women only spaces for ‘nurturing’ leaders? separate but equal then? awesome. thank you. so the coloreds can go from one master to another. yay us.

Here, here! No hijacking from anyone, please!

I’ve been thinking about women’s spaces lately, and why they are special. I went to an all-women’s college, spent time in various women’s groups and have recently been participating in women’s groups for my male-dominated profession.

I found a similar space recently though, at a local political movement, that had nothing to do with gender. Instead it was carefully facilitated by an experienced anarchist facilitator who purposefully disrupted power dynamics and attended only by explicitly feminist people who were experienced in active listening. I do not believe it is gender that is important: I believe it is behavior.

I have been in at least as many women’s spaces that failed as those that succeeded, because while being a woman is correlated with a listening, receptive, collaborative, high-social-intelligence approach to the world it is certainly no guarantee. As much as it is much harder work, in the long run the only way to change the status quo is to explicitly teach both men and women the skills we value from those all-women’s spaces. There are many women poorly served by separate spaces (trans* women, queer women and gender-explorers most obviously, but also poor women, women of color, immigrant women, women who don’t speak English well or those with cultural experiences unlike the predominant White, middle-class feminist norms).

As much as women’s spaces made some things easy for me personally, I consider them at best a short-term bandaid and not a long-term panacea. The exclusion of the consideration of men’s oppression under patriarchy has been a serious blind spot that has hurt feminism as theory was built on incomplete information. I think women’s spaces can be extremely helpful as short-term, personal consciousness raising spaces and day-to-day support. I think they are a highly exclusionary way to build a movement.

“Simply talking about feminism, participating in an ongoing online exchange of feminist ideas or highlighting sexist issues without attempting to drown out women’s voices I do not find in the least problematic.”

This! This is what I think, but said nice and clearly :)

I find many claims of White Knighting to be attempts to silence feminists, period. It is not men’s fault they are given more weight by sexists: all that does is give them a greater responsibility to speak out early and often. They *can* go out of their way to reference the feminist thinkers they are drawing from and are responsible for not claiming other people’s ideas as their own, but I expect sexists will encounter feminist arguments for the first time in men’s writings basically by definition.
I think the truly problematic behavior is better described by the word “mansplaining”, where men attempt to tell women how to be feminist. Simply talking about feminism, participating in an ongoing online exchange of feminist ideas or highlighting sexist issues without attempting to drown out women’s voices I do not find in the least problematic.

Well, I can understand some of it – if I express ANY strong opinion, then I’m telling women how to do feminism. And that’s true, there’ll always be women who take an opposite stance on an issue, and I’m disagreeing with them. But yeah, I think some of it (from both men and women in my experience) is specifically aimed at men who claim to be feminists.

So maybe the vitriol is thrown at anyone who expresses an explicitly feminist sentiment, rather than just women?

Although yeah, the nature of the rage isn’t the same.

Thank you very much!

Did I “slightly dance around” it? I think I out and out say that patriarchy silences men too?

But I do really like your point about feminism and the ultimate achievement of gender equality being as valuable to men as it is to women, which I didn’t consider. The fact that men would hold ‘selfish’ motives means that we do have a shared oppression, and they can be feminists for the same reasons as women.