oh Andrea we're really in it now

This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.

May her memory be a blessing

What they were saying to me was very clear. As long as any male, anywhere is suffering, women are selfish to mention that they are suffering, too.

I'm sure neither of those men realized the woman-hatred behind their feeling that everything and everyone should come before women. I pointed out quietly that in every country where children are starving, women are starving also. In every country where men are being tortured, women are being tortured also. I was insensitive enough to point out that Vietnam is also strewn with the blasted bodies of women, and that many, many of those bodies were not simply blown up, but were also sexually abused-raped, gang raped, used up in prostitution, tortured. No matter when or where or what men suffer, women's suffering is on some totally different, more exquisite, plane.

But no one wants to hear that women are suffering. Men's ordeals are recounted and described and depicted in every conceivable way in every medium on earth, and have been from earliest history. We are always asked and expected to look at and listen to and understand and sympathize with men's pain and suffering, and we have always done it, all of us, men and women. But women's agony at the hands of men must never be revealed. If women steadfastly and courageously began to tell the truth and would not stop, would not be co-opted, would not become afraid, the truth of our enslavement would be undeniable, and the jig would be up.

That this might indeed happen is terrifying to most people. It would stand the whole world on its head. This is why any time women say, "Look at what is happening to us!" someone invariably rises up on the spot (as patriarchy has trained us all so well to do) and shouts, in order to divert us, to frighten us, to remind us of our vulnerability and danger: "But what about men?"

I explained to the distraught man whose buddies lie in fragments all over the corpse of Vietnam: ''You are performing this function here tonight. May I interrupt this well-rehearsed performance to point out that we have given men 5000 years of undivided attention." (Is it any wonder they have remained spoiled little boys?) As Pauline Bart points out: "We are not allowed, even now, to speak of women's suffering without someone saying, 'and men, too,' although we have always spoken of men's suffering without adding 'and women, too!'" Patriarchy has worked hard to make women's experience appear so trivial and so invisible that it is inconceivable to most people that we warrant any attention at all. Otherwise, it would not be so maddening to them to have to listen for a whole hour to a speech about women, though they listen willingly day after day, year after year, to talks by and about men. For many hundreds of years they have heard about nothing but men: their wars, their ideas, their art, their politics, their science, their blah, blah, blah, ad nauseam."

This past Sunday marked the 98th annual Academy Awards (@theacademy). Breaking the troubling pattern of the last two years, none of the women nominated for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress depicted prostituted women. The winners for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor have consistently depicted a variety of characters, such as nuclear physicists, architects, musicians and government leaders. In the history of the Academy Awards, no man has ever been nominated or won for portraying a prostituted individual. If Hollywood keeps pedaling stories of prostituted women and the sex trade, what message are they pushing out? What are they instilling in women and girls, what are they showing society values about women and girls?

The narrative about men is only going to change if men step up and fucking change it.

Call out your mates when they make sexist comments. Put a stop to the bad behaviour of your male friends.

And the other part of this video i want to highlight is the part where he said "if you think this doesnt affect the women in your life, its not because its not happening to them. Its because they dont trust you enough to talk to you about it."

What are you as a man doing to let the women in your life know that youre safe to talk to about this shit? What are you actively doing to prove in advance that youre a trustworthy man?

I remember when MeToo had its brief moment before Hollywood and the media shut it down. Men were saying "psh, these statistics are all so overblown. I dont know a single woman who has been assaulted, but the stats are claiming practically every woman has." And then people told those men to go home and speak to their wives. To ask their daughters if anything like that had happened to them. To phone their sisters and mothers and ask if theyd ever been harassed or assaulted by a man. To check in with their female friends and ask the same questions.

And some of those men went and asked the women in their lives. And any man who did was shocked to their fucking bones to learn that almost every single woman they know has faced some form of sexual harassment or assault. That in fact for women, this shit is fucking constant.

"Miss" means an unmarried woman. "Mrs." means a married woman. (both of these have origins in the word "mistress" as in "mistress of the house".)

I've had people (usually children) ask me at work if I'm a missus or a miss. I have replied that I am a miz, full stop. And when they pressed for which one I was REALLY, I have replied, "Why? Are you going to treat me differently depending on whether there's a ring somewhere?"

That's what Ms. is for. That is its linguistic function. It says, "This is an adult woman," and nothing else. Nothing else is necessary, and in my case, nothing else is desired.

I also use miz for other women unless and until they express a preference for something else because I don't magically know everyone else's marital status when I meet them. That's a courtesy—I'm declining to assume marital status and allowing them to decide whether they wish to declare it.

According to [new/old/even older] research, [Gen Z/Millennial/Gen X] women have had it with going out to work. At long last, we’ve realised that the feminist movement conned us with its myth of [Girlboss/career woman/shoulder-padded ballbreaker] empowerment. Turns out proper work – the kind of stuff men do – isn’t the Barbie-with-a-briefcase fantasy we thought it was. Alas, being the kind of idiots whose brains can only manage ‘pottering about a bit with babies while doing a bit of dusting’, we let ourselves be brainwashed into viewing said ‘pottering about’ as oppression. Honestly, what are we like?

Earlier this week I spotted a tweet announcing that ‘Gen Z women are officially done chasing the “girlboss” grind’:

“A new poll shows 47% of Gen Z aspire to be a tradwife — married, with kids and the husband as the top earner.

Girlboss ranked 2nd, digital nomad 3rd, and a strong 14% aspired to be a trophy wife — the classic MRS degree.

The biggest lie women were told is that success comes from the workplace. Success is expanding humanity for its survival. The joy of motherhood is indescribable and better than any job title.”

Hear that ladies? You’ve all been lied to! Having babies is the best!

I feel I have been seeing variations of this argument my whole life. I was born in 1975, into a not-very-feminist family. I benefited from second-wave feminism’s fight for improved workplace conditions for women, without having to do any of the fighting myself. The backlash to this was ever-present. It’s never gone away, yet it always seeks to portray itself as something new.

Growing up, I noticed how men treated women who ‘didn’t work’ (or rather, did work, but not for any pay, or for lower pay than the men). I saw the way the disrespect extended to ‘housewives’ was matched by that extended to ‘working mothers’ (parasite or bad mother, either way you were morally inferior, especially if there was no man around). I watched all the ‘career women are bitches who’ll regret neglecting their kids, or become extra-bitchified by not having kids at all’ films that emerged in the late eighties and early nineties – Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Baby Boom, Immediate Family, Working Girl – that Susan Faludi takes apart in Backlash. The US-imported ‘mommy wars’ – supposedly pitching stay-at-home mothers against ‘working mothers’ – always seemed a pretty transparent way of telling mothers (and women in general) they were their own worst enemies, whatever they did.

When I started university in 1993, my dad commented on what a waste it was to see so many female students as “they’ll all go off to have babies” (I was never sure whether I counted as a “waste”. In any case, male students still outnumbered female ones in my college – which only started admitting women in 1980 – by three to two). In 2007, pregnant with my first child, I read Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels’ The Mommy Myth, which warned of the rise of “the new momism” – “a highly romanticized and yet demanding view of motherhood” – and sought to pitch this as ‘true’ choice and liberation for women:

“Central to the new momism, in fact, is the feminist insistence that women have choices, that they are active agents in control of their own destiny, that they have autonomy. But here’s where the distortion of feminism occurs. The only truly enlightened choice to make as a woman, the one that proves, first, that you are a ‘real’ woman, and second, that you are a decent, worthy one, is to become a ‘mom’ and to bring to child rearing a combination of selflessness and professionalism that would involve the cross cloning of Mother Theresa and Donna Shalala.”

Is this sounding at all familiar? Oh look – doing exactly what women did before (in 1950s adverts, at least) is the real feminist choice! And no, it’s not taken Gen Z women looking at their exhausted Gen X mothers to ‘realise’ this. Gen X and Millennial women have been told this all their adult lives, too. And still we keep getting paid jobs, as if we need money, and maybe even careers, as if there’s other stuff we’re interested in or good at, like the idiots we are.

At this juncture I should probably tell you how important my kids are to me and how being a mother is indeed the most important thing in my life etc. etc. (as Douglas and Michaels emphasise, “we adore our kids […] The smell of a new baby’s head, tucking a child in at night, receiving homemade, hand-scrawled birthday cards, heart-to-hearts with a teenager after a date, seeing them become parents – these are joys parents treasure”). But that’s just a bit insulting, isn’t it? Yes, I am quite aware a spreadsheet doesn’t love you back but honestly, why does this need saying? There is an enormous legacy of feminist work on how we can value motherhood more, and improve the experience of it more (I have a Fairer Disputations piece coming out on this soon), and it is incredibly frustrating to see generation after generation ignore this work and its recommendations in favour of “we’ll just tell women how lovely it is when your baby smiles at you”. Like we couldn’t have worked that out for ourselves!

There is so much to say about changing workplace, economic and family structures in order to make mothering better and easier. But what I think is often unsaid, but increasingly obvious to me, is the way in which the drive to push women out of the workplace – or at least out of jobs that men might want for themselves – trivialises and undervalues what women do as paid workers in much the same way that the work of mothers is undervalued and trivialised. It’s not so much that ‘women’s work’ or ‘motherwork’ is devalued – it’s that anything women are doing isn’t classed as ‘real’ work. That’s why infantilising caricatures of women playing at being workers, strutting around being ‘girlbosses’ or barging others out of the way with their shoulder pads, have been so enduring. As if men still do the real work but women, having had a major tantrum in the mid-70s, are being humoured and it’s time for them to give it up.

This is the story we are told: feminists – who invented feminism to compensate for their lack of properly feminine qualities such as maternal instinct and the desire to be soft and decorative – told other women – who apparently hadn’t ever worked outside the home before – that having a career would totes be empowering and fun. Alas, these other women – who did have properly feminine qualities, which included being stupid – let themselves be duped into going along with this, with many of them forgetting to have babies. These women then found that being a worker, far from being like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, was really hard, and often quite boring. They hadn’t realised this because 1) men never, ever moan about work, being the superior creatures they are, and 2) women are eternal children, for whom ‘liberation’ is nothing more than some teenage ‘when I grow up, I can do whatever I like, and no one can stop me!’. Therefore it’s best they only have actual children for company, lest they go getting ideas (as an added bonus, being at home with babies and cooking for men, in addition to being the entire meaning of life for women, is also a piece of piss, so men don’t have to be particularly grateful for it or work out a system of rewards that grants stay-at-home mothers the same levels of financial freedom or social status).

It is true that when you are young, you might think that because adults have more choices, and because you wouldn’t make the same rubbish choices as the adults around you, growing up will be a wheeze. You’ll get your own place! You’ll earn your own money! You’ll show them all! The Girlboss Idiot narrative treats women as though they never grew out of it, while supporting the idea that 1950s imaginary housewives were pampered children who didn’t know how good they had it. We’re like petulant kids who decided to leave home, got to the bottom of the road, hung around getting cold in an attempt to save face, then eventually slunk off back to Mummy (and Patriarch Daddy).

I, too, find adult life is not exactly how I imagined it would be when I was five. Like absolutely everyone, I find adult life full of compromises I didn’t always anticipate, some of which might be remedied by making the kind of structural changes feminists (including maternal feminists) have been requesting since forever, and some of which are inevitable because you have to close some doors to go through others. When I look at the survey results triumphantly shared on X, it strikes me that I wouldn’t mind if my partner suddenly got a massive pay rise that made him ‘top earner’ – not because I strive to be subordinate him, but because we’d have more money (I wouldn’t mind if I got a massive pay rise, either). I wouldn’t mind having fewer mundane tasks to do – the kind of life where I could cherry-pick which bits I did and didn’t do. I wouldn’t mind having ‘a wife’, as Judy Brady Syfer’s classic essay put it. I wouldn’t mind things just being easier.

On paper, I’m someone who ‘left it late’ to have her third baby at forty, but I wanted a third child long before then (having two children full-time at nursery got us into debt, and made us put off having other children, for years. One of us staying at home would have made matters worse). I’m also someone who was ‘reckless’ when getting pregnant with my first child (not married, partner on a temporary contract, newly estranged from my family, so new to my own job I didn’t qualify for maternity pay). For women – particularly women who benefit from things that were not available to previous generations – the ‘making it up as you go along’ aspect of life is all too often recast as, well, was it the perfect choice? If not, blame feminism! But it’s never the perfect choice.

When everything women do is cast in this way, it masks the actual contributions women make, not just to their families, but in the wider world. Male workers are seen to deserve higher pay because they nobly commit themselves to hard graft (and being noble hard grafters is so integral to their identities, it’s selfish of women to take ‘their’ roles). Women, meanwhile, see work as a kind of accessory, like a new lipstick. Men work to provide for their families; women work instead of caring for their families (despite the fact that it is men who spend more on themselves). Whatever women do, they don’t ‘deserve’ as much as men. Either you’re outside the home, doing something contrary to your ‘true nature’ (so you can’t be doing it as well as a man), or you’re in the home, doing something that comes so naturally it isn’t really work.

Even if “the joy of motherhood” is “better than any job title”, mothers don’t just coast around on maternal joy, just as female employees don’t just coast around in a state of perpetual gratitude at being ‘allowed’ to work (or pretend-work, when it’s something the men want to do themselves). These are things women give, not postures we adopt. Whatever choices and compromises we make, it’s about time they were recognised as such.

The uncritical use of the term ‘girlboss’ by feminists – whether to celebrate women in particular kinds of roles, or to denigrate them as bad feminists – has really bothered me in recent years. While I’m quite aware that the ‘feminism’ of Sheryl Sandberg hasn’t exactly helped things, ‘girlboss’ is such a patronising way of describing any female worker, one that feeds into the idea that women are just playing at it. It’s all very “look at you, with your big, important job! Totally girlbossing it today!” It sounds like a lipstick shade (actually, there are several ‘girl boss’ lipsticks, although there seems to be some disagreement on whether it should be deep red, dusk pink or a range of shades with a “no-budge, matte finish for a killer pout”).

It reminds me of terms such as ‘manageress’, ‘WPC’ and ‘coed’, words given to women in places or roles that ‘originally’ belonged to men. ‘Girlboss’ covers anything a bit important – so a whole range of roles and positions where men are just managing or leading or whatever it is that important men do. It makes the women in question seem unnatural, babyish, self-serving all at once. [...]

Obviously there is much to criticise in actual Lean In-style feminism (one woman making it to the boardroom is not a victory for all women, and isn’t the most pressing issue facing most women today). Still, the criticism of ‘girlbosses’ offered by edgelord feminists such as Lewis reminds me of their criticism of ‘Karens’, and the way these criticisms end up merging with those of the kind of people who’ve always wanted women to sit down and shut up. Like the right-wing woman who makes a career of telling other women they shouldn’t have careers, there seem to be a lot of white, middle-class feminists who want white, middle-class women to be quiet (but not them) and not to have jobs which might rely on the labour of lower-paid women (which academic and journalistic careers totally don’t, if you discount all the times in which they do).

And there have been multiple articles about people with no prior history of mental health issues going off the deep end with ShitGPT; maybe they secretly had underlying problems, but it's bad how it's bringing this out in people and I just don't think having a digital Magic 8 Ball is worth all the trouble it's causing

...Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.” “He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.” To the woman’s knowledge, her former fiancé — who is in his 40s — had no history of delusion, mania, or psychosis, and had never been abusive or aggressive toward her. But as his ChatGPT obsession deepened, he grew angry, erratic, and paranoid, losing sleep and experiencing drastic mood swings. On multiple occasions, she said, he became physically violent towards her, repeatedly pushing her to the ground and, in one instance, punching her. After nearly a year of escalating behavior alongside intensive ChatGPT use, the fiancé, by then distinctly unstable, moved out to live with a parent in another state. Their engagement was over...Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT.

In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.) The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school. “I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'” Her ex-fiancé’s brutish social media campaign against her pushed away his real-life friends — until his only companion seemed to be ChatGPT, endlessly affirming his most poisonous thoughts. Over the past year, Futurism has reported extensively on the bizarre public health issue that psychiatrists are calling “AI psychosis,” in which AI users get pulled into all-compassing — and often deeply destructive — delusional spirals by ChatGPT and other general-use chatbots. Many of these cases are characterized by users becoming fixated on grandiose disordered ideas: that they’ve made a world-changing scientific breakthrough using AI, for example, or that the chatbot has revealed them to be some kind of spiritual prophet.

Now, another troubling pattern is emerging. We’ve identified at least ten cases in which chatbots, primarily ChatGPT, fed a user’s fixation on another real person — fueling the false idea that the two shared a special or even “divine” bond, roping the user into conspiratorial delusions, or insisting to a would-be stalker that they’d been gravely wronged by their target. In some cases, our reporting found, ChatGPT continued to stoke users’ obsessions as they descended into unwanted harassment, abusive stalking behavior, or domestic abuse, traumatizing victims and profoundly altering lives. Reached with detailed questions about this story, OpenAI didn’t respond.