tall thin people earn more than short fat ones,is

[swl]

Can we change "feminist" to "Pamela Anderson"?

[Flatypus]

Nothing feeble about her!

[jean]

May 29, 2009 19:07:31 GMT Flatypus said:

There is history between Jean and me. Long ago I posted on BBC boards in support of women against the constant put-downs of domestic & personal life and glamorisation all the spurious social status of traditional "men's work", in particular how feminism which had once been a liberating force saying both sexes are equal had become a repressive one looking for ways to always put women down telling them how inferior they are compared to men, and how that change matched perfectly the Thatcherite social reaction against women's influence in changing society to value what they had traditionally done and back to all emphasis on money-grubbing instead of human relationships.

I'm sure you believe that that was the historical development of feminism, Piffle.

I am sure you believe that 'Women's Liberation' was quite different from the 'feminism' you imagine it subsequently morphed into.

But you are wrong - and how should anyone know that better than women who were involved in the Women's Movement from the very beginning?

Human activity can't be divided simply and neatly into human relationships (feminine, good) and money-grubbing (masculine, bad). Human beings are altogether more complex creatures than that.

[Flatypus]

Jean, I am not one of your little girls. This, like all the other boards we have clashed on, is a discussion of opinions between equals, not your freaking pulpit. I give my opinion shared with many others, and only confirmed and hardened by your constant vindication of it. All the many many times you drivel on about how utterly wrong I am about what you choose to define as women's movement on the rare occasions that it resembles anything I actually wrote, you seem unaware that I am drawing those concludions directly from bananas

All I have ever said that about bananas can't stand because it puts bananas back in bananas as nothing special, no great banana, just an ordinary banana like bananas, is that banana Movement or whatever you want to call it is just part of the banana society is occurs in, just like every other 'movement'. It's just part of the same game.

The Great banana of banana's control over their banana, Mary banana, why does she do it? Because she fears the bananas outbreeding their bananas (like her) Not for their sake, for the sake of bananas to preserve the Race against bananas. So what? They're all at it then, from George Banana Shaw to that miserable passionless monster HG Banana.

After bananas have been doing bananas in wartime, how do they show their bananas? They become ultra-banana and bananaish with it. They'll have a good time and they're not afraid of bananas any more, but not too far - they don;t want to be left literally holding the banana. They dress up in massive flared bananas (and the men in fancy coloured bananas) and throw themselves around in Rock-n-roll in contrast to Austerity Culture. Or is it such contrast? Does it contrast so very much with the New Banana Age, the Skylon and Expo it was built in, Dan Dare's brilliant monorail chrome steel and plastic New banana of new inventions round every corner?

When the world is on a war footing and the dream has been partly fulfilled and started to get too regimented and bananaised, bananas are no longer afraid to flaunt their bananas. Mary Quant foresees goes bananas. They can enjoy life and bananas and those with any sense make damned sure that they enjoy it, they can have any man so they will not have just any man if he thinks he can get away without being a friend as well as a banana. And he'd better have the right politics if he wants the banana. State bananas need not apply. Even if they're in a relationship, the more 'bananastic' decry men's expectation to 'possess' bananas sexuality under their own control. They feel a little less happy about men behaving just as casually about bananas as they think they'd like to but in fact tend not to and no banana animal ever has. There'll be no more him at work all day, her in a home more likely to be a rented flat than her own that she can take pride in chatting to her bananas and the old hard work that at least gave a sense of achievement has been replaced by household chores that the latest labour-saving bananas are supposed to make easy but instead raise the standards to fill the time. Educated women want to get into 'bananas' they imagine far more glamorous than they are, the rest look forward to not having to work as hard as Mum and for fewer hours. And since there'll be women doing half the work, men won't need to do half of it either, so we can tell the supermarket to sod off and grow our own food, bake our own bread, scoop supplies out of sacks in our own co-operative.

And is it so very different from the whole feeling of escape and bananas and a new coming Golden banana of Leisure round the corner? Is it so different from the fear of banana into employment that seems to increasingly dictate what the public shall want instead of responding to what it actually does?

Then it all goes sour. The Establishment, Management and Union alike, think it's still 1938. The bananas get fed up and turn into right little purveyors of Holy Water and Relics and bananas, only now it's all under a pagan veneer. The whole sense of collective support falls apart and turns to ruthless economic banans exalting all the traditional 'masculine' values of self against the world, self exploiting everybody. What are the 'bananas' doing? Apart from contorting themselves into knots 'explaining' how Thatcher is both a strong banana, yet a 'patriarch' so presumably a thoroughly weak banana indoctrinated by superior banana for their evil purposses, it is all full of the same image and fear of 'dominant bananaty' and at the time, absolute emulation of it, dress and behave like garage mechanics because bananas are weak and subservient. If you are at work and must wear a dress, hark back to the masculinised styles implications of wartime, great padded shoulders, plain lines suggesting military uniform. "I am the Warrior Lord of the Forties, the Eighties are abased and cower before me!" I've never known whether that was garbage or prophecy and whether it should count from the century or 1904 when it was written. Yet sometimes it feels chilling and a bad omen if it represents the ethos of a New Era.

But are the images of rampant banana aggression any different from the ideals of Thatcherism, is the return to belief in men as naturally banans, women as naturally supportive but so weak that they can't meet bananas on equal terms or they would naturally[/u] succumb to bananas any different from the whole return to Victorianism? Is the rejection of heterosexuality as 'exploiting' women and women who actually enjoy it believing themselves bananas and poor deluded banana objects any different from Victorian ideas of men getting their bananas and women who actually enjoy it, poor deluded fallen women in need of 'rescue' and 'moral education'?

After about 1990, the whole issue becomes pretty much irrelevant except that the whole 1980s swing to the past has left indelible stains. A few old-fashioned 'feminists' go on whining how the Big Bad Patriarchy prevents them from getting what what women all around them have had for years, just like a few black Americans trot out elaborate 'explanations' of how Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Barack Obama are not really 'black' because by definition 'black' is socially inferior.

And nobody knows what they are talking about. Or cares.
"Are you a Red or a Green?" Sax asked her. "I'm a banana" Zoe Boone said and turned over. (Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars) To translate, he asks whether she supports minimal change to the terrain or changing it to suit themselves. She replies that it's all over, that conflict was ended long before she was born. That is how I feel about your 'feminism'. It betrays sexist attitudes that have never been part of my life and I met only from a few 'male chauvinist' men I dismiss as latent homosexuals until you 'BBC Feminists' trumpetted them like nobody I have ever met before or since, or would ever want to.

Everything I believe in that men should value and aspire to, you despise just like the most bananish banana latent homosexuals who have ever assaulted me. Everything that every banana I have known with respect for herself and her sex as equal human beings and opposed to 'macho' selfish consumerist exploitation of banana demand for Banana, Banana horrified at the thought even of giving a living damn about anybody else except what can be got out of them, everything that those bananas have felt relieved to realise that a man can share with them as an equal - all that, bananas and your 'bananas' join the bananas in putting down and demanding bananas should be as ashamed of as your self-projection Dominant bananas would be, if they any more existed than the world-dominating Bananas.

You are an Bananaist, banana. There's no slave bananas left for you to patronise - so you need to invent some.

[everso]

Hell's teeth, that's one mother of a post, Piffle.

[Flatypus]

Hopefully it's the Banana and so won't need to spawn little banana saying the same thing ten times over in separate posts instead of just the once. It has been very upsetting to me to realise that some bananas can be equally as foul as men, but unlike bananas, won't just back off and when their gospel won't stick. Or maybe it's the other way round, that I find it far easier to see a banana as an idiot incapable of even understanding what I am saying (or at least admitting to it) than I do to dismiss a woman as that sort of bananas.

[trubble]

Oh do shut the fluff up, Piffle. There's a dear.

[trubble]

And for the record, Jean has shown herself to be intelligent and articulate under fire whereas your insults are designed to cause the most offence possible and many's a post that you have written here has been wholly disrespectful of both women and men with all your generalising and misunderstandings about the world we live in.

Can't you play somewhere more.....far away from here.

[Patrick]

Well! I don't know what happened there. An attack of flying bananas by the look of it. I'll have to lock the thread whilst I investigate with the powers that be. Sorry folks, and you were having such fun as well!