Okay - well that was fun!

Apparently we all had a grand ol' time over on the Bidisha thread.  It's still open, so the fun isn't over.  I wish I'd gotten into the Harker thread a bit sooner than the last post!  Oh well.  Kiz suggested summat about what's on your MP3/iPod.  Not surprisingly, about half of what's on my computer (no iPod for me) is Terry Hall in some form - Specials, Fun Boy 3, Colourfield, Terry, Blair & Anouchka, solo, and I have the Dub Pistols version of Rapture (I actually like it better than Blondie's original.  Middle-aged white women should not rap.  Shouldn't even think about it.)  Apart from that, mostly I only have one or two songs from various people - my taste is all over the place. With a bit of luck, that will change a bit later tonight and I'll have the album "Manden der ønskede sig en havudsigt" by the wonderful Danish band TV-2 on there, too.  A sampling of the other stuff:  Blur's "To the End" just ended and GooGoo Dolls' "Iris" just started.  "Big in Japan" by Alphaville is the first thing, alphabetically.  "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" by Warren Zevon is last.  The Cardigans' "Lovefool" is the most embarrassing thing on here.  Queen, The Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Petula Clark, They Might Be Giants, Squeeze, Nanci Griffith, Echo & the Bunnymen... oh, and another song that only scherfig would be familiar with - "Tik Tik" by Kim Larsen.  That's just a bit of it, but I'm guessing most of you now know much more about my taste in music than you ever wanted to.

A point of business here - if anyone would like to be included as an author - meaning that you can start one of these posts & not just comment - click on my profile & e-mail me.  I will then e-mail you an "invitation" that will enable you to get on as an author.  Kiz has already become one and 100 are allowed, so we've got 98 spots yet!

So much for the blokeosphere...

As most of you know, there was a bit of a "Cif tiff" over at Cath Elliott's blog this week.  Coming hot on the heels of Rowenna Davis's assertion that the blogosphere is a boys' club, the experience was interesting, if not downright surreal.  Kiz and I decided that we should relate our experience in the "safe" atmosphere of a women's issues blog.  Therapy for us - entertainment for you.  First, here's Kiz:

Cath’s Blog Debacle
When I first saw what was going on with Ciffers on Cath’s blog my immediate reaction was; there’s been a misunderstanding (resulting in some quite unpleasant comments from the fems and ciffers.) but, perhaps, there is a chance to get a decent debate going. So I decided to stick my oar in with the intention of trying to get some dialogue going on a different footing.
Big mistake.
I was determined not to get into any name calling and set out just to suggest, seeing as Cath explicitly welcomed men on to her site, that there was room for all of us to get talking. I also tried to point out that AllyF and Jay weren’t misogynists. The reaction I got from the rad fem posters was jibes, sneers and outright derision. Assumptions were made about my age, sexual history and aspersions were cast on my validity to call myself a feminist and even my sex (woman) was called into question.
Still, I foolishly tried to keep a dialogue going. I was accused of being smug and I in turn accused them of being condescending and well… bossy! In the end, I got a lot of comments about how I can’t do anything without a man telling me what to do and that I was simply the kind of woman looking for male attention, which was a shame because I would suffer emotionally when I discovered that men actually despised me (I paraphrase for brevity). So, not surprisingly, I decided that the forum wasn’t really conducive to debate and I left.
Now, I didn’t really think that the radical feminists were going to welcome my opinions with open arms, but neither did I expect to be ganged up on in that way. In fact, I was really shocked. It’s a feminist site that is supposedly a place for women to meet up and discuss feminist issues. I expected, if not respect for my opinions, at least, a willingness to debate them. But I found that the only women who are welcome are ones who hold the same opinions as them. It is, in fact, an exclusive club and one that is rabidly defended from any outsider regardless of their biology. CiF is not perfect and there are more than a few idiots on the threads but I’d rather be there where I can find people to engage in debate, even when they really don’t agree with my views, than on a site that just attacks with such spite and venom. So, the next time I hear a feminist say the internet is intimidating to women I shall point out that the most intimidating place
 for a woman to be on the internet is just as likely to be a feminist site as anywhere else. It’s a shame, because I do not in any way blame Cath, and I’d love to comment on her site but I think I’ll stick to CiF, which, as it turns out, really is a broad church.

Now it's my turn.  Looking back at my initial post over at Cath's, I was perhaps not as diplomatic as I could've been.  I did tell them that it seemed to me that they were more interested in mutual masturbation than actual debate.  But lord love a duck, by the time I got over there, they'd already savaged Ally, Jay, Dot and Kiz!  I tried to point out to them that there was nothing inherently sexist in suggesting that perhaps current models of DV services aren't working terribly well.  The reaction?  According to someone called stormy, I'm sucking up to men.  She proceeded to make what seemed to me to be a non sequitur comment about the suffragettes and then told me that I need to think more deeply.  The tone was so condescending that I'm afraid I couldn't come up with a better riposte than to refer to her as a bovine with attitude.  I'm deeply ashamed of that.  I feel like I let the side down.  

As the exchanges went on, we were repeatedly told that we were more interested in sucking up to men than we were in feminism.  One poster seemed to accuse us of having "internalised misogyny" and using "abusive language" to defend men.  I was asked how old I am and there were more wild assumptions made and more words put in my mouth.  I was accused of thinking that radfems were sexually repressed prigs and one told me she'd done things with men that would make my eyebrows curl, but this same poster turned around assumed that Kiz and I were both "solo-partnered" types (as if that somehow made us less qualified to decide whether or not men are all bastards).  Honestly, the arrogance and condescension shown to us because we did not share their radfem outlook was just astounding!  Not once in all my years of joining in on-line discussions, first on Usenet starting in the late 80s/early 90s, and now on Cif - have I ever been subjected to that much vitriol.  (Not even when I dared to suggest once on soc.culture.british that some English men seem to have an unhealthy fascination with train timetables and rolling stock!)  At the end of the day, in the "safe" environment of a blog on women's issues, I was told that I was an emotionally immature, sexually inexperienced, male-worshipping teenybopper.  Just because I dared to suggest that Ally and Jay were pretty reasonable men and that they might have something worthwhile to say.

Suffice it to say, I won't be venturing off into the world of the radfems any more.  I shall wear my emotionally stunted man-worship like a badge of honour.

Kizbot's week on Cif...

Here’s my weekly wind-up. Hope I don’t rant or waffle too much.. do try and stay awake at the back there now…

Monday
Due to a bit of over-consumption at a taverna to celebrate IWD on Sunday I was in no fit condition to go to work, so I monged at home with Cif for company. Not a bad day on cif with plenty to keep me occupied and amused. Charlton is always fun so no change there. I managed to get a bit cross about the article ‘The Lies Men Told To see Me Dance Naked’… Surely it should have been the money men paid me to see me naked? Still it wasn’t so much the article as some of the responses that wound me up, particularly Susahini’s ‘ What you were forced to go through was absolutely wrong’. Voluntarily taking on a job is not forced, now is it! It really is like banging your head on a brick wall on cif at times! but what the hell.. My day on cif ended pleasantly enough with a chuckle at Katherine Whitehorn’s piece on washing machines and catholicism.

Tuesday
In solidarity with ‘incarcerated friends’ I posted a comment on PT’s latest thread with Tuscany rather deftly (well I thought so!) included, as did a few others I’m glad to say. We’ll see if and when the mods spot them. Which they will if they come on here! As I was supposed to be working (shudder) I didn’t have much time to play on cif other than keeping an eye on Polly to see who else would try and pull a fast one on the mods. Mod baiting may seem as childish as chucking green custard at politicos but seeing as the CiF powers-that-be refuse point blank to discuss anything to do with moderation then they deserve everything they get. I also (inexplicably!) managed to elicit an offer of marriage from poster charlessimmonds15 on the Katherine Whitehorn thread but no one will ever believe me coz it was modded. Weyhey hey! I made the best of comments thingy for a post on the open thread on Julie Myerson… a first!

Wednesday
Just had a skim of AllyF’s thread and bitethehand did my head in (again). He accused AllyF of being like a boy complaining about being excluded from his sister’s birthday party. A telling analogy, in that he appears to think excluding a family member from a celebration because of their sex/gender is an acceptable thing to do. Hello!
I was feeling a bit dispirited and wondering why I ever bother to stick in my tuppence worth on ‘Gender Issues’ but then Annetan came along and gave me hope. She’s fab.
Have got fed up with the Julie Myerson thread, it’s all been said now and I thought that the comment someone made about Matt Seaton and Ruth Picardie on the subject of confessional journalism was wickedly cruel. Matt can drive me a bit mad with his supercillious comments but that was just out of order.
I then added a few comments to Rowenna’s ‘blokeosphere’ thread. Again, another blog espousing victimhood. It is actually driving me a bit mad that CIF feminism so resolutely insists on sticking to 1979 and that as soon as someone like AllyF suggests a new approach the response is to scream him down, which hardly fits in with Rowenna’s theory tbh. Ah well, I’ve made my bed in cif feminism and I can shout as loud as the other fems and I, for one, am not going to be giving up any time soon.
The interesting thing about this thread, though, is people talking about debating styles and which are male and female . The Lout (whaddya know) had a wee pop at me about sounding female. I have no idea if my online voice sounds female or not and it’s interesting because I’ve got lots of posters’ biology wrong in the past. It’s funny how we attribute a sex to a poster even if they have a gender neutral moniker, and then sometimes find out that we got it wrong. I suppose preconceptions about me are reinforced by the fact that I’m pink and make a habit of pointing out I am a girl… So folks have I got a girly style? And I don’t mind if I do…Just wondering?

Thursday
They’ve changed the CIF main page! Now we’ve only got the top 5 blogs… Oh! Annoying! I liked the top ten list. It was useful for finding threads that I’ve been active on.
Went on the Tanya Gold thread. I like her pieces. She’s funny, even if she is pathologically self-obsessed. But, like Michele Hanson (I love her too), she gets a hell of a lot of ‘Yet again I’ve wasted 5 minutes of my life…” Funnily enough it appears to be mainly male posters who go in for this kind of bitchy commenting. Whoever it is, though, it’s bloody tedious.
Was about to be bored today, but Jay started a bunfight on the ‘blokeosphere’ thread that was great fun.

Friday
Happy and surprised to see that My little battle with Jay has not been modded. It was pure daft but it goes to show in some way (I hope) that battling it out with other bloggers isn’t necessarily intimidating. Wildhack’s post coming to Jay’s rescue was brilliantly funny, and a fitting end to the battle of gendered wits at the CiF ok corral. Too much serious stuff on the site today for my Friday mind. I was hoping some silly threads would turn up to wile away the hours til I escaped the office but it wasn’t to be. Spent most of the day on Ally’s thread which ended up having some really fantastic comments. In the end, and despite a rickety start to the thread, it was one of the best threads of the week.

* Really really hard to compress a whole week on cif into one short article!
** Sorry about the lack of links... am linkphobic.

Well, let's just talk about the mods, then...

Scherfig's back with the troops.  Sarka managed to find something offensive to say about Michelle Obama's arms.  Let's just talk about those wacky mods, eh?