Hmm. Nope. Don’t like that.
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izzy's playlists!

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d e v o n
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#extradirty
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@afabchauvinist
Hmm. Nope. Don’t like that.
I feel extremely blessed that I can’t name a single one of these rantsonas.
What-sonas???
I like the dragon’s design
i knew they were bad but that FLOORED me
Isnt the wolf from that video on why we should bring child labor back?
Which wolf
Wait im wrong
this is the child labor guy
Isnt that blue wolf the one who made “The benefits of incest” video
Oh my god you’re right
Just because I physically cannot keep this information to myself, but in “In Defense Of Pedophiles” he says that the sun revolves around the earth
I always see the first three panels and think “is this supposed to sound ridiculous? Bc I would love this”, completely forgetting about the last panel, which i then scroll down to and proceed to lose my shit
Oh, gee, I wonder why making people put their lives at risk for the economy might make them consider ideologies other than capitalism?
We were socialists the entire time!
Not interested in uwu butch positivity that consists largely of "don't let anyone tell you that you're like trans men, who are nasty and apish and disgusting" because I don't think it is reasonable to lift up a group of people that are like me at the expense of literally anyone, but especially not another group of people that are very like me. *you're NOT getting in voice* You're NOT making me slap myself 🥴
you're not bad with money you're just living in a society that underpays you, overcharges you, then gaslights you into feeling guilty for needing to eat
It’s so fucked up that someone who works 8 hours per day should feel guilty for spending / can’t afford to spend 10$ that day on a drink and snack
hi, i like your posts about feminism a lot and from my perspective you seem like a pretty good ally to trans people, but i've seen trans feminists say that radical feminism has been so poisoned by trans exclusion that we should ditch the label, repurpose the good parts of radical feminism and call it something else. i don't understand what's wrong with that to avoid conflation, what would you say you a trans woman or ally who doesn't trust radical feminism as a label at all?
i mean, the whole thing is, feminism (any kind of feminism) isn’t a fixed identity. it’s a set of ideological principles that should guide the way you think and act, along with your personal experiences and other political principles and so forth. but no matter how you describe your politics, you’re always going to find yourself being lumped in with people whose words and actions you find loathsome and indefensible. you don’t ask socialists to stop calling themselves socialists due to the existence of tankies, and thankfully most people have finally realized that it’s insanely offensive to find out someone you’ve just met is jewish and immediately lay into them about israel. nobody tells catholics they should go start their own church to avoid being conflated with all those child molesters. third-wave liberal choice feminists frequently hold horrible opinions and produce deeply offensive takes every damn day, but would you go up to a stranger in a notorious RBG shirt and just start going “why do you think it’s empowering for underage girls to count down to their 18th birthday so they can start doing sex work on onlyfans? what do you think your red lipstick is actually doing to smash the patriarchy? THE KHALEESI WAS A VIOLENT IMPERIALIST, YOU FACILE GIRLBOSS BITCH!” i think it’s pretty common to assume most people don’t agree with every single member of the groups they belong to, and we’re quick to give folks the benefit of the doubt, especially if their own beliefs are evident in their actions and character. so... why are radical feminists uniquely guilty by association?
i firmly believe that there are no perfect ideologies. i come from a post-soviet background and was raised to avoid groupthink and rigorously question any set of group beliefs that come pre-packaged as an identity - religious, political, philosophical, even things as shallow as stan culture. my political beliefs are broadly aligned with radical feminism, but you might have noticed i rarely describe myself as a radfem when i’m talking about it in depth, which is a function of that aversion to conflating ideology and identity. however, i do deeply believe in the core principles of radical feminism:
as the oldest and most universal form of structural inequality in the world, patriarchy underlies and reinforces all other forms of structural oppression
because patriarchy has been the most common and widely-accepted social structure across the world for the past 5000 years, our modern economic, legal, political, and family systems all rely the oppression of women to function the way they were built
all men benefit from the oppression of women
all women experience misogyny in one form or another and no amount of privilege along other axes can fully insulate or exempt you from it
until women develop genuine solidarity as an oppressed class, we will never have the organizational power or sheer strength in numbers necessary to overturn this vast system of inequality that has been in place for 5000 years
that’s the short answer, but then i started free-writing and ended up writing a straight-up dissertation. seriously, this post is SO long, but it’s also pretty detailed, and sorry if your scroll finger’s broken but i think it’s worth reading. it has graphics! and math problems!
so, just follow me here. radical feminism is based in the core class-based analysis that all women are oppressed, exploited, and marginalized by patriarchy. i believe sex-based oppression is valid and real, because no matter how you slice it, afab people have always faced violence, exploitation, and had fewer rights and opportunities conferred on them from birth, solely on the basis of their biological sex and the gender roles enforced on them as a result. to insist otherwise is an utterly ahistorical insult to thousands of years of well-documented rape, abuse, trafficking, and murder committed with impunity by men all over the world. i don’t know how people can look at the history of human civilization and not conclude that afab people have consistently been an exploited underclass based on their biological sex and reproductive capacity. this is true regardless of race, class, sexuality, or socioeconomic status.
for instance, the reason that my primarily russian/german ass can also trace my ancestry directly back to what is now modern-day iran is because of rape. my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather kidnapped and raped and forcibly impregnated my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother during the russo-persian war in the early 1700s. meanwhile in england, right around that same time, queen anne was forced to endure seventeen pregnancies and deliver at least five stillborn children, for no other reason than that due to the circumstance of her birth and sex, she was obligated to give birth until her body gave out in order to produce an heir. my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother probably didn’t have a lot in common with queen anne otherwise, but they were both victims of reproductive violence and exploitation. that has been the underlying truth of all people born biologically female for nearly all of recorded history: it has only been over the past century that we have begun to incrementally seize our reproductive autonomy and the right to determine when and if we give birth.
you might be asking yourself, “okay, but why do you care so much about this non-issue?” roe v. wade is settled law, planned parenthood exists, abortion is a white feminist pussy hat topic! it’s suspiciously aphobic and possibly terfy to harp on it so much! well, i made this visual aid to add some context. imagine the timeline of human civilization, from 3000 BC to june 2020, laid out on a ruler. every inch represents approximately 420 years (nice). the blue parts represent when abortion was severely limited or even completely illegal to at least a quarter of the world’s population of reproductive-age women, and the orange parts represent the period in which the legal right to an abortion was guaranteed to every woman on earth:
as you will notice, it’s all blue. that’s because even under the most dire circumstances, abortion is still illegal in 26 countries. 90 million women of reproductive age live in countries where they cannot access abortion under any circumstances whatsoever. another 22% live in countries where abortion is only allowed under lifesaving conditions. roe v. wade, which permitted a woman’s right to have an abortion but did not mandate any standard of accessibility for abortion services. meaning that due to healthcare funding restrictions like the hyde amendment and state legislation written to make it impossible for women to actually get abortions without tacitly violating roe, abortion remains as functionally inaccessible to many women in the USA as in those countries where it’s outlawed entirely. women of color, women in poverty, undocumented women, and those belonging to other marginalized groups are disproportionately affected by these restrictions, but even relatively privileged white women with health insurance and supportive partners/families are impacted by those laws. if you still have doubts, here, i wrote you a word problem:
jennifer is a white, heterosexual, middle-class, christian, 30-year-old married mother of 2 from joplin, missouri.
she has an 8-year-old son and a 1-year-old daughter. her husband, ken, is an electrician at a local power plant earning $70,000 a year, and jennifer is an assistant manager at target, making $50,000 a year, putting their combined annual pre-tax income at a healthy $120,000. jennifer has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and initially intended to pursue the grad degree and postgrad specializations to become a school psychologist, which in the long run would increase her earning potential to over $100,000. however, she became pregnant during her senior year of college, and her son aidan was born 2 months premature, resulting in a mild heart condition requiring surgery as well as moderate-to-severe asthma. due to aidan’s health issues, she spent the first 5 years of his life as his full-time caregiver. when she rejoined the workforce in 2017, she found herself with limited opportunities - she’d never held a full-time job, and lacking an advanced degree or certification, her BA in psych from MSU was basically worthless. retail management was the best-paying career path available to her on paper; however, when her daughter was born, target provided only 2 weeks of paid parental leave. on top of the financial concerns, after two high-risk pregnancies and births, jennifer never wants to go through it again. however, her periods have been irregular since her last birth, which with two kids and a mentally and physically demanding job, makes tracking her cycle harder than it used to be. besides, she’s still breastfeeding - every woman she knows assures her you can’t get pregnant as long as you’re still breastfeeding! it’s only after missing two periods (with intermittent spotting) that she takes a pregnancy test. she and her husband have both always identified as pro-life, but facing a potentially life-threatening third pregnancy that would put a significant strain on their finances even in a best-case scenario with no additional medical bills for either jennifer or the baby, they agree that terminating the pregnancy is the best option for their entire family.
jennifer just learned that she is 10 weeks pregnant. jennifer wants an abortion. jennifer and her husband make a combined six figures, but the closest abortion clinic is 272 miles away in st. louis, and missouri law requires that a woman seeking an abortion undergo a mandatory counseling session with the same doctor who will perform the abortion, and then wait 72 hours before returning to the clinic to have the abortion. jennifer and her husband both have full-time jobs, but they’re both shift workers with irregular hours, and she also has two young children, including one with special needs. additionally, jennifer’s private insurance plan only covers abortion when the mother’s life is immediately in danger, so she will need to pay out of pocket. to get an abortion, jennifer must request time off work OR find coverage for her shifts in order to make two ~600 mile round trips 3 days apart, arrange childcare for both kids (including round-the-clock availability in case aidan has an asthma attack bad enough to require medical care), potentially find a place to stay overnight in st. louis in case she experiences complications, and then make another 600-mile round trip for a followup a week later.
if jennifer makes $26/hour and loses 4 days of wages, and childcare costs $20/hour, and she spends $90 on gas per round trip, and she makes 3 round trips total, and the abortion costs $600, and there’s only one remaining abortion provider in the state of missouri, and due to demand there’s a 4-week wait for abortion services, and the abortion cutoff date in missouri is 15 weeks, can jennifer actually get an abortion?
this is not some far-fetched oppression fantasy. “jennifer” is a realistic composite of an average middle-class white woman seeking an abortion in a red state: most abortion patients have previously given birth, more than half pay out of pocket, and in states with only 1-2 remaining clinics and strict legal restrictions, it’s not unusual to have to make 2-3 trips of hundreds of miles apiece in order to end a pregnancy. as a straight white christian woman whose household income is more than twice the median in her city, jennifer is the picture of privilege in many ways. she’s probably not woke in any sense of the word. if she votes, she probably votes republican, but only once every four years - if that. she probably says she’s “just not a fan of politics.” yet despite her enormous amount of privilege on just about every other axis, she’s still not insulated from structural misogyny. what radical feminism calls the “tyranny of reproduction” affects jennifer and jessica and katie and karen as much as anyone else - and that doesn’t even take into account how many women across the world are forced to endure the life-threatening experiences of pregnancy and childbirth against their will, even in the most progressive countries, simply because their partners, families, and/or religious leaders give them no choice in the matter.
radical feminism incorporates the long view of history as well as the existing failures, deficiencies, and structural inequalities in reproductive healthcare, even in the richest countries in the world. radfem theory asserts that the tyranny of reproduction is the bedrock of patriarchy, that our social and economic opportunity is fundamentally linked to our reproductive choices, and that until all of us have the absolute, inarguable right to bodily, sexual, and reproductive autonomy, we will never be free. for 5000 years, half the world’s population has maintained control over the other half by depriving us of the basic right to choose who fucks us, who marries us, whether we reproduce and how many times, and what happens to us if we’re no longer fertile or our bodies simply give out. by restricting a population’s reproductive rights, you also restrict their economic potential, social mobility, and political capital. if all women were suddenly free to opt out of pregnancy, childbearing, and motherhood without consequences and live full lives with the same opportunities as men, it would disprove thousands of years of gender roles and stereotypes based on the man-made construction of women’s inferiority. if sex-based oppression isn’t real, why would men be so damn desperate to roll back the reproductive rights we’ve got? if access to birth control, abortion, and comprehensive sex education didn’t threaten the power and privilege men have enjoyed for millennia, why do they work so hard to ensure we can’t access them? what are they so worried about?
here’s the thing, though: this concept is not inherently trans-exclusionary. reproductive violence constitutes the foundation of violence against afab people, including nonbinary and transmasculine people, and moreover, the right to accessible and affordable health services, the right to comprehensive sex education, the right to be free from domestic and sexual violence of all kinds, the right to make our own healthcare decisions free from the control or undue/unwanted influence of government, religion, and social structures, and above all the human right to privacy -- these are fundamental rights that will contribute to trans women’s liberation along with the rest of us. if you had to boil all of radical feminist thought down to one single driving demand, it’s that complete and absolute individual bodily autonomy is essential to the end of patriarchy and the liberation of women as a class. in practice, the form that autonomy takes will be different for everyone as to their own needs. if i’m a cis bi woman who needs an IUD, sitting in a clinic waiting room with a cis straight woman who needs an abortion, a trans woman who needs HRT, and someone who is afab and nonbinary who needs a regular STI panel, we all deserve to have our needs met! and naturally, individual groups have specific needs that are not necessarily shared by the whole. my ultimate vision as a quote-unquote “radical feminist” is for all women to develop class solidarity, advocate for each other across intersections of identity and experiences, and work to find solutions for individual needs while not losing sight of the oppression we all share.
again, none of that negates the idea that trans women are women, that transmisogyny is misogyny, and that trans rights are fundamentally wrapped up in all the core feminist issues like rape and domestic violence, police and prison violence, sexual and reproductive autonomy, hiring and pay discrimination, and so forth. the issue with radical feminism isn’t the “radical” part, but the ever-widening chasm between biological determinism and materialism among second wave feminists all the way back in the 70s. i obviously fall much closer to the materialist end of that spectrum, guided by a few basic principles:
sex and gender are two different things
both your sex and your gender play fundamental, but somewhat different, parts in creating the material conditions you experience in the world
gender roles are social constructs, not determinants of gender identity
sex is biological, but masculinity and femininity are not
i read and follow and admire and am friends with no small number of trans people who loosely share these beliefs. no two individuals will have identical experiences with how gender impacts their lives, but i think people who feel some degree of disconnect or distance from the gender roles and/or identity enforced on them from childhood tend to drift toward some version of these principles. my whole personal stance on my gender is “i’m a woman whether i like it or not, and i usually do not.” internally, i feel no particular connection to female gender roles; my personality is mostly made up of traits that our culture considers masculine. but also, i’m 5′2″ with big fucking honkers and wide hips and soft features, and short of, like, a freaky friday situation where i wake up having swapped bodies with chris evans, there is no world in which people will ever read and treat me as anything but a woman. i don’t perform femininity because i enjoy it, but because i’m constantly running cost-benefit analyses and asking myself whether it’s preferable to endure an activity i feel neutral to mildly negative about, versus enduring the markedly poorer treatment from others if i don’t? i don’t feel an OVERWHELMING BASELINE AVERSION to performing femininity or presenting as a woman or using she/her pronouns. i tolerate the parts that are tolerable or painless as a trade-off for being allowed to move through the world a little easier, but for the most part i just... don’t think about any of it. i don’t wake up and say “man, i feel like a woman,” my womanhood is just the accumulation of everything the world has done to me.
but like i said, this is a spectrum with lots of individual variation, not a single universal experience. as far as FEELINGS about gender and identity go, i’m probably pretty much right in the middle of that spectrum. i feel little to no inherent connection to my gender, but i don’t feel an implicit need to do anything to change it; for people on my left, that inertia or neutrality might edge further toward active discomfort and dysphoria and the desire to actually do something about it. however, i think for most people who fall along this end of the spectrum, there’s a shared acknowledgment that gender is fake, whether you plan on doing anything about it or not. you can go back and forth over what it would mean to be cis or trans in a post-gender world, and i’ve observed that outside of this ideological plane, trans people tend to be split on whether saying “gender is fake” is an invalidation of their experience with dysphoria and transitioning. but also from what i’ve seen, most radfem-aligned types with Gender Feelings tend to fall into the general camp of “gender is a manmade construct, your personality and adherence to gender roles are determined by a whole slew of factors, not by your biological sex alone, and in a world where pregnancy/childbirth/reproductive obligations were no longer a fundamental tool in the oppression of half the population, all of those harmful ideas invented to justify that oppression would eventually fade away, too.” basically, not all trans people view gender from a materialist perspective, but the materialist analysis supports a trans-inclusive approach to radical feminism, and therefore most of the trans people who identify with radical feminism usually tend to align with that perspective.
on the other side of the spectrum, you start to slide from “gender roles are fake but i still feel like a woman, whatever that means” to more pronounced beliefs rooted in the ideas that sex and gender are inextricably linked and your biological sex is a major determining factor in your psychology and personality. on the more extreme end emerges the bio-essentialist argument that due to differences in the male and female sexes, AMAB people are inherently violent and dangerous, and pose a fundamental threat to AFAB people regardless of their gender or sexual identity. that belief in the inborn violent nature of the male sex predates our contemporary understanding and cultural concepts of what it means to be trans by several decades, by the way - it was devised as an alternate theory in the 60s and 70s by radfem thinkers who disagreed with the materialist model; rather than saying “men actively choose to oppress women in order to uphold their place as the ruling class, and sex roles were constructed to reinforce that system,” they basically said, “actually, gender roles are a reflection of male and female behaviors rooted in the biological differences between the male and female sexes, and since you can’t make men less violent, women will only be safe in the absence of any interaction with the male sex.” many of the beliefs commonly associated with all radical feminists - the political lesbian and female separatist movements, any variation on “all sex is rape,” and, yes, the idea that trans women pose a unique threat to the safety of women’s spaces - are rooted in the belief that our capacity for violence is primarily determined by our biological sex.
just as on the other side of the materialist vs. essentialist divide, there are degrees of disagreement about how much of a role biology actually plays in human behavior! male and female sex hormones have demonstrably different effects on our physiology, our weight and muscle mass, and our sex drives. basic science backs that up. we know that anabolic steroid use in cis men correlates to increased rates of aggression and violent behavior, but among men who abuse steroids, you also see MUCH higher-than-average rates of mental illness, personality disorders, and other forms of drug abuse, and because there’s so much overlap, it’s hard to control for how much of what we call “roid rage” is actually a function of these sudden, excessive doses of testosterone interacting with an existing condition. when transmasc people talk about their experiences with HRT, one of the most common ones is a rapid increase in libido as well as more abstract shifts to their sexual interests in general. but like i said, it’s a spectrum! just because science tells us that male and female hormones influence our sex drive and how we express aggression, it doesn’t mean men are incapable of controlling their urges - it’s that they’ve created a world where they don’t typically face consequences for violence and the primary incentives to practice self-control are emotional and social (losing your partner, being outed as an abuser and ostracized by your friends), with material consequences like losing your job and going to prison occurring far less frequently. much like in the steroid studies, you can’t just control for socialization and come up with a figure like “violence is 90% biologically ingrained and 10% the product of socialization,” because those two factors are constantly interacting and cannot be separated. you basically just have to use your judgment and decide for yourself, based on the science and literature and anecdata and data data, how much you actually believe in an essential relationship between sex and gender.
what i’m saying is, on the scale of “gender is a construct not tied to sex” to “gender roles are a universal function of biological sex,” you don’t just jump right from me in the middle with no real opinion about my gender and no desire to interrogate anyone else’s, to “trans women are men and they’re invading women’s spaces because they’re inherently violent.” there are many reasonable points based in facts and science about how hormones and sex characteristics correlate to differences in social behavior to make before you hit the degree of biological determinism that supports actual trans-exclusionary beliefs. but part of convincing people on the fence to drive off the bridge into terfland is getting them over that threshold of reasonable belief. that’s when you get the old-fashioned appeals to self-pity and isolation, blaming Big Trans Activism for structural misogyny AND the failures of third-wave feminism and insinuating that trans women have taken something that is rightfully theirs. and the thing is, when you consider it objectively, this whole fixation on the stereotype of the predatory trans woman makes no sense - it goes against everything we know about sexual violence (intimate partner violence poses a much greater threat than a stranger in the women’s locker room), and despite common sense and evidence both indicating that even among convicted sexual offenders, cis men still vastly outnumber trans women, because OF COURSE THEY DO. the whole conspiracy relies on holding up a few rare but high-profile examples of trans women who did engage in legitimately predatory behavior, as if to suggest that they are representative of the whole, and the whole conspiracy falls apart if you think about it critically for two full minutes. this kind of extreme transmisogynistic fearmongering is counterproductive to the goal of building solidarity among women (it doesn’t just alienate trans women, but everyone who sees the most vitriolic stuff and assumes all radfems are like that! it turns off everybody we need to convince!) but alternating reasonable-sounding facts and data with appeals to emotion is a really effective form of persuasion, especially when the movement becomes so visible that it starts attracting people who come in eager to be persuaded.
i can understand how women end up going from “maybe there IS a link between testosterone and aggression” to full-blown obsessing over a few individual cases of genuinely predatory behavior among individual trans women at the expense of every other topic. i especially get it with teen girls whose reading comprehension and fundamental beliefs are still developing, but i also see how anyone who struggles with suggestibility and assertiveness (i.e. women raised in very religious or patriarchal homes where submissiveness was a core value and they were discouraged from questioning authority) can be led down that path without even realizing it, because we’ve seen the same thing play out in every other political group or movement over the last 10 years as well. incidentally, one of the best ways to increase your capacity for critical thinking and problem solving and decrease your susceptibility to be easily persuaded by extremists or fall victim to groupthink is to intentionally seek out situations and conversations that challenge your (actually inborn) tendency toward rigid and polarized thinking. listening to people whose values partially conflict with your own both helps you understand their rationales and arguments and helps you evaluate your own. it’s not about agreeing with both sides, but evaluating both sides. and this is true for all parties, not just gender-critical radfems! whether it’s feminism or politics or cultural issues or a dumb take about taylor swift, you should be secure enough in your own beliefs to say with confidence, “i agree with this, i disagree with this, here’s where we align and where we conflict,” and move on.
ANYWAY. you can certainly look back to the 60s and 70s and point out individual theorists and academics whose beliefs fall in line with modern-day trans-exclusionary feminism, the sub-community of radfems who held those specific views and priorities about trans issues and gender wasn’t cohesive or vocal enough to necessitate a term to differentiate them from other radfems until 2008 or so. which just so happens to be when social media and online communities moved away from blogs and forums and closed-system communities where the exchange of information was a person-to-person transaction of ideas between a defined group of people. the new landscape of online interactions doesn’t promote the meaningful exchange of nuanced ideas through individual conversations and interactions. rather than centralized discussion-based communities, feminist discourse now takes place on social networks like twitter and tumblr and instagram - performing a monologue for an audience who can choose whether or not to amplify them, and searching for the most glib or provocative phrasing, at the expense of nuance and taking the reasonable but familiar middle ground. the nature of microblogging platforms means that users are constantly being bombarded with opinions and hot takes that have grown increasingly polemic and shallow in tone. our worldviews are being shaped and impacted by snappy bits of content written in a way that sacrifices nuance and context and moderation for viral potential. youtube and pinterest's algorithms are designed to show you increasingly extreme content based on what you interact with. even the discussion-based, community-focused social networks like reddit and facebook groups use engagement-based algorithms to decide when and where content is surfaced.
the reason normies and libfems conflate “TERF” and “radfem,” or mistakenly assume that all radfems are TERFs, is due to the general degradation of historical context through dumb but popular social justice rhetoric, as well as the deliberate dissemination of anti-feminist misinformation by misogynists and trolls. statistically, TERFs make up a statistically tiny minority within the vast sea of online feminist discourse, but if you didn’t know better, you’d think every other woman in the world was a full-blown transphobic conspiracist based on how much everyone else talks about them. it’s because the shift to an algorithm-based, engagement-driven, performative quest for virality created the perfect conditions for the most extreme voices across the political spectrum to reach people who would probably never seek them out in real life through that kind of gradual persuasion, AND by courting controversy and backlash to stay in the news. the mainstream platforming of TERF ideology is a function of the same system that made celebrities out of alt-right goons like milo and richard spencer and normalized the woke racism and misogyny endemic in the dirtbag left. it’s the same process by which incels and proud boys and tradwives and all those other extremist subcultures became known to millions of people who never would’ve heard of them otherwise. social media is designed to exploit our natural tendency inclination toward tribalism and our desire to seek out increasingly extreme content over time. it’s very similar to porn addiction, actually, which is ironic. here you have a bunch of radical feminists, who are ostensibly educated on how the widespread availability of hardcore porn desensitizes viewers and leads them to seek out increasingly extreme depictions of violent sex acts over time, but they’re ending up hooked on outrage porn instead.
so here’s the point i’m ultimately trying to make: radical feminism isn’t a straight line where one end hates trans people and the other end likes them. it’s more like a rubik’s cube where the colors are all mixed up. you easily can read the texts and decide for yourself “well, firestone was right about reproductive control being the basis of patriarchy, and dworkin was spot on about how the right uses fear tactics to seduce women into working against their own interests, and audre lorde was right about racism and intersectionality and the whole theory of eroticism, and phyllis chesler is pretty much right about everything but islam,” and so forth.
over the years, there have been so many disagreements among the OG writers and figures and academics and womanists and marxist feminists and TERFS and gender abolitionists and gender essentialists and people who really hate bisexual women and every other niche group in the world, and due to the sheer volume of opinions and dissent in the theory and online spaces, your personal slate of beliefs might likely draw from multiple writers who were entrenched on both sides of the materialist vs. biologically determinist divide, or diverge from radfem theory entirely here and there, or intersect with other forms of activism based on your whole identity and experiences and priorities. and like every other political movement these days, the most extreme voices will almost always attract the most attention. allowing a vocal minority with extremely narrow priorities to hijack a movement and turn it into a vehicle to sow division instead of building solidarity, and just throwing up your hands like “well, i guess it’s ruined now!” just means you’re giving up your power and allowing that group to speak for you. if you’re confused about the difference between regular radfems and TERFs, the onus should be on you to go read up on it and be open to the idea that your first impression might’ve been wrong, not on the whole movement to pick up and start over from scratch.
i am so sorry for the length of this. i will be truly shocked if anyone makes it all the way through, but fuck it, i wrote it and let it sit overnight and here y’all are. don’t call me a damn terf, thanks.
🌟☕️💞👏🏼
But seriously having appearance or ‘sexual attractiveness’ brought into irrelevant situations (eg. Being called ‘gorgeous’ or strangers saying ‘thanks for the view’ when you give them directions, being honked at etc.) leads to this really persistent and uneasy feeling of being watched everywhere you go and it amazes me that people still don’t understand how constant and negative that feeling is
meirl
Another half to go