Briar Rose,

Just slightly off-topic, there is a brilliant little book by Amy Wax - Rights, Wrongs and Remedies - about the limits of what other people, or the state, or any of its agencies, can do for anybody, and what they may have to do for themselves, if they want the situation that they are in to change for the better. Or whatthey might have to do for themselves, if they DON'T want to be in a certain situation. Very highly recommended :)

Your clearly much more comfortable in the shallows, Briar Rose, so I'll leave you to it.

I don't know if suzeonline's reference to "the anti feminist brigade" was directed at me -

I don't know either what "anti feminist" means. Is it like "un Australian" but specially for women?

Yesterday after publishing on the Drum I was told I was "man fondling" (that's my personal favourite), being pro male and anti woman, and having a pr*ck in my head.

I guess the message is any woman who publicly says women have to take responsibility for themselves, or suggests that complaining about men is a useless waste of energy and we need to do something else, is automatically "anti feminist?"

Given what passes for feminism these days, I'm not too worried.
Thanks for the book reference, Loudmouth. I'll definitely have a look at it.

Sorry Squeers, I totally get that the context in which these events take place is a capitalist system where the only consideration is profit and everything human is now a commodity. Gender identity is constructed within this context, and serves the capitalist project.I think that's true.

I also think the capitalist project wouldn't last five seconds without the collusion of women, and women are as deeply implicated in it as are men.

Personally I don't give a toss about what kind of underwear people choose or if they don't choose any. I only used that as a symbol of how these things are turned into weapons in ideological battles and become representative of someone's worth as a human being. Thereby playing back into the capitalist project in which we are defined by our consumer choices.
Jennifer.

Briar rose
I would characterise feminism as being a combination of bigotry, discrimination, mis-information, advocacy research and repeatedly describing men in negative terms.

Noted also that few can find anyone in a so-called Australian university that has ever said a positive word about the male gender.

I have made a quick count of articles recently published on OLD

Out of the last 40 articles, only 6 were from women, with 2 by the same author.

I congratulate those female authors, and apart from continuously describing men in negative terms, feminists (or university academics for that matter) sure aren’t saying much.

Perhaps they don’t want to take too much responsibility for what they publish.

Perhaps they would prefer to leave it to evil males to take responsibility, but they themselves wish to avoid responsibility.

"I guess the message is any woman who publicly says women have to take responsibility for themselves, or suggests that complaining about men is a useless waste of energy and we need to do something else, is automatically "anti feminist?"

I wouldn't take the comments of a few to generalise about what other women are thinking Jennifer. Basically there is a cultural kneejerk reaction on both sides of the feminist debate. If you defend feminism in any shape or form you are a misandrist and if you knock any aspect of feminism you are a misogynist.

Not much room for rational debate if that type of thinking is the norm, but it is not - I am confident most people take a broader and more egalitarian view.

Perhaps there was also a kneejerk reaction on my part that your article by implication makes an assumption that women are not
already making decisions for themselves and are considering men in all manner of ways in relation to policies that are fair and equitable for human beings first without necessarily a gender objective