There is no way for me to adequately summarise my personal reading of Andrea Dworkinâs Intercourse within the confines of this reblog, but suffice to say I donât agree with her opinion that vaginal penetration is inherently demeaning and unpleasing, and, more to the point of your essay, I utterly reject her framing of Joan of Arc. To define Joanâs lifeâs goal and great success as âbypassing male desireâ is dementedly misogynistic and idiotic. And I say idiotic not to be unnecessarily insulting, but because we all know that she died at 19. Most women and girls during her time & place married between the ages of 17 and 25. Whether she would have fallen in love with anyone, let alone married, is a matter of pure conjecture; she was barely out of childhood. And while one can argue about the very concept of childhood in medieval France, it's of note that she was most often described by her contemporaries as just that; a child. That she had to worry about male violence during her childhood is a footnote of her life, the most fucking commonplace atrocity of every woman and child in patriarchy. How is doing the practical basics to avoid male violence The Story of her life?
There have been plenty of women throughout history who were famous enough that even the male scribes given the power and privilege to record history didnât feel they could get away with erasing them. To describe Joan as âa hero whose biography brazenly and without precedent violates the constraints of being femaleâ is ignorant and misogynistic. The Boudiccan Destruction Horizon begs to differ.
Joanâs virginity was but one tool of many she used (much like St Margaret and St Catherine before her) to get into the position of power that allowed her to achieve her goal. Arguably, the prophesy she identified with referred to virginity as inclusive of any young girl of religious virtue, regardless of sexual experience. But, in any case, her claim of virginity, substantiated by Queen Yolande (the other woman responsible for putting Charles on the throne) herself (let's pause to think about the feminist implications of this fact), was as much a tool of practicality within patriarchy as anything else. It was decidedly not, as Dworkin insists, âan essential element of her virilitiy, her autonomy, her rebellious and intransigent self-definitionâ. Like, lol, we actually have no idea if Joan had sex or not, and itâs of precisely zero relevance to her lifeâs work. The idea that sexual experience has any bearing on a woman's, let alone a CHILD's, worth, her virility, her autonomy, her rebellious and intransigent self-definition is a decidedly MALE myth, one entirely constructed out of the hatred and disgust they feel for women and girls. Like, why are you even entertaining this rot in the big year of 2026? Many women do, actually, enjoy vaginal penetration, and you have access to that info.
In any case, sexual inexperience was not a marital requirement of girls and women of the social class Joan was born into, and though the noble circles she found herself elevated to in her teens did place sexist importance on the matter, the public perception of her virtue was much more contingent upon the effectiveness of her strategies out on the field, rather than on her conjectured sexual activity, as thatâs the only reason sheâd been elevated to such a high social status in the first place. It was customary for peasant women and girls to have sex and get pregnant before marriage in Joan's time, so we know women and girls were sexually active outside of marriage and that this reality ostensibly did not infringe upon the concept of their religious virtue.
Like, we can debate the finer points of Joan's particular cultural setting and personal wishes, but my issue with both Dworkin's writing and your own is that you both fail to even consider such things. Just so, we see this use of virginity as a political symbol of religious virtue, as opposed to a direct reference to sexual inexperience, repeated in the life of Queen Elizabeth I, who famously claimed the title Virgin Queen, despite being publicly known to have sexual relations with her âfavouritesâ. The actual threat to both Joan and Elizabeth's political power was not intercourse, but marriage. Because marriage was, and still is, a man's lawful ownership of a woman/girl within patriarchy. We know that Joan faced pressure to marry before her military campaign, and that she refused on the basis of that very military campaign; her saints had given her a mission and she had promised to complete it. Whatever her father meant for her, his domain over her was simply outranked by the saints, and then the Prince, and that was, I think quite obviously, by her design. Her holy mission to save France was the religious virtue she was protecting; that's the reasoning she gave, over and over, on record. Whether she would have married after her triumph is, again, pure speculation cos the English murdered her before she got a chance to do anything else.
I'm belaboring this point because it's central to both Dworkin's writing and yours, and the way you frame Joan of Arc's life. We all understand that there is a direct correlation between symbolic virtue and female sexual inexperience, but Dworkin implies that Joan's importance as a historical figure is based firmly in her conjectured abstention from sex, which there is absolutely no evidence to support. This assertion, in particular, is disgusting; âShe refused to be fucked and she refused civil insignificance: and it was one refusal; a rejection of the social meaning of being female in its entirety, no part of the feminine exempted and saved. Her virginity was a radical renunciation of a civil worthlessness rooted in real sexual practice.â Joan was a child soldier. She died at 19. What the fuck do you mean that her refusal to "be fucked" was a radical renunciation of "civil insignificance"? Does that framing of a Medieval peasant teenager busy leading a nation to military victory make sense to you? Um, bruh, this girl radically renounced civil insignificance by SAVING FRANCE, not by refusing to be fucked.
As to Joan saying that there were enough women already attending to womenâs duties, that's not a condemnation of women nor the work we have historically done; only a misogynist would think so. Womenâs work runs the world. Joan grew up working in the field, learning animal husbandry; were these not womanly duties? In fact, âwomanly dutiesâ, at the time, included the continued invention and expansion of the scientific method and the medical industry, which women would soon find themselves purposefully disenfranchised from by way of the witch hunts I previously mentioned. You know, the bulk of which Joan saved her countrywomen from.
Like, you don't even know the context of that quote, even though, as I've said before, her trial records are publicly accessible; all you have to do is google them. When Joan was asked that question about "womanly duties" it was in the context of wearing "women's clothing" and performing the sort of work that women were, at the time, expected to fill their lives with. The court was very pointedly attempting to chastise her for being a soldier, for saving France. They were big mad that they wasted 100 years of blood and gold on a military campaign that was ultimately defeated by the tactical brilliance and military leadership of a random peasant girl. Midwife or farmer, they didn't give a single shit what she did instead. They weren't asking her why she was refusing to "be fucked", they wanted her to stop ruining their very lengthy and expensive colonization effort. If she had been a boy, they would have, in all likelihood, captured her just the same, probably not bothered with a trial and simply beheaded her as an enemy of England. Are you okay. Like I really don't know what you think was even going on in the middle ages.
Dworkin being uninformed is not the true issue here. In general, I value her work and respect her both as a feminist and an academic.
The instances of ignorance and flawed logic that her work contains are to be critiqued, not to be copy-pasted 40 years later without question. To that point, this is one of the most misogynistic, psychotic things I have ever heard anyone say about a child: âIn Joanâs own words, it was the rest of her contemporariesâ job to be stripped down to genital filth, for use and objectification - while she wore menâs clothes to protect the privacy of her body in what she asserted was Godâs own plan.â Those were decidedly not her words, and thatâs why Iâm being aggressive towards you; any misogynist who speaks about children sexually like that can catch the same from me. âBeing fuckedâ is something Dworkn and you both seem to think is how a child would solely define âwomanly dutiesâ as, apropos of nothing. Joanâs mother, Isabelle RomĂ©e, was her teacher; an educated, intelligent woman of incredible moral integrity, whose love, loyalty, and courageousness had an obvious and profound impact on Joan, as records of both their deeds well attest to. This was Joanâs foundational example of a woman who attended to âwomanly dutiesâ; thatâs how you think she thought of her mother, her married sister Catherine? As having been âstripped down to genital filthâ? Those are YOUR words; what the fuck is wrong with you?
As for Joan chasing away prostituted women from the soldierâs encampment, I regard that as an obvious feminist action. First of all, If she had no issue with women and children being abused in such a manner, she wouldn't have said a word about it, much less taken action against it. The political ramification of drawing her sword against her fellow soldiers, for example, was untenable. This was a girl whose defining talent was tactical brilliance. Chasing the prostituted women and children away was the one thing she could physically do to help stop them, in the moment, from being sexually assaulted without destroying her own political position. She then verbally confronted the soldiers, religiously lecturing them and commanding them to confess their sins and stop looting, assaulting, and harassing civilians. She got one of the commanders, Lord Etienne de Vignolles to agree, and the rest of the men followed in line. She, at no point, âchose the status of menâ. She chose the status of a female SAINT, which is precisely how she got those men to listen to her and stop assaulting prostituted women and children. Again, I don't know why you think it's acceptable to use Joan's life as an example of anything at all in an academic essay when you don't know anything about her life, and you haven't even bothered to apply critical thinking to what you believe you know about her.
To sum up, you are willfully framing a CHILD, 13 when she made her commitment to save France, as some sort of extreme âIâm not like the other girlsâ sociopath without even knowing, really, anything about her. And I think the fact that you feel entitled to assume such things about any girl says a lot about you and what your âfeminism" actually consists of.
Feminists understand that male supremacy, especially imperial male supremacy, is our true enemy, not other women and girls. Your preoccupation with framing the survival techniques of women and girls throughout history as evidence of THEIR inability to enact sisterhood proves that it is your own sense of sisterhood thatâs lacking. Gender-non-conformity in women and girls is the fucking norm, which is why it is heavily policed. Like, Iâm sorry to be rude about it, but I do think you are actually stupid if you think that gender conformity is average, natural, normal. It is decidedly not, and we have evidence of that in both scientific fact and historical record. Rare is the woman or girl who wholeheartedly and entirely conforms to the feminine stereotype. The amount of destruction that women have collectively committed against the systems of male supremacy we have continuously found ourselves in is ignored only by the ignorant and misogynistic. The record we have of women who âcross-dressedâ only represents the ones of note who got caught doing so. How many women and girls were forging documents and poisoning men and dong fuck knows what else to subvert the rule of men? Youâre the one who thinks of most women and girls as lambs sweetly presenting their necks for slaughter.
Youâre like Kanye West, arguing that most black people chose to be slaves. The norm of subjugated people is defiance; how many women and girls were put to death in the Middle Ages alone for their nonconformity? What sort of woman, what sort of girl do you imagine is the target of every femicide? All these women and girls tortured and murdered, and you think the majority were submissive to their subjugation? Do you think Joan of Arc was the only girl in the 1400s to be burned alive? How can you logically hold the idea that only the few special and exceptional women and girls have and continue to fight their oppression? How can you possibly argue that this is a feminist stance?
Like, you imagine you have the right to wave away women and girls' stated reasoning for why they larped as male within male supremacy, because, apparently, according to no one but you, they were incapable of discerning, let alone telling, the deeper "truth", by which you mean the anti-science bullshit that the trans cult cooked up in the contemporary era. No, of course it canât be for practical and safety reasons, it canât be because they had important shit to do and that was one of the many ways to get it done, it must be because they were all secretly mentally ill enough to believe they werenât really female, that their vulvas were mere demonic hallucinations. All these women must have been as misogynistic and braindead as our current trans-identified dipshit sisters, cos you say so. And while it's perfectly true that idiots exist and that some of these women qualified as such, all evidence points to the fact that the majority of the women and girls who cross-dressed were decidedly smart enough to know better than to think they were in any way male, and, to my fucking point, JOAN OF ARC was very much among that sane majority.
Shakespeareâs 1600 Viola cross-dresses pointedly for the sole purpose of practicality and safety. What logical conclusion can we make of this other than that this was a well-established practice, that it could be employed as a literary device which the public at large would immediately understand. Duke Orsino spends exactly zero time being surprised that Viola would do such a thing; her reasons are thoroughly obvious to him, without her having to utter one goddamn word of explanation.
Dworkin asserts that the âmale clothesâ were Joanâs âsexual crimeâ, the crime that the Inquisition were after her for. This is ridiculous. The English were determined to kill her because she LIBERATED FRANCE, and the church was the tool which allowed them to annihilate her. Joan's trial transcripts demonstrate her brilliant tactical intelligence; the way she deftly parried the religious scholarsâ, the most powerful and most highly educated men in her world, theological traps was an act of true genius and astounding bravery, especially coming from an illiterate peasant. Their charge against her was heresy; the wearing of breeches was a small part of their evidence, and the only one they were successful at âprovingâ. After pressuring her to sign a document stating that she would resign herself from military action and wearing breeches, they locked her up and used male violence to pressure her into putting on the pants they. gave. her., therein forcing her to commit a âheretic relapseâ. The punishment, of course, was death. Saying that wearing âmale clothesâ was Joanâs main crime, the cause she died for, is like saying that Al Caponâs main crime was tax evasion. You cannot think The English, The Catholic Fucking Church, gave a single flying fuck that that peasant child wore pants; please be so for real right now. They put her to death because she cost them FRANCE. She died to save her country, her people. Hello. I find it utterly absurd and actually very concerning that you and Dworkin are as obsessed with this kid wearing pants as the trans cult is. She saved an entire nation, but you think her achievement most worthy of mention, most relevant to feminism, was wearing trousers. Okay.
It is simply a position of internalised misogyny and frankly bizarre idiocy to imagine oneâs material physical reality is what should change, instead of the oppressive, very much mutable, structures of society. There will always be morons eager to believe their oppressors are truly worthy of veneration and supremacy; there will always be those who seek to identify with their captors, their slavers, their torturers, their rapists, their would-be killers, instead of taking arms up against them. Thatâs a story old as time; we call those people traitors and cowards, because thatâs what they are. As feminists, we do not imagine that all women fall into such a pathetic category, nor that giving more time and attention to this particular bullshit is a progressive endeavour. I donât hold sympathy for trans cultists because their ideology is factually incorrect and both their beliefs and their actions harm people. I want them to stop. I do not want to sit around and idly imagine how many other women throughout history might have been as stupid and harmful as they are. What the fuck is the actual point of that? Whether the thought occured to them or not, women and girls are not male and never will be; to pretend otherwise is not a true escape from anything. To larp as oneâs oppressor is, at best, a temporary tool of survival, along with every other maneuver women and girls employ to temporarily alleviate what aspects of our subjugation we can.
Lesbians are, by definition, female. I do not subscribe to the notion that there is any particular gendered performance that homosexual women exhibit, or should, and I personally donât give a fuck how women and girls dress or what skills and interests they choose to hone. They are female, by biological definition, and it is a fact that homosexuality, as well as heterosexuality, is a neutral, natural, observable trait of our species, as well as most other mammals. Homosexual females are not a social construct; we are a natural reality present throughout human history and whatever idiot wants to argue otherwise is fucking well wrong and we really, truly madly deeply, do not need to make it more complicated than that.
Plenny oâ lesbians and bi women are smart enough not to buy into the dipshit misogynistic dichotomy of butch vs femme, which lock, stock, and two smoking barrels, mirrors the sex-based stereotypes of male supremacy. I'm well aware of the historical and cultural importance lesbian and bi women place on the butch identity in particular, and although I sympathize with the reasons why, it is still a misogynistic construct. Women are not masculine, they are gender-non-conforming. The concept of the butch reaffirms, rather than challenges, sex based stereotyped. A woman is not acting like a man when she learns how to fix a car and chooses to cut her hair short; she is acting like a woman, because that is what she is and always will be, in defiance of the sexist socialization she has been raised in within patriarchy. Women and girls who have used cross-dressing to avoid homophobic persecution have my empathy and sisterhood. However, none of them were or are or will ever be male. If forced to guess what such women and girls thought/ think about themselves, I consider it the empathetic and respectful stance to assume they were not doing so out of the misogynistic, idiotic, and insane belief that anything they might think, anything they might do, anyone they might love, or any way they might dress changed, or indeed was capable of changing, the material reality of their biological sex. It's very important, actually, to base our arguments as feminists in material reality and refuse to cater to the many layers of ideological nonsense males and their allies have come up with over the thousands of years of persecution we've faced.
Your position seems to be, essentially, that you think a lot of women and girls in the past were very stupid and confused about how to conceptualize, survive, and fight male supremacy, so we should all be a bit more understanding of the women and girls currently being very stupid and âconfusedâ about how to conceptualize, survive, and fight male supremacy. As I said before, all youâre doing is further muddying the discourse between feminists and these trans lunatics, and, therein, supporting their malicious obfuscation of male supremacy. I'm not sympathetic towards any member of an oppressed group who truly thinks she's better than her sisters because she's secretly part of the oppressor class. I'm gonna feel revulsion towards the stupidity and greed that makes holding that belief possible, as we all should. This is not something to be encouraged; it is harmful shit we must take great and swift action to unilaterally rebuke.
Trans ideologists who are female, however they feel about themselves, share in our common female ancestry, and yes, sure, of course they are free to think about our foremothers however they like. But material reality, scientific understanding, fucking historical fact must intervene anytime one of these clowns wants to publicly spread misogynistic misinformation. No one can afford, especially at this particular juncture in time, to tolerate the lies that our oppressors seek to spread, and that very much includes the idea that people can change their biological sex at will, and that sexed-based stereotypes are anything but the hateful fantasies of our violent oppressors.
I have to add that it is profoundly disturbing to me that you repeatedly mention Joanâs genitals at all, let alone them being âon displayâ. If thatâs your main takeaway from the imagined visual of a girl being burned at the stake, then I have to say you sound fucking pornsick.
If you had any academic let alone feminist integrity, you'd never have posted such an essay in the first place. But why bother fact-checking anything? Must be such fun to post your unedited bullshit and give the libfems more misogynistic mythical fodder to prop up their increasingly unhinged, self-harming political praxis.
Like I said, keep Joan's name out of your ignorant mouth.
