I guarantee you, anyone with āx criticalā wording in their blog description is either a radfem or unwittingly drinking radfem koolaid
not to be that dude but what about kink critical or people who are critical of the media they consume (like su critical). i dont think theyāre drinkin the koolaid, i think its just unfortunate that radfems ruined ___ critical. (which im confused anyway because Iāve literally only seen radfems use gender critical)
Swerfs often consider themselves kink critical so thatās been ruined for me, too. That might not be the case for other people but it is for a fair amount of people.
kink-critical is 12,000% radfem koolaid and thatās just the facts. Like I hate speaking about this publicly in any capacity for a lot of reasons but this is like the 4th example of this misunderstanding Iāve seen this weekĀ and it needs to be addressed because I feel like people are starting to lose the thread of radical feminism and its pervasive toxicity by boiling the entire ideology down to onlyĀ the TERF [and occasionally SWERF] archetypes so I guess I gotta bring this discussion down on my own damn head. So hereās the deal: the foundational tenets of radical feminism result in many wide-reaching beliefs About The World, and men, and women, and people of other genders, and the way they interactāand they have a great deal of interest in classifying those systems of interaction in ways that reinforce the foundational tenets. One of those beliefs is that men are abusers and women victims, unilaterally. They believe also that women are brainwashed by patriarchy to accept, normalize, or overlook violence done against them by men. This is tied in directly with beliefs about BDSM being a system which allows men to abuse women, and which encourages women to believe they want it when in fact they are being conditioned to accept violence. If youāre seeing some kernels of swerf nā terf ideology in that portrayal, goodāyouāre getting the point. BDSM [or a straw man of it, anyway] is usually the big bad in this system of beliefs, but the formation of the argument allows it to reach well into other kinks and sexual practices, reclassifying them into some form that denies the agency of everyone involved, paints at least one party as an abuser exploiting a power system, and positions radical feminists as the noble crusaders defending Good Misled Women from Bad Exploitative Menātying the whole thing back into the core ideas they have about the shape of the world, and also tying them into their other beliefsāwhat kind of people are men, for example, or what kind of behaviours women are A. not allowed to do and B. are too ignorant to realise they shouldnāt be doing [in their belief system]. Because thatās the thing about radical feminism at the end of the day. All of the beliefs are interconnected and products of the same twisted logic, usually reinforced with just enough grains of truth or plausibility to make them appealingāand to make them likely to be picked up, embraced, and circulated by people who may not recognize their origins. This is deliberate. Recruitment is a major game for radfems, and rather than hit a potentially open-minded, reasonable person over the head withĀ ātrans women are menā right out of the gate, they seed these other, tangential beliefs first. They package them in conspicuously TERF-free wrapping. They sprinkle them into communities where theyāll be taken at that face value. They market them to vulnerable people looking for a way to explain, understand, and heal from bad things that have happened to them. And then, when youāve swallowed that key piece of their logic, they bring you into the fold by giving you more and more of the big picture, each step leading naturally and by design from the one youāve already accepted. And I know this, because thatās how they got me. They found a young, scared, confused, hurt personāsomeone who had had their interest in kink used by unscrupulous people to rape and abuse them, and someone who had been alienated from mainstream feminism due to complicated trauma reactions around those same events. It wasnāt my fault, they assured me. Of course Other Feminists werenāt equipped to understand me. They could help me heal. They could help me understand. They knew what Iād been through and they had the answers. They got me hook line and fucking sinkerĀ by using their kink-critical ideologies to exploit my trauma and vulnerability and position themselves as the answer to my pain. And then they fed me more, and more, and more beliefs that all seemed like such a natural extension of that first one, the one I was the most receptive to. It took me yearsĀ to figure out what had happened and disentangle myself, and Iām still deprogramming a lot of it. So, yeah. Kink-critical is radfem ideology down to the bones. And because I know itās gonna come upāyouāre allowed to not like kink in general. Youāre allowed to be squicked or triggered by specific kinks, or even the whole affair. Complicated or even outright negative reactions to those things are well within the range of normal. ButĀ ākink-criticalā as a whole, and as an unexamined belief including refusing to question where it came from, who it benefits, and what it leads to, is pure radfem bullshit.Ā
Thereās a big old difference between āIām not comfortable with kink stuff/I donāt like BDSMā and ākink-criticalā. Because, just like with āgender-criticalā, itās a euphemism meant to hide that these people absolutely think they have not only the right, but the ~moral obligation~ to step in and save people from themselves, if theyāre daring to do a thing that the radfem in question dislikes. āItās just being critical of a thing! Critical thinking is good! Iām not trying to tell anyone how to live their lifeā¦I mean, I am, but I still want the plausible deniability of hiding behind this pseudo-academic/pseudo-analytical term.ā
And just as āgender-criticalā means not āI am criticizing the structures of binary genderā but āI am going to criticize your gender, specifically, and your expression of it as well, and Iām going to be very nasty and very violent about it and still think Iām justified and standing on the moral high groundā, ākink-criticalā doesnāt mean āI am looking critically at the ways which kink may interact with social structures like race, gender, etc.ā but instead means āIām going to reach into your sex life and criticize your kinks, specifically, and accuse you of supporting violence against women, and still think Iām justified and standing on the moral high ground.ā
Honestly, if you donāt want to be taken for a radfem and donāt want to unwittingly help further spread their cancerous tentacles, ban the ā[thing]-criticalā construction from your vocabulary entirely. Purge it. Put words in a different order, use other phrases and words to convey āI choose to think critically about [thing] and am aware of the ways it may be problematic even though I engage with it for my own reasonsā, but just keep ā[thing]-criticalā off your blog and out of your mouth. Iām sorry, Iām sure thatās inconvenient, but sadly radfems have ruined it to such an extent that I donāt think it can be reclaimed, at least not in this space - if you use it, that acts as a signal both to radfems and to those of us whoāve had to deal with them that you are either a radfem already, or a ripe candidate for recruitment. So if thatās not what you want to convey yourself as, donāt use that phrase, ever, at all, about anything, but ESPECIALLY not kink-critical or gender-critical.
Linking in the interview with an ex-radfem here, because itās an incredibly relevant read.
And to add on the old Fandom Discourse like a complete fucking fool: I would even say āSU-criticalā is likely to have some kernals of radfem ideology in it, too. There are plenty of reasons to have beef with Steven Universe, and I personally do not give a shit about that- being critical of the show is not the issue.
But I was around for that first wave of āSUcritā stuff. The people calling themselves āSU criticalā were the same people who later ended up being aphobes and exclusionists, the same people who were ākink-criticalā, etc., and thatās not a coincidence.
Ace exclusionism was explicitly started by TERFs and radfems, because that type of āwho are the real [marginalized group]ā discourse is exactly what they need normalized in order to persuade more people down the rabbithole, just as the same goes for ākink-criticalā. (See that interview for more context, and @exradfem, whoās since spoken on the topic in more depth.)
The original reason people started calling themselves āSU-criticalā was because someone dug up fanart depicting unseemly kinks that Rebecca Sugar, the showrunner, had put out years and years prior to ever working on the show. This is not a defense of that fanart; but the subsequent rise of āthis show is secretly evilā takes was deeply, deeply rooted in ākink-criticalā ideas: i.e. someone who engages in Kink is inherently dangerous, and all of their actions, ideas, and creations are similarly evil. (And this is just conjecture, but I wouldnāt be super shocked to find out TERFs were behind the push to ācancelā the first animated kidās show to depict transgender/nonbinary characters.)
āSUcritā discourse had people fully and genuinely theorizing that Rebecca Sugar, a nonbinary Jewish person, was secretly a fascist Nazi sympathizer. They didnāt directly tie every claim back to that original āicky kinkā issue, but something tells me those theories wouldnāt have existed if not for the initial push founded on ākink-criticalā ideas.
Not to mention āSU-criticalā never really meant āI am thinking critically about the ways in which systems of power have interacted with this show and itās messagingā, it meant āI am critical of you, personally, for liking Steven Universe even though I have deemed it Morally Reprehensible, and I am going to bully and harass you into either agreeing with me, or becoming too afraid to talk about the show at all anymore.ā (At least, at the height of the discourse.)
