No one asked but I've been thinking about a few posts I've seen where women lament discovering radical feminism because it made their outlook on the world so depressing. And I feel for everyone who goes through this, but I think its actually much better for you to know why you're suffering.
Before I knew about feminism, everything that happened was an isolated incident. My mother's childhood abuse wasn't connected to the domestic abuse she experienced as an adult, and my friend's childhood abuse wasn't connected to the sexual abuse she faced from her peers as a teenager. Eating disorders had nothing to do with rape, and neither did cutting yourself, and neither did transitioning. Everything women go through was random, unpredictable, and unavoidable, and nobody was ever to blame.
Except, something is always to blame. Everything happens for a reason- it's all caused by something else. Humans have an innate urge to rationalize traumatic experiences and understand their cause, so that we might avoid experiencing the same pain in the future. But without the language of feminism, there is only one way to rationalize all these things. When you're a little girl, you grow up learning that male violence is the law of the land. These are the way things are, and everyone is happy with it, so if you're unhappy then you're too sensitive for this world. You need to deal with it. You rapist will sneer this at you, and so will your mom, your grandmother, and your friends. And you will believe it.
Without feminism, you internalize that all your discomfort, all your trauma, it's a consequence of your failure to adapt to reality. It's your fault, and so is everything that happens to you, and everything that happens to every woman like you. There's no deeper meaning to anything: it's Nicole's fault for marrying a psycho, it's Aileen's fault for running away from home, it's Amber's fault for not leaving sooner, and it's Ariana's fault for never visiting an ED clinic.
All these women brought it onto themselves, and so did you. You invited that man to touch your toddler body by having a vagina. You invited that boy to hold you down and rape you by talking to him. Without the language of feminism, you can only communicate through the rules of misogyny, where everything is women's fault, and men are never responsible for anything. It's a way of life that is fundamentally hostile to women, and the vast majority of women have internalized it, at a great personal cost, because they have never been offered another way to look at the situation.
Only feminism can break you free from that endless cycle of guilt and shame. Only feminism can give you the language needed to forgive yourself and all other women for how we've turned out after years of violent abuse. And only through that forgiveness- that recognition that women are largely not to blame for the sorry state of our rotten lives, can you begin to heal from your own trauma.
Feminism allows women to redefine our lives and our identities in a world where men have always had the final say. If being able to take that power for ourselves didn't matter, then men wouldn't work so hard to strip it away.