern, not a specifically male one (which would make sense in evolutionary terms, if we want to be reductivist about it) and (b) that bullying cannot possibly always be linked to gender and/or sexuality.

Having said all that, I’m very alive to the possibility that it’s just my perception that the non-geeks bullied the geeks. Maybe other people on both sides of the scale saw it differently. Which rather underlines the point about individual viewpoints – it’s simply not in my nature to view the world through the lens of gender (something I believe I owe to that schooling method, by the way).

The great weakness of many stripes of feminism to me is the assumption that everybody sees the world in a gendered way. And if they don’t, they damn well should. My assumption would be the opposite. It would be my ambition that every girl had the kind of schooling which meant she *didn’t* see the world through the lens of gender.

When I was younger, it never so much as crossed my mind that my being female would define the way I felt or the way the world treated me, and I suspect this blitheness has led me to success more than once. I’ve been surprised in more recent years – and often charmed, I suppose – to find so many people caring about my “plight” on my behalf. Somehow, my upbringing gave me some deep-seated confidence that whatever restrictions normally operated on women, they didn’t apply to me, that I was a human being before I was specifically a woman, and deserved to be treated as such. If we could replicate that confidence on a mass scale then surely we’d have a permanent end to any final whisper of male privilege. Whether single-sex schooling would really work to do that by itself I don’t know.

Incidentally, if my account of my schooling reads like I’m quait middle-class and from Surr-ay, it’s because I am. Both of which are probably at least as important as gender in defining how well I will do in life.

No, but then neither does the word Fascist, it’s just a word. Now, if I was running around saying that that parent was acting as if she were Hitler then I’d completely understand what you’re saying, but that’s not what is happening. A perfectly ample descriptive term for how someone is is being used, that is all, to taint the word with a single act in history…to me…is much more frustrating.

I find it hard to care if the worst of our problems is finding the right word to be insulting to someone. We get far too pent up about words here.

Not by historical standards. But that doesn’t mean some groups can’t be opressed, relatively.

The problem with calling everything fascism is that when an actual fascist comes along you have nothing left to call them

I agree with this.

No they can’t. Well I suppose a parent might act like an actual fascist but I don’t think it’s very common. Fascist has a specific meaning. I think in those examples better words would be “bullying”, “authoritarian” and perhaps “aggressive”, all of which are perfectly good words, and serve to identify what’s actually wrong with something, rather than just saying “it’s fascist” which is basically an insult.

bear in mind that right-wingers have started calling everyone facists too nowadays, so the word isn’t even “ours” any more. I mean most of us are envirofascists and we support Islamofascists…

The problem with calling everything fascism is that when an actual fascist comes along you have nothing left to call them. I often wonder what people who like to use the word “Islamofascism” would have done if they had to call Mussolini something. Was he a Fascofacist? maybe Hitler was a Nazionazist?

Getting back to the subject of bullying in schools. I think we can all agree it’s bad. So what can be done about it?

Or perhaps on the flip side we need to invent different levels of “terrorism” or similar too now, lest we get arguments in the future of “Oh you can’t call THAT terrorism as only 20 people died, in my day….”

Hah! I’m glad someone actually made that point. I was too lazy to blog that this week.

Anybody who frequented Taboo (in Leicester Sq) will have had a little taster already.

What’s in your tea?

Still as she seems to be saying no more than that roles are learnt in early life which are debilitating to men and women we can skim quickly though the rest. Maybe ; maybe not . Observing my own children at Nursery , I find the Liberal orthodoxy , that men and women were essentially the same , does not hold up well . Quite how differently little boys behave is a revelation
.If behaviours are at least in part innate who is Laurie to tell people not to be what they wish to be ? Quite what further legislative steps can be taken defeats me . I see the Liberals wish to impose career breaks on men (presumably so as to increase dependency on the state ).I also know that Mr.Clegg will deem his own career far too important for this boon

The problem is there is no more frontier . As civilisations become settled they often become feminised Power is removed from individuals and cooperative and social skills become more useful than risk taking and courage. This is certainly happening to our society .Perhaps the state , manipulated by baby boomer establishment women may impose a sort of gender homogeneity upon us . As a man I agree that it might be a good thing . I would agree as a packed my case with Hemingway and Humphrey Bogart DVD`s and lit out for the territory , following the spirit of Huck and be free of women and their rules .

( Back for tea I expect)

Class is undoubtedly socially and economically defined and attempts to dismantle it have now collapsed in failure despite leaving a bodycount which dwarfs the holocaust. Religion seems to have survived the Enlightenment too.

Unlike class or religion, gender, while not identical with sexual dimorphism, still has a large and obvious biological componant. Short of the chemical suppression of pre-pubesent children and having them raised by robots what would you suggest?

But I think you’ve taken a very selective reading of Laurie’s comment there. And, like I said earlier on, I’ll believe that society is as unconcerned with gender stereotypes as you are, when it’s safe for me to go to the local in a dress and eyeliner.

And Laurie (40): you brought Sophie Lancaster into this.