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From: flaps@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Montreal
Message-ID: <89Dec14.120052est.5492@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Date: 14 Dec 89 17:00:01 GMT
References: <5771@yunexus.UUCP>
Sender: ambar@ora.ora.com
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Approved: ambar@ora.com

Beryl Logan (logan@nexus.yorku.ca) writes about a vigil mourning the victims of
the "Montreal massacre" which excludes men:
>They don't think they can fully express their emotions and grief with men
>present, and want the men to organize their own event...

[ the killings represent a social problem not a women's problem... ]

>I don't think it is treating men with respect if we say to them that we can't
>mourn alongside you.

I don't see that this is very different from excluding men from all sorts of
other events.  I support the idea of women excluding men from events.

I'm sure I don't have to tell the readers of this forum that most men tend to
dominate most women in discussion and in other ways.  We could argue forever
about whether it's the women or the men's fault.  (I think it's the men's
fault.)  The point is, I don't think you can get very far without realizing
this basic fact.  Even in a discussion with dozens of women and two men, you
can keep track of how much everyone says and find that the discussion was
totally male-dominated.

Obviously we want to work to change this.  We also want to work to change many
other things, and I don't think we want to insist that we completely fix the
male-dominated-discussion problem before making any other progress anywhere
else.  So then the question becomes whether or not we want men to dominate
all these other women's discussion groups.  I think we don't.

If discussions or other events involving both women and men have a tendency to
be dominated by men, and some women want to have a discussion or other event
which is not dominated by men, they may find they have to exclude men to
achieve this.  I think this is fine.

On the respect question:  Well, perhaps you can't respect all of the people all
of the time.  To acknowledge that men tend to dominate discussion groups could
be construed as a lack of respect.  I think we should acknowledge it.

ajr