It was very good.
I almost didn't go, as I had a 2-hour Zoom class immediately before it, and I was exhausted, but I reasoned that all I had to do was stay on the sofa, so I went.
I will definitely read the book when it comes out in paperback (I hate reading hardbacks properly, as opposed to dipping in and out). She was a very good speaker, and said a lot of things that made me think, and a lot of things that perfectly articulated things that I already thought but struggled to explain to myself.
She talked about the conflict between feminism as a structural movement and as a self-help movement, in which women are encouraged to ignore the underpinning reasons for their (shared) problems in favour of 'being nice' to other women and dealing with issues on an individual basis as opposed to collectively. I can see what she means by this, but I suspect that it is part of a move away from collective politics in general, and is not specific to the feminist movement.
I found her thoughts on the role of language particularly interesting (and perhaps a bit surprising). She objects to the way in which she feels that a lot of the debate is ignored because of an insistence that everyone uses the 'correct' form of address, or pronouns, or whatever, and feels that this can alienate those who feel that they can't join in because people are waiting to pounce on them for getting something 'wrong', rather than listening to what they are saying, and engaging with their point of view. She said a lot of interesting things about social media discourse, and how that fuels a lot of this 'trashing' of other women. On one hand, she felt that social media gave busy women time to engage with feminism in a way that they previously couldn't (eg logging onto Mumsnet in the ten minutes between making the kids' tea and feeding the baby) but on the other, that there were always a few voices being heard above all the others, because they would 'trash' anyone who used the wrong vocabulary, in the way that the patriarchy always 'trashed' women by belittling their attempts to join in conversations.
She also used 'prostitution' as a good example of how language and what she called 'theological' argument could distract people away from a useful debate, talking about the efforts to wipe criminal records of women prosecuted for soliciting being derailed by arguments over the semantics. Whilst women argued over whether 'sex work' was 'empowering' or 'prostitution' was 'exploitative' the actual women who engaged in it were unable to get other jobs because of having a record that employers could see.
I have banged on lately about my own lack of confidence just now, and she summed up a lot of what I'm feeling by pointing out that men are taken seriously after the age of 20 or so until they die, whereas women have such a brief period between being seen as 'silly girls' and 'silly old trouts', and they have to cram everything into that time, which for many coincides with child-rearing and all the juggling that goes with that. She made the point that at an age when a lot of women realise that they have no more fucks to give and will say what they think, they are entering the stage of their lives where nobody is listening to them, including other women.
One more thing that chimed with me (then I'll shut up
) was that women are encouraged to use biography or 'confession' to justify their feelings in a way that men are not. We are not expected to think things just because we think them, but to explain how we have the 'authority' to speak, which leads to so many women baring their souls about rape, or domestic violence, or giving anecdotes about when we were involved in x y or z . This then leaves us open to accusations of lying, or virtue-signalling, or being factually inaccurate etc, and again, shifts the debate from the subject to the semantics. I hadn't thought about that before, but now that I do, I think that there is a lot of truth in it.
There was more, but that's what I remember most, and I've wittered on enough.