I'm a young woman and while you have every right to leave if you are fed up, tired, or feel your energy is better spent elsewhere, I would just like to say: I don't want older women like you to leave us. I desperately want women to be homosocial across generations, we need this. Men divide older women from young women on purpose by brainwashing us from birth to fear growing old and to hate old women. This is a divide and conquer tactic and it' sadly effective, but I don't want to let them win. I value what older women have to say so much, I just want you (and anyone else reading this) to know that.
I would do anything for a panel of older women to do a podcast or YouTube video. The older women on this site are a lifeline. Please put us in our place if you see us going in the wrong direction. I want us to be ready to guide the next generation of young women just as you have for us.
I appreciate that, but at the end of the day it's up to younger women to realize that. We have been here fighting for your rights for decades. These things don't even matter that much to me personally. I don't have children and I'm past menopause. I'm not involved in competitive sports. We fought for you. Now it's on you to listen to what we say, value our experience and sorry, but stop being assholes and telling us we're old and out of touch. You will be where I am before you know it. Everyone is aging all the time.
Yeah, I know I'm aging. I'm not far off 30... and for what it's worth, I don't think older women are out of touch. I think of them as in touch with aspects of a bygone era that we should all learn from. You by virtue of living through things I didn't because I was too young or not yet living, are in touch with things I can never be in-touch with, at least not the way you are. Reading history is no substitute for living it, especially where women's history is concerned, so it's so little documented.
There are two women on this site who sometimes comment about what lesbianism was like in the 70s, and while I've read books about it, hearing about this in real time from women actually talking to me makes me want to lap-up every bit of what they have to say. Same goes for when discussion of spirituality come up. I live in a city that apparently (I learned from older women on this site) used to have an active Dianic Wicca grove in the 90s (I would've been too young to know anything about this, sadly), but it is disbanded since then and one or more of the women running it are sadly no longer with us. I feel so sad I missed that, but I was grateful that women on here, who lived that, were able to tell me about it. There are no heritage plaques about goddess-worship in my city, after all (but they do have "queer history" plaques, ugh... at least they aren't even made of metal, haha).
Anyway, I do my level best to discourage young people from dissing older women, it doesn't come in conversation so much during the pandemic but I have left multiple comments talking about the "divide and conquer" tactic men use on this and other websites, and have gotten positive feedback (granted, probably from people already likely to agree with me, but still). I can't change everyone's mind, but I do my best. I read FDS sometimes (I don't post there), and I've seen young women there catch on to the whole "men don't want u stop learn from older women for a reason" thing, so I think some of us are definitely figuring it out. If I could snap my finger and make all young women listen to older women, I would. Oh how I wish it were that easy!
Yes. I agree with this. Ever since I was very young I always enjoyed talking to older women, and even the ones who weren't involved in feminism at all or barely knew what it was about, always taught me something. Many of us who didn't have a strong female figure in life need older, more experienced women.
Correct. I've been holding the line since 1980 despite the ridicule and disdain of younger women who think they know better. They don't.
I've been involved in the trans debate since 2015. A lot of the other women my age who were fighting for women's sex based rights have disappeared. I am close to leaving myself. It seems like it was all for nothing. Most of the time we were shouted down and derided by younger women. At some point you get tired of that shit. I don't want to hear how things are by someone who just discovered radical feminism after being a libfem or even a TRA for years. They have no clue and don't even know what they don't know, yet they're arrogant enough to act like an authority on the subject.