Women forum

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[trigger warning: may contain upsetting material to sensitive persons]

Ok, MasterJedi, it's like this.

I used to work in a collective run DIY bike shop. We had tools and parts available, people would fix their own bikes, volunteers were around to show people how to do the work.

We had a women/trans only night. A lot of the male members of the collective were offended by the idea of being banned one night out of the week. We had very long discussions about the need to create a "safe space."

It's basically a rape/sexual assault issue. Women who have been raped often have problems with male/macho behavior. Be it loud yelling, being "hit on" or pedantic, authoritarian attitudes. Bike shops, like most technical repair services, tend to be dominated by pragmatic males with poor social communication skills (people like me.) Some women felt like they were being banned 7 nights out of the week, because the environment was so hostile to their [unwanted] sensitivities and hang ups.

Having a women-only night gave them a chance to use the shop in an environment guaranteed to be free of sexual pressures, and a chance to use the shop where they were guaranteed to be able to hang out there without accidently running into a person who had abused them in the past. Those pressures were an impediment to their learning how to fix bikes.

The other 6 days of the week, the shop was open to everybody. Including the abusers, because most of the time the general community doesn't know who the abusers are.

Most women would use the shop any old day of the week. But some could only concentrate enough during women's night.

Having a women's forum that was only for women would give them a space where they could talk about issues like this without someone else barging into the conversation and calling them sexists. Where the "barging in," itself, is a typically male pattern form of dominance that can prevent women from having meaningful conversations about subjects like this.

It is privilege, be it gender privilege or racial privilege, or whatever, that makes it easy for a dominant group to dismiss the concerns of any non-dominant group. Being dismissive to people's lack of privilege, or oblivious to the power of your own privilege, is a distinct characteristic of having privilege.

So the Third Reich is alive and well in Germany.

so women are afraid of being sexually assaulted or hit upon in open forum?

It's a bike shop, not a bar!

It was very hard for me to understand, personally. The social issues were very complex. A couple years later, I participated in a Men's Group to discuss a lot of those same issues, in a women-free context. It was a lot easier to talk about the issues when we felt like we weren't being judged by female-bodied humans.

It seems like men tend to only open up emotionally to women, that women are the designated emotional caregivers in our society. Having an opportunity to open up to other men, to admit fears and regrets, was enlightening. To say the least.

I really don't see why this is a big issue. Sometimes women need a space were they can discuss problems unique to them, and you can at least give them that.

MasterJedi, maybe you should read Women's Discussion, and then you would see that there are issues that require sensitivity and a space were said where that is shown.

people outside whatever you are have opinions - some of which you might not have considered that might be of some assistance.

lol nazis = innocent question on a forum...? err..