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“you’re just erasing all the radfems of colour”

This is such a huge issue with liberal feminists and I see it over and over. The whole “radical feminism was built by white women for white women” is a revisionist lie.

I actually followed up with someone who said this and had about three back-and-forths with them until they blocked me. They argued the following:

a) “Radical feminism is fundamentally built on racism.”

When Frieden released The Feminine Mystique and propelled us into the second wave; when those second wave liberal feminists started campaigning solely for the expansion of rights for white, (largely middle class) women, it was WOC who founded the Women’s Liberation Movement — widely considered the first radical feminist political organisation.

The concept of consciousness raising groups was most notably utilised by radical feminists. Most of these groups were created to be apolitical safe spaces for WOC to discuss the intersection of race and sex.

There is not a speck of evidence to suggest that radical feminist theory or political history is fundamentally racist. However, the works of liberal feminists of the second wave are blatantly negligent to WOC struggle.

b) “WOC who supported radical feminism didn’t realise they were fighting in their own disinterest, and this is still true for WOC today.”

To preface, I’m white and don’t want to speak on behalf of anyone. However this struck me as extremely disparaging toward WOC.

c) “Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and other WOC who ever criticised radical feminism, (even if they were radical feminists), actually weren’t radical feminists, because they were critics of radical feminism.”

This is the one that really gets me. Audre Lorde famously criticised liberal feminism and white actors within feminism. She criticised Daly, (a cultural feminist). As far as I’m aware, she never criticised radical feminism specifically. She was an advocate for radical feminism. So is Angela Davis. While it’s possible they criticised radical feminism as a means to develop its emphasis on racial justice, that doesn’t suddenly make them just critics, they were crucial actors.

Omitting these women from radical feminist canon is so weird. Liberal feminists have this skewed view about radical feminism being dominated by the white middle class because they omit all of the contributors who weren’t white in order to maintain a revised version of history.

the “block op they’re a terf” movement was so thorough that now none of the libfems have any idea what radical feminism is about. I just saw a post saying that we enforce rigid gender roles and most of us are white like…not only are there a LOT of radfems of color (including myself), our whole thing is abolishing gender while acknowledging sex based oppression

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i'm not really sure how people got it in their heads that natal women are a privileged class whose desire for language to articulate their struggles and spaces to talk about it privately is an archaic desire to roleplay victimhood when it still isn't even considered a hate crime for someone to murder a woman for no other reason than that she is female and a woman is murdered every 11 minutes, according to a 2020 study by the united nations.

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kill yourself

why would i do that

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The response to the Ethel Cain situation is really bizarre.

I was surprised when the allegations were first posted and saw a bunch of white people on tiktok outright dismiss the racism or state they didn’t care. Hayden’s target demographic appears to be the liberal left leaning types who would be otherwise disgusted by the use of racial slurs.

I follow a woman on tiktok who is exceptionally articulate on feminism and Black feminism. She made a video expressing dismay about the incest tee due to a personal history of such abuse. The majority of the comments were in Hayden’s favour, telling her that Ethel Cain is a character/piece of art so it’s okay, or that she ‘was a victim of incestuous abuse, not incest,’ so the sentiment written on Hayden’s tee shouldn’t bother her.

I will say that following Hayden’s terrible statement, I’m seeing less of these videos/comments. (What on earth does having a hypothetical struggle with the concept of incest mean?)

Hayden’s fans appear to think that intersectionality is when we don’t hold white people responsible for racism if they are part of another minority social identity. (In this case, being transgender). That’s why I suspect the usual progressive types suddenly don’t care.

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When your bioessentialist genderfluidity threatens to turn a cyclist into road paste

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Fetishists don’t jack off and go away quietly. If this were the case nobody would be censoring anything because they wouldn’t know how their images were being used.

Fetishists form collaborative forums and upload these images without the poster’s consent; these forums are explicitly pornographic. They write in detail about their fantasies regarding this particular person and their feet or whatever. They incessantly contact the poster with sexual content, including non-consensual pornographic images of themselves.

According to OP and the commenters emphasising that this is “Victorian era standards of modesty”, not wanting your Wikifeet to be the first thing that comes up when someone googles you, and not wanting Harvey, 63 from Wiltshire to be harassing you with dick pics every other day is “fucking weird puritan behaviour”.

Let’s stop blaming women for their efforts to preserve their digital footprint and avoid sexual harassment campaigns. <\3

being so fucking worried that a foot fetishist may see your toes and jack off about it that you start censoring your feet online and treating them like a perverted thing and being weird about seeing other people’s feet is fucking weird puritan behaviour and i really wish the general internet hadn’t gotten that far

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Iran’s trans affirmative healthcare model is used to suppress homosexuality. The point of the procedure is to enforce the conservative gender binary, which includes the erasure of homosexuals. Homosexuality can otherwise be punished by death.

TRAs will consider this progressive, but will turn around and berate feminists for “cosy-ing up to the right” on the issue of pornography.

Yeah no coincidence these are also some of the countries with the worst misogyny

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Identity has become the axis of so much university activism because, for all the radical posturing associated with it, identity politics does not threaten the established order of society. It promotes a moralistic and self-indulgent anti-politics, where a person’s use of language and the purity of their thinking matters more than confronting collectively the material conditions and social relations under which they are forced to live. It creates a simulation of political struggle - one that doesn’t merely fail to challenge the material inequality and unfreedom of late capitalism, but fundamentally aligns with the dynamics and interests of its atomised, spectacle-driven society. It is a perfect mirror of consumerism, playing-upon the individual’s desires for real freedom, only to perpetuate and prettify the conditions of their alienation.

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a central transfeminist point that it's difficult for tmes to wrap their heads around is that trans women do in fact interact with society as women, and are treated as women, even when they're being misgendered. misgendering isn't just misunderstanding, it's a deliberate act of violence targeting a particularly vulnerable class of women

this seemingly paradoxical nature of transmisogyny is what makes talking about these things so maddening

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the link

but it's their choice~

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Remember when trump said “grab them by the pussy” and part of the response in the woman’s march was to make the pussy hats and then people were mad it wasn’t inclusive to wiener havers? A sexual predator was president talking about harassing women and people were mad their dicks weren’t included in the protest 💀

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⋆˚꩜｡ about me

my name is io and i’m 22.

i consider myself adjacent to radical feminism; i’m reluctant to identify wholly with radical feminism because i believe we lack the anthropological evidence to back certain claims, but i do think radical feminism generally “gets it right” regarding the circumstances of female oppression and how to combat it. i have other qualms with the community (i think the online movement borders on orthodoxy sometimes and this contrasts against our interest in accessibility for marginalised groups of women), but overall i’m on the same wave-length.

my specific beliefs are what you’d assume from radblr (gendercrit etc). my interest in radical feminism was piqued by commentary on the commercial sex industry so i align with people like bindel and mackinnon, and the topic encompasses the majority of what i read up on and dedicate time to talking about.

i think my other views go without saying but if anyone’s particularly interested they can drop an ask about a specific topic and i’ll try to provide something in-depth.

i quite enjoy debate and discussion and i don’t think it’s futile to articulate radical feminist ideas to those with dissenting perspectives.

i’m sure i’ll update this post with more information and resources in the future! ᡣ𐭩

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inasmuch as most leftists rn are willing to admit that women are oppressed on the basis of being women, they really really really want you to name men as an equally victimized class. and of course you cannot acknowledge men as a class of people who benefit from women's oppression!

so where does patriarchy come from? a magical system that harms everybody equally and benefits nobody at all, forced upon society by some kind of mysterious and unknowable force? it's probably best that we just avoid talking about it forever because it's not that important anyway and there are real problems to worry about instead

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“The rape and exploitation of enslaved black women was not just rampant, it was endemic. The writings of former slaves such Harriet Jacobs, as well those of sympathetic white women like abolitionist Sarah Grimke, paint a picture of black girls in their early teens getting routinely bribed with presents and "favors," such as promises of better treatment, for agreeing to sex with white plantation workers or relatives of the owner. Resistance was met with punishment by way of a whipping. "When he make me follow him into de bush, what use me to tell him no? He have strength to make me," one enslaved woman is quoted in the book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. Such testimony led the authors to conclude that the rape of female slaves was likely the most common form of interracial sex. The dehumanisation and hypersexualization of black women was so systematic it was woven into the very fabric of society: their optimal breeding times were the topic of dinner conversations, and they were sold at market in little to no clothing as potential buyers prodded and poked their frequently pregnant bodies to assess their "breeding" potential. Often forced to dress in rags, with legs, arms, and sometimes chest showing, they provided a deliberately marked contrast to the fully and heavily clothed white women, which, as Bell Hooks has noted, both reinforced their supposed innate lack of chastity and morality and exposed them to yet more abuse: "the nakedness of the female slave served as a constant reminder of her sexual vulnerability."

We cannot put a number on how many black girls and women were sexually abused, but we do know that such abuse was the defining feature of their enslavement, prompting Jacobs to proclaim, "Slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women." The abuse of black women served at least three functions: it terrorized the black population in order to reinforce white domination, it provided a source of continuous labor, and it was a sexual outlet that white men took advantage of in order to maintain the illusion of the moral superiority of white society in an era of supposed sexual chastity.”

From White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color.

The trans movement: black women are seen as men/male adjacent 1.Enslaved black women were wet nurses to white babes (side note: do people know how hungry and drained breastfeeding makes you? A child is literally sucking the calories out of you on top of the fact that your body has to exert energy making the milk) 2.Were repeatedly raped and impregnated against their will to give birth to more slaves- aka their female reproductive labor specifically exploited and pimped to directly financially profit slave masters. 3.Were raped and used as sex toys by both black men and white slave masters. 4.Were forced to do traditionally feminine roles like childcare, cooking, cleaning IN ADDITON to all the back- breaking, hard labor the men had to do. 5.In the founding of gynecology- enslaved black women had their guts cut open and wombs and uteri taken out and experimented on. Had their breasts, vaginas and buttocks, all sex organs, pickled in jars and shown in museums. In other words, our female ancestors experienced the absolute worst assaults on their SEXED bodies. Experienced horrors and mechanisms of torture designed for and exclusive to THE FEMALE SEX. And you people let transfemmes say we're seen as males. Unchecked. I'll never forgive or forget this. I'll never forgive. I'll never forget.

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define female and woman without excluding any cis women and without including any non-cis women

Define that term you just used, "cis women."

Demonstrate how it’s possible that you know what a cis woman is, but not what a female is. And then demonstrate what point—if you even had one to begin with—you hoped to prove by pretending to not know the meaning of the core concepts which your ideology was built upon.

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Judith Butler’s books are so dishonest and convey such an obvious discursive bias that I’m constantly floundered by the blatant half-arsery of their work in contrast to the never ending acclamation they receive.

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Adding my thoughts to the “radfems hate asexuals” discourse. 

To me, it seems fairly reasonable to suggest that some people, due to some neurobiological difference, do not develop sexuality. I’d argue the vast majority of radical feminists do not dispute this either, but rather the cultural politics of the queer community and its existence as a means of obfuscating female class consciousness. 

Studies routinely indicate that women are much more likely to identify as asexual and I believe this deserves investigation. Not because I believe there is something wrong with lacking sexuality, or because I think it’s a disorder requiring a medicalised “fix”, but because I think it's just as likely that many women may reject sexuality on the basis of patriarchal sexual mass-domination, or our culture of pornification and sexual humiliation against women. 

I take no problem with those who reject sexuality on this basis. If they are comfortable practising asexuality, that’s their prerogative. Same goes for anyone wishing to seek resources to develop sexuality should they believe their quality of life would improve.

My thoughts are however, that rejection of sexuality as I have described is a feminist issue. Asexuality as a queer identity is not conducive to recognising how women are oppressed sexually. I have asked about the specific forms of oppression which asexual women experience; among them are forced marriage, social expectations to “settle down” and have children, disinterest in casual sex leading to social alienation, and the belief that their gendered sexual "role" is incongruent with the self. 

I argue these are not issues of prejudice against sexuality, but issues of prejudice against women. Forced marriage is self-explanatory, but even disinterest in casual sex is a rejection of socially normalised male-pattern sexuality. (As well as the orgasm gap plus risks of STIs and pregnancy, women are less inclined to enjoy sex without emotional investment and many who have sought casual sex later reflected they did so due to social pressure). As we seep deeper into myths about sexual empowerment for women, (that increased sexual availability is liberatory), more will feel at odds with the persistence of these sexual norms. 

Divorcing such issues from the experiences of women in favour of the experiences of the queer community, which is an ambiguously defined community at best, is a step in the wrong direction.