[LAF] Last "All Gender" meeting

[Echo of Freedom]

I apologise that i didn't send this out earlier, but unfortunately i had some 
things going on which disallowed me to sit down and write down straight away 
what has happened at the last meeting. Here is what i can recollect now, 
hopefully some of you will find it useful.

The last meeting tool place November 16, and was dedicated to the problems of 
gender dynamics in the mixed gender spaces. We discussed things like living 
together with other people (both as the community as simply sharing for economic 
reasons), having political and social groups where gender becomes a dominant 
factor in the interaction, and living in the family (specifically how gender 
effects the interaction).

The meeting was more themed, and Selene clearly spent a lot of time preparing 
what she was going to say. She has talked in the beginning discussing some 
issues that come up in the mixed gender environment and then we started going 
around with the issues that we have where we live (we didn't actually get all 
the way through the full circle), the discussion of the differences in how 
people organise collective lives with other people where they live sprang up 
from that. In *my opinion* the most important things that came out from this 
were the differentiation between the communal and economic sharing (former is 
when people feel a part of a community and actually interact with each other in 
that way, latter is when people simply share a space) and this in term lead to 
the discussion as to how the households organise cleaning and other duties 
within themselves. The issue is quite interesting as it can be looked at from 
two different positions, on one hand if one person in the household of equals 
has higher cleaning standards, that individual ends up doing all the work, and 
that is unfair for that individual, on another hand somebody who cannot feel 
relaxed until everything is cleaned should not have the ability to force others 
to live up to that person's standards.

After that we did discuss the specific issue that the rampART social centre is 
having with the gender dynamics within the group. There were a lot of 
intricacies in the situation, and i will not discuss the issue itself here, as 
some parts would involve personal information, but there were some clear and 
almost cliché gender issues that take place ("alpha male" psychology, blaming 
the victim, etc)

We have as a group tried to figure out what would be the solution to the problem 
there, but all paths seem to me to be the "lesser evil" approach, and there was 
no truly positive solution. This is not an attack on the people who have 
proposed those solutions, but rather realisation of the difficulty of the 
resolution of such an issue.

The meeting ended with Selene presenting the written paper, but i hope that it 
will be available in the electronic form somewhere, as unfortunately i don't 
remember enough about it to write about it here.

                       - Volodya

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  "None of us are free until all of us are free."    ~ Mihail Bakunin