I think that some people could call it sexist? (smoles)

It's just your clever way (as a non-shaver of course) of sneaking in to the women's only Hearme sessions.

Kevin could you take your pedant's hat off for a while and help me phrase the question, so I could receive an answer? For even if the analogy is not spot on, I am pretty sure you can work out what I am trying to ask.

What I am trying to do is address the question that you posed quite early in the thread, about why some groupings were OK, others not and how you could deal with the latter?

You more recently touched on the relative strengths of groupings, in the power sense and also that some groupings that were not related to power issues at all. I think that is at the heart of the problem we are having here.

For I think that this suggestion was a strange mixture of a grouping for both power (from an assumed weak lobby) and what I referred to earlier as a request for 'an indulgence' (because it would be nice).

Along with all the baggage of the real or assumed criticism of the present system and their male participants, it also had the additional complication (for me) of also being for the purpose of making music defined only by what it was excluding.

Unfortunately the emphasis to later entrants to the thread appeared to be a question of 'WHAT'S WRONG' with the suggestion. Rather than 'WHAT'S RIGHT' with it.

Maybe it would have been better to decide first:…. If it was necessary (to rectify a power imbalance)…. If it would just be nice and then if it was a desirable precedent to make?

Would it be OK to have a blues HearMe session and exclude all non-blacks? Maybe Max should answer that one?