Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!jarthur!ucivax!gateway From: austern@ux5.lbl.GOV (Matt Austern) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: womyn-only space vs. men-only space? Message-ID: <8131@dog.ee.lbl.gov> Date: 17 Nov 90 19:30:33 GMT References: <89803@aerospace.AERO.ORG> <10153@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <1990Oct31.185009.701@athena.mit.edu> <46160@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> Reply-To: Matt Austern Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (theoretical physics group) Lines: 37 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: zola.ics.uci.edu Answering an explanation of why "women's space" is often considered to be different from sexist organizations like the Bohemian Club, Greg Bullough (greg@uts) writes >There is a not-so-subtle form of sexism here which says "what women do >in their space is virtuous and good, but what men do in their space is >conspiratorial and evil." It is precisely this sort of sexism which as >so polarized the forces on either side of the women-space/ men-space >issue. > I think this is a slightly unfair characterization of the argument for "women's space." The point isn't that any women's organization must necessarily be good and any men's organization necessarily evil; it is just an observation that today, in the world we live in, organizations like SWE play a different role in society than do organizations like the Bohemian Club; that many women's groups exist for the purpose of inclusion, not exclusion. The social context just isn't the same; why should we pretend that it is? On the net, I often see the sentiment, usually expressed by non-feminist men, that our attitudes about male-female relations should be completely symmetrical. To parody this attitude slightly, the idea seems to be that if a statement is true, all you have to do is exchange the words "man" and "woman" and it will still be true. (Maybe that's not such an unfair characterization, since we've all seen postings that consist of nothing but such a transposition. Text editors make that kind of game easy.) In some kind of ideal society, maybe we would have that symmetry. We don't live in such a society, though, and I don't think it's sexist to notice that fact. -- Matthew Austern austern@lbl.bitnet Proverbs for paranoids, 3: If (415) 644-2618 austern@ux5.lbl.gov they can get you asking the wrong austern@lbl.gov questions, they don't have to worry about answers.