Tara Knight (transfeminist Substack "writer", better known for other work) says that her laterally transmisogynist screed about trans women who are too solipsistic/disabled/un-self-sufficient to be good polycule partners was just a "vent post that was taken too far." I think this is weakling behavior, but an illustrative example. Tara knew that she was being provocative, intentionally, she made that clear in the initial post caption ("I'm sure the reaction to this one will be fun"), only to perform shock and offense that people were provoked. (A common response of the "they just hate me because I speak truth to power - so remember to buy my book, donate to my website!" grifter.)
The formal decision to write this in second person, and to then post it on Substack, where the positive comments are clearly receiving it as something beyond mere venting of a personal narrative, is inexplicable from the perspective of a vent post. It is transparently cynical engagement bait for her recently released self-published book of essays.
Oh, actually, apparently it was always "material analysis," something with some sort of educational or consciousness-raising value. I thought it was a hyperbolic vent post!
Anyway, these professional discoursers are only interested in promoting their own social authority and lining their pockets by churning out a high volume of low-effort low-quality content. The fact that it takes the form of long-form essays and not short-form video doesn't actually change the basic lack of substance.
Tara doesn't know what "materialist analysis" is in any meaningful sense - the reference to surplus-value in her essay is completely nonsensical given that the only substantive claims are about unwaged reproductive labor and providing wages to support a dependent partner (as well as sexual exploitation and emotional manipulation, which are, of course, bad). But she knows that it is a phrase you can invoke to give the appearance of insight, righteousness, knowledge, and radicalism. She knows because she has seen many people do it successfully for years, because there is a whole market in your feed for this kind of intellectual posturing. The whole fixation on rehabilitating "radical feminism" is the same way. If you find that her work is lazy, pretentious, long-winded, repetitive, rhetorically bigoted, or lacking in original insights - well, you are really just showing you are insufficiently materialist, and by extension insufficiently radical.
Tara - and what I'm far more interested in talking about, people like her - are not equipped to do this sort of social-theoretical work, because they are not actually interested in doing it but in using it as a means of maximizing their self-advancement. Their work is a mix of vibes and half-remembered discourse posts and cherry-picked references and AI slop. It is a simulacrum of feminist theory. It is embarrassing.
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