amozabaeltumblrcom/post/177958859754/about-terfs I don't know how to feel about all this it seems like a lot of this is based on sock accounts wdy think?
Anon, to answer your question, everything said by @feminists-against-feminism and @amozabael in that post is hot garbage. Everything they’ve said is wildly inaccurate horse hockey disguised as being a giant wall of critical thinking.
To properly describe my attitude towards this analysis, I'm going to point out that the phrase “feminists against feminism” is an oxymoron. People who are opposed to feminism aren't feminists, they are quite literally anti-feminists. When I see someone who's handle is @feminists-against-feminism, that oxymoron usually indicates to me that I'm looking at someone with an extremely bias driven agenda, so I try to regard everything that's said with a healthy amount of skepticism. In my experience, people who behave in this fashion aren't trying to reason with you, they're trying to manipulate you with rhetorical tricks like logical fallacies and emotional appeals.
That it eventually falls down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theory and complete bullshit is just proof of this kind of biased and manipulative bullshit.
For anyone interested, this is a reference to a post by @amoazbael that descends into full blown right-wing conspiracy theory, complete with references to Jordan Petersen, the KGB, and many radical misinterpretations of marxist analytical framework. (source)
So naturally, I had to write a short debunk of it. Because it’s such a super huge goddamn long post I’m not going to reblog it. The original points shared by @candidlyautistic are fantastic and it’s a goddamn shame that some authoritarian jackasses had to take a giant crap all over their post.
Warning. This is going to get long, even though I high only the high points. If I stopped to do a blow by blow analysis of all of the really heinous bullshit in this post, we’d be here all day.
First, let’s talk about the way that @feminists-against-feminism talks about TERFs being marxists because it shows that they don’t understand marxist theory, feminism, or why the original post was talking about how TERFs often identify as marxists.
The reason that it's relevant to point out that a lot of TERFs identify as marxists is because it speaks to the political concepts that TERFs have internalized to form their identities. When you strongly identify as a member of a politcal group, whether that's a leftist, a marxist, a capitalist libertarian, or what have you, you're internalizing some aspect of that political theory as part of yourself. That both makes it hard for you to question that political ideology and also leaves you vulnerable, because you can start to see criticism of that ideology as a personal attack on yourself.
This is relevant for TERFs because, if they've internalized being marxists, finding out that they actually behave like fascists can be a tremendous blow to their own sense of self. While painful and difficult to deal with, anon's point is that this can be the kind of shock that a TERF needs to shake looks the kind of regressive social ideology that they've built up around gender.
To put that simply: Many TERFs identify as marxists. Confronting TERFs with the fact that they behave similarly to fascists can shock them and help them see that they're wrong.
Next, @feminists-against-feminism doesn't actually grok conflict theory. Or any theory described here, actually, but I’m going to focus on how they misunderstand conflict theory in particular.
For one thing, conflict theory is not a zero-sum game between two juxtaposed groups. It's an idea that we can analyze society by examining power disparities between different groups and the way that these inform larger social trends that reinforce our social hierarchies.
A quick moment to talk about Karl Marx:
Marx used this framework to analyze politics and economics as a conflict between the proletariat, the people who produced things but didn't control the means of production, and the bourgeoisie, who controlled the means of production and would benefit from them by dint of that position in the social hierarchy.
He talked about the forces of production, the people, processes, and technologies that use labor, and the relations of production, or the social organization we build up around labor. In this model, the proletariat don't have power in the forces of production due to being deprived of that power via the relations of production, while the bourgeoisie both control those means, and thereby the forces of production, because they are the ones who most benefit from the relations of production.
The reason it's bunk to call this a zero-sum game is because it's not a win-lose scenario. The proletariat being freed from oppression does not mean that the bourgeoisie will become the new oppressed. So that's just a completely useless thing to discuss amidst all of this.
This is further reinforced by the way that @feminists-against-feminism then asks you to believe that criticizing the bourgeoisie or 'oppressor class' is actually just prejudice. They even use the terms bludgeoning or torturing in order to emotionally manipulate you by making you think that opposing this viewpoint means supporting torture and other kinds of vile behavior.
Beyond those points, pretty much every example they bring up initially is bullshit.
In the first batch, the Feminist Frequency tweet is completely accurate and doesn’t demonstrate any prejudice, while the rest of these images are just illustrating how deeply bigoted some individuals are.
The only common factor here is @feminists-against-feminism, because they're associating all of these images together to make it seem like this is part of feminist critical theory, instead of someone cherry-picking times when someone put their own bigotry and hatred on display and just happened to do so in a way that @feminists-against-feminism could misinterpret as being 'core to feminism'.
That we then immediately move into a discussion of how this is 'an actual social paradigm' that's 'taught in publicly funded universities' just gives you more evidence to what's really going on here. This is how right-wing authoritarians talk and this kind of analysis would be at home among alt-right YouTube channels.
You know how antisemitism often takes the form of antisemities making up lies like the blood libel in order to make Jewish people look evil? Or how racists in the US try to tell you that black people are unintelligent criminals even though it's bullshit? Yeah, same thing, only this is what it looks like when you need to attack feminism.
Pretty much everything this person is saying about marxism, intersectionality, and feminism is wrong, and that’s before they get into providing you with a completely erroneous and bullshit view of postmodernism, Russia, and the KGB.
If you've gotten to the point where they're talking about how intersectional feminists are marxists too, then you can see how it ramps up into high gear and goes full blown 'I'm going to make up bullshit and sell it to prove my point' territory. A few highlights of things they got wrong:
Intersectionality isn't a synthesis of all marxist conflict theories. Conflict theory emerged from Marx's work, intersectionality is another framework that expanded out of conflict theory.
Queer isn't "wild leftist ideological terminology" but people like @feminists-against-feminism sell it as that in order to support the current wave of 'queer is a slur' that's been ripping through social media.
Feminism isn't a theory about men vs women in a zero-sum game.
Human rights activism was never liberalism. Liberalism is a specific sociopolitical ideology that epouses religious, economic, and political freedoms for a protected class of people, usually rich white men, while failing to provide those same protections to other groups.
They even invoke the communist party in order to make you panic and think that you're supporting those dirty stinking commie reds. To paraphrase the kind of bullshit rhetoric we'd see from a red-baiting boss in a John Steinbeck novel.
This is compounded when they describe feminism as 'leftist identarianism' because people have started to realize that identitarians are just rebranded nazis and by claiming that feminism is just identarianism for leftists, they think that they can make it sound like feminists are just secretly nazis.
By comparison, @amozabael’s own contributions are far shorter but are just as faulty, but that’s not surprising. This is the kind of post that literally looks like it’d be at home on the Info Wars forums and it’s basically just right-wing circle jerk conspiracy theory mongering.
I’m honestly surprised neither of them said feminazi.
