On 11/22/2011 6:22 PM, Sarah Stierch wrote: The sexism in the antiglobalization and non-pacifist and non-womens antiwar groups (and even some of the former) was pretty bad in the "first decade." Not just tolerance of sexist remarks and discomfort with discussion sexist advances, but too much tolerance of advocacy and practice of violence by males. (While women who spoke out against were open to being accused of using "violent language" or being "peace nazis" for opposing such talk.) Women who went along with the male consensus (or were paid employees of various male dominated activist organizations) were allowed to be leaders, spokespersons, etc. Women who went their own way, exercised leadership that didn't support the male consensus or worse were against it would get in big trouble. (I have lots of times. ;-) So I assumed the worst about most of the Occupy groups. I was wondering if and how soon women would start to organize against the nonsense. Now I see there was at least talk in that article about them doing so in DC (even if link didn't bear out that assertion). I'll definitely have to wander down soon and snoop around. Oh, boy, a brand new chance to be slammed as an "obnoxious feminist" ....

It's quite hard to make meaningful generalizations about Occupy - even ignoring the initial diversity, the different circumstances of each occupation (especially the local political reaction to it) has made for quite different groups. Most of my experience is with bay area occupy groups - occupy oakland, occupySF, and occupy cal. All three are a bit weird, because the bay area as a whole is incredibly liberal and at the same time local politicians and law enforcement have been way more aggressive in trying to disband the camps than has been true in most of the rest of the country. There's a very solid chance that my experiences don't generalize well to other occupations. There are several distinctly different groups of people involved in Occupy events, and the gender ratios differ substantially between them. In the bay area, I have found that the gender ratio during the day or early evening is pretty close to even - in at least one of the major police actions I accidentally got stuck in, there were substantially more women than men. Many marches and daytime convergences are 50/50 or even more female than that. Men do speak more than women at the general assemblies, although there are quite a number of very active women at them too. The modified consensus system that GA's use doesn't scale well and is susceptible to the same kind of problems that occur on Wikipedia. GA's are irritating enough that I generally avoid speaking up - and for any of you familiar with me irl or how I act on-wiki, that's a pretty impressive thing for me to say, heh. I suspect that women are driven away from GA's for the same set of reasons that Wikipedia is distasteful to some. Definitely more men sleep in the camps than women. Part of this may be that a decent number of the people who bring tents long term to Occupy were homeless or transient to begin with - and most people who fall in to that group in the US are men. Most of the rest I would think is because sleeping in a tent in a city center is not an attractive proposition to many women because of a (unfortunate but not entirely unwarranted) fear of crime. The local government of Oakland has stated that there have been (I think) two sexual assaults in the encampment before it was disbanded that were reported to the police (via 911 calls from inside the camp.) Some people are skeptical of these claims, because requests for access to the taped calls have been rejected (911 calls - even for sexual assault - are public records here) and there have been no details released about the victims (and no one knows who they are.) There was also one murder near the encampment that involved people who had at least transiently passed through the camp. Unfortunately, none of these crimes surprise me given the location they've occurred in - the only murder I've personally witnessed occurred within a couple blocks of the encampment (a year or two before occupy, though) and it's an exceedingly high crime area in general. Oakland has the 4th highest violent crime rate of any American city. If anything, honestly, I'm surprised that there have been so few reported crimes. Most of the inappropriate behavior that I have seen (especially gendered or racialized stuff) has been dealt with fairly quickly by bystanders. Openly sexually harassing someone at a bay area occupy will get you a swift boot to the ass from a bystander - much swifter than I have seen in any other setting. And I do mean a literal boot - people have been way more ready to aggressively intervene when they see something going wrong at most occupy events that I've been to than in any other context I've seen. Although I haven't been to occupy LA, one of my good friends has. Her experiences were massively more negative than her experiences in the bay have been - tons of people either aggressively hitting on her or warning her that other people were going to be aggressively hitting on her. Admittedly she only spent a couple evenings there so she may have just had exceedingly bad luck - but if what she saw was representative of occupy LA, then they have a lot more problems than the bay area ones do. Some of the comments made to her there would have resulted in immediate intervention by bystanders at occupyoakland. tl;dr - Occupy is a pretty much a microcosm of society in many ways. Because it does attract an unusually liberal/progressive demographic problems that do come up are often handled more appropriately and aggressively than they would be in most other settings, but because it is drawing people from American society and not an ideal place, it still does have substantial gender issues. --- Kevin Gorman user:kgorman-ucb