#shulamith

[freneticphoneticfanatic]

Hearing other women talk vaguely about how things “used to be bad for women” saddens me. Things were really bad for women in [INSERT TIME PERIOD HERE]. (Not now though.) There’s always a sense of distance and indifference. An impersonality, an underlying sigh of relief, “Not that bad, could be worse.” I think this is a result of disconnection from each other and our histories. And I don’t think it’s totally our faults.

In my experience going to school in the USAmerican Midwest, I was taught the barest bones of women’s history. It was totally impersonal, cold, not engaging for me at all. We pretty much solely focused on legislature, and that did not thrill me. (Did you know Jane Addams had intimate relationships with women?) But then I started doing “independent study” (reading lesbian feminist writing) once I graduated high school and it was like my brain was exploding. I’m reading The Dialectic of Sex and I still feel that way. I just can’t get enough.

As a result of reading what I’ve read, I feel a stronger connection with women who are different from me because it turns out we have a lot in common. I feel less inclined to say things like “Women had it bad back in the day, but things are better now,” because I know not that much has actually changed, and the concrete changes that have been made are new and fragile. (Women in America only had a constitutional right to abortion for fifty years.)

I think if more women read books like Backlash by Susan Faludi, Loving to Survive by Dee LR Graham, and A Passion for Friends by Janice Raymond, we will have a wider perspective and a better shared understanding of our situation and position in our societies. I also think a lot of women would feel less crazy and alone upon reading women’s accounts of our own lives, what we synthesize from our experiences and observations, and how we can do things differently. That’s the effect feminist work had (and continues to have) on me.

You likely won’t find these books at a bookstore—at least that’s the case where I live—but you can find them online. I use ThriftBooks and Better World Books, and I’ve never received a damaged or illegible copy of a single book I’ve ever ordered, even though they’re super cheap, usually under $10 for a book. (They sometimes have highlighter marks or notes written in the margins, but I like seeing what the previous owner had to say, and I like to write in them too.) Finding and reading these books is well worth the effort. Talking about them and sharing them with other women is well worth the effort, too. I’d like to encourage every woman to get in touch with her intellectual legacy.

[haggishlyhagging]

There is also much truth in the clichés that "behind every man there is a woman," and that "women are the power behind [read: voltage in] the throne." (Male) culture was built on the love of women, and at their expense. Women provided the substance of those male masterpieces; and for millennia they have done the work, and suffered the costs, of one-way emotional relationships the benefits of which went to men and to the work of men. So if women are a parasitical class living off, and at the margins of, the male economy, the reverse too is true: (Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.

-Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

[woman-for-women]

[onewomancitadel]

You spend so long on Tumblr you forget the average opinion online is that cunnilingus is gross and demeaning. I never even thought the opposite position, or at least its neutral answer, was at all notable until I was disabused otherwise with my pet misogynists on AO3. None of you people are having sex properly

[envolvenuances]

always fascinating to see the "biology or socialisation?" question cause controversy on the feminist bubble of the internet, especially when it reaches the 'otherwise feminism would be hopeless' line of thinking. because this is what the original critique by marxfems of some radical feminist theory as "biological determinist" and/or "vulgar materialism" was about before neoliberals appropiated and distorted it.

one of the reasons why by now I can identify at least three distinct praxis opperating under 'radical feminism'

[honeyriot]

[lemuel-apologist]

The Dialectic of Sex, "Conclusion, Section I: Structural Imperatives," by Shulamith Firestone [or, rather, my notes on it]

[ian-thebean]

Hot tip for all you ladies out there:

If your husband cannot satisfy you in matters of conjugal love, consider taking a trip to the statue of Saint Uncumber in St Paul’s cathedral. If you set a peck of oats at her feet, she’ll straight up destroy your husband! Once Saint Uncumber has carried him off, maybe try one of those convents you’ve heard so much about. I hear it’s a very fulfilling place for those inclined to assist their sisters in Christ.

[gliklofhameln]

Elisabeth Subrin (American, b. 1964)

Shulie Speaking [Shulamith Firestone]

2010

Chromogenic color print from 16mm film

[forever70s]

Shulamith Lasri (AKA Julie Margo) in "Black Emanuelle 2" - 1976

[liquidlightandrunningtrees]

To be worshiped is not freedom.

Shulamith Firestone

[dwellordream]

Women in the Middle Ages: Women in the Peasantry

- Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate

[haggishlyhagging]

Men are right when they complain that women lack discrimination, that they seldom love a man for his individual traits but rather for what he has to offer (his class), that they are calculating, that they use sex to gain other ends, etc. For in fact women are in no position to love freely. If a woman is lucky enough to find "a decent guy" to love her and support her, she is doing well—and usually will be grateful enough to return his love. About the only discrimination women are able to exercise is the choice between the men who have chosen them, or a playing off of one male, one power, against the other. But provoking a man's interest, and snaring his commitment once he has expressed that interest, is not exactly self-determination.

Now what happens after she has finally hooked her man, after he has fallen in love with her and will do anything? She has a new set of problems. Now she can release the vise, open her net, and examine what she has caught. Usually she is disappointed. It is nothing she would have bothered with were she a man. It is usually way below her level. (Check this out sometime: Talk to a few of those mousy wives.) "He may be a poor thing, but at least I've got a man of my own" is usually more the way she feels. But at least now she can drop her act. For the first time it is safe to love now she must try like hell to catch up to him emotionally, to really mean what she has pretended all along. Often she is troubled by worries that he will find her out. She feels like an impostor. She is haunted by fears that he doesn't love the "real" her and usually she is right. ("She wanted to marry a man with whom she could be as bitchy as she really is.")

This is just about when she discovers that love and marriage mean a different thing for a male than they do for her: Though men in general believe women in general to be inferior, every man has reserved a special place in his mind for the one woman he will elevate above the rest by virtue of association with himself. Until now the woman, out in the cold, begged for his approval, dying to clamber onto this clean well-lighted place. But once there, she realizes that she was elevated above other women not in recognition of her real value, but only because she matched nicely his store-bought pedestal. Probably he doesn't even know who she is (if indeed by this time she herself knows). He has let her in not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies. Though she knew his love to be false, since she herself engineered it, she can't help feeling contempt for him. But she is afraid, at first, to reveal her true self, for then perhaps even that false love would go. And finally she understands that for him, too, marriage had all kinds of motivations that had nothing to do with love. She was merely the one closest to his fantasy image: she has been named Most Versatile Actress for the multi-role of Alter Ego, Mother of My Children, Housekeeper, Cook, Companion, in his play. She has been bought to fill an empty space in his life; but her life is nothing.

-Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

[nohkalikai]

such a shame that one of my fave essays on the oppression of children as a class is by a 70s radfem. and ofc all the people on here who love her work are terfs.

[seraphimsundance]

I support Dirty and Bad Lesbians

[benevolent-blackhole]

It’s weird and sad how often women’s studies classes teach the second wave via one “racist crazy white lady” reading and one Black feminist “white feminists are crazy and racist” reading as if that helps anyone or gets at any of the essential issues of that movement.