Radblr constantly talks about how woman should raise boys right and teach them to respect women.
Radblr also talks constantly about how women should support and work with other women.
But I never see radblr talking about how women should uplift, encourage, and support girls 🤔
Girls are the most vulnerable group of people on earth, and also the most powerful force of social change.
Millenial girls grew up to embrace liberal choice feminism and spread it through pop culture. Where was radical feminism during 1995-2010 when millenial women were just girls? What were radical feminists doing when we were all playing with bratz dolls and watching totally spies? I’ll always have nostalgia about the 00s pop culture I grew up with. But, that culture was the breeding ground for the choice feminism self exploitation hell we live in now. Spice Girls, Cheetah Girls, Destiny’s Child, Pussycat Dolls and Britney Spears were all marketed to millennial girls age 6-10. How is there any doubt about why millenial women are teaching gen-z girls to exploit themselves? It’s tempting to think of libfems as malicious narcissists or shallow idiots, but they aren’t. They were girls groomed for ‘sex positivity’ through 00s pop culture. They were girls radical feminists failed.
Radical feminism is always defined and organized around the root of subjugation women face–sex and reproduction.
Why not organize radical feminism around the root of female future, power, and success–girls?
Feminism is called a women’s movement. Occasionally, it’s referred to as a movement for women and girls. I think prioritizing women over girls in our concept of feminism is one of the greatest mistakes feminists ever made.
Feminism should be a movement for girls, supported by women.
If you are 20+, you are no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, a girl. I know girlhood is hell. I know it leaves us scarred and wounded. I know we feel the universe cheated us out of a girlhood brimming with carefree adventure and exploration. But it wasn’t the universe cheating us. It was adult women failing us. Adult women who were too focused on the damage their own girlhood did to them. This cycle of girlhood trauma has left women’s movements chasing their own tails for a century.
Patriarchy is passed through generations by men socializing boys and women socializing girls. If men are initiating boys into the fraternity of sexual subjugators, women are initiating girls into the sorority of victimhood. Radical feminism was built within that sorority, and it shows.
All feminist writing I’ve read delineates women’s historical trauma and ties it to the subjugation of women in contemporary society. Through feminism, we find other women and discuss our shared past traumas with each other. In the internet age, we do this on a personal level through blogs and forums, or on a societal level through hashtags like #metoo and #yesallwomen. Feminist discourse builds up to a model of women’s universal suffering. And through that we identify males as the bastards behind it all. Radical feminism calls class recognition through shared trauma ‘consciousness raising’. They cite consciousness raising and solidarity between women as the greatest sources of female power. In other words, radical feminism elevates the sorority of victimhood as the key to female liberation.
But the more I piece this out, the more it looks like a damn crab trap. The shared trauma, the model of women’s universal suffering, it only leads us to perpetuate our subjugation. There’s comfort in thinking what happened to you happened because you’re a woman. There’s comfort in seeing traumatic events as predestined. But predestination is the oldest crab trap in the book. Through predestination, we see victimhood as a right of passage and a key to wisdom. We overlook naive girls until they’ve been victimized enough to trauma bond with women.
I’m not saying we should throw out radical feminism and start from scratch. Women coming to terms with trauma is a step towards female liberation, but it’s a step that will take a lifetime. That, unfortunately, is the nature of trauma and PTSD. There is no way to resolve past trauma. You can read all the feminist discourse ever written, and you may find some comfort in it, but the trauma will not heal.
I know a lot of us take comfort in that catchphrase about women not being responsible for our own oppression. We need to start recognizing this as a thought terminating cliche and blackpill feminist idea. Saying we have no hand in our own oppression means women’s liberation depends entirely on men. This, of course, renders women’s liberation impossible.
If we’re looking for more than comfort, we’re going to need more than radical feminism is currently offering. If we’re looking for liberation, we must do the most uncomfortable thing possible. We must dismantle the victimhood sorority. We need to stop saying our trauma happened because we are women. We need to stop being complicit in patriarchy by holding up victimhood as a right of passage to womanhood.
Women do not have to suffer. Women do not have to be victimized. Girlhood does not have to be characterized by neglect. If we use all the power of women’s class solidarity to protect and celebrate girls, we will escape the cycle we are in. We need to stop prioritizing the lives of women over the lives of girls. We need to make girls’ liberation the primary goal of feminism, even if we have to sacrifice personal freedoms to do so. That is the true right of passage. Being an adult doesn’t mean perpetuating the past into the present. It means passing up on your needs in the present to secure a better future for the next generation.
Your inner girl will never heal until you become the woman that should’ve been there protecting you as a girl. So, become that women, and do everything in your power to lift up girls. Do everything in your power to give them the carefree adventurous girlhood you were denied. Don’t do it because they’re your daughters or surrogate daughters. Do it because they’re the future, and they are more important than we are.
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