radical feminism

What exactly does ‘queer’ mean?

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It used to be that people who described themselves as queer were simply gay, lesbian or bisexual. Some rejected the idea of reclaiming the slur on principle while others believed it was an effective way to change the meaning and thus the power of the word. Now fewer and fewer people are referring to themselves as gay, lesbian or even bi. Most just say they’re queer. Why is this the case, and whom does it serve?

https://twitter.com/SourPatches2077/status/1626037367542005760?s=20

‘Queer’ ultimately means whatever the person using the word means – and that’s the point. Referring to oneself as queer is a deliberate, often well-meaning attempt to signal one’s inclusivity. If you do say you’re gay or lesbian and insist that means you’re same-sex attracted, trans activists will call you a bigot (Don’t believe me? Scroll down to the bottom). Better not open that can of worms and make someone feel invalidated. One big happy rainbow family.

Queer is a word that describes sexual and gender identities other than straight and cisgender.

Planned Parenthood

Notice ultra-woke Planned Parenthood uses the word straight instead of heterosexual; this framing avoids associating biological sex with sexual orientation so it’s accommodating to gender identity.

The Unitarian Universalist Association, however, presents a much more expansive definition:

Although this definition is less widely known, many so-called queer people identify with the fourth definition. For them, it isn’t about sexual orientation or even gender identity necessarily, but the simple act of kicking against sexual norms. As a radical feminist, I believe some norms should be smashed, including gender, but not for the sake of it. That’s just nihilistic teenage rebellion. In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett demonstrated that rather than happening in a social vacuum, social shifts happen in the context of pre-existing power dynamics. In a patriarchy, the sexual revolution of the 1960s inevitably found a way to exploit women while claiming to liberate them. A modern iteration would be SlutWalks which, conveniently for straight and bi men, give them exactly what they want.

I don’t care if men wear makeup, carry purses, wear their hair long or don’t know how to change a tire. Gender critical people often say they don’t mind men in dresses. Yeah, well radical feminists do, and not because the cocks in frocks are performing femininity. Now, one might think feminists would appreciate men adopting the feminine gender role. The first problem arises when men leverage gender identity to claim that doing so makes them women. The second is what femininity means to them. Men no longer perform femininity while acknowledging they’re men like they once did in the goth, glam, and hair metal scenes. Thanks to porn, more men than ever are internalizing the fetishization of the female body, transposing themselves as the female object of desire. As sexual submission is indelibly linked to femininity, these men get a charge out of pretending they’re a member of the subordinate sex, frequently identifying as masochistic “sissies”. This is evidenced by the explosion of sissy hyno porn and forced feminization. These men are otherwise known as auto-gynephiles. Men like the Oakville high school teacher with gigantic prosthetic breasts and protruding nipples, a dude who calls himself Rosemary Times and exposes himself in public and women’s spaces (NSFW), darling of professional gender critical feminists Debbie Hayton, and, as radical feminists have suspected all along, Lia Thomas. The list of AGPs is endless.

Once you see these things, you can’t unsee them and it becomes clear why cross-dressing in this context is neither innocent nor a human right. Men don’t have to worry about trans-identified females creeping into their washrooms, locker rooms, and changerooms to perv on or film them, film themselves while committing lude acts, or assaulting them. Women simply don’t tend to have that compulsion and even if they did, they could easily be overpowered by men. Trans activists always accuse “TERFs” of being prejudiced against trans people when in fact the issue is the ever-present reality of male violence and, that threat aside, the right of both females and males to privacy.

Because queer theory fundamentally values transgression, there have always been people – men, largely – with “marginalized” sexual interests within LGBT culture, notably becoming more visible in the 1970s with drag, transvestism, and transsexualism. As such, the LGBT/queer trajectory has been and remains controlled by men, initially with gay men and now, increasingly, straight trans-identified men. It was largely gay male culture, which can be quite misogynistic, that embraced practices like BDSM, leather families, porn, prostitution, etc. Some lesbians did as well, but to a much lesser extent and it wasn’t a feature of the culture of women-identified-women. In other words, these practices aren’t inherent to homosexuality or bisexuality. What does someone who likes to flog or be flogged, choke or be choked, or have multiple partners have in common with any random homosexual?

After the AIDS crisis and the recognition of same-sex marriage, LGBT advocacy increasingly shifted from sexual orientation to sexual identity. This allowed the kink community to gain a stronger foothold. Bottom feeders like pedophiles saw the opportunity to stake their claim, convincing some prominent queer activists to begin referring to them as “minor attracted persons” or MAPs. Michel Foucault, a founder of queer theory, has been accused of raping children and was at the very least a child sexual abuse apologist. Since Foucault and John Money, numerous prominent queer/trans activists have tried to destigmatize pedophilia and normalize the idea of child sexuality, that children are sexual beings, including Peter Tatchell and Jacob Breslow. Alok Vaid-Menon, posting from his Blackmatter Facebook account, once referred to girls as kinky and deviant. A queer Pre-K teacher in California published a post on social media questioning childhood innocence.

Bearing all of this in mind, it doesn’t take an evangelical Christian to question the appropriateness of bringing children to drag shows, which until very recently have been understood even by liberals as adult entertainment. That male drag performers are grotesque sexist caricatures of femaleness should be considered damaging to children, especially girls. We now have several instances on camera of men performing as scantily-clad female strippers interacting with children, taking their money or encouraging them to stuff cash into their g-strings. Even when performers are conscious of what’s appropriate, somehow some parents aren’t. These videos are real. The political persuasion of those sharing them is irrelevant. Those who believe Drag Queen Story Hour is innocuous might be surprised by what some LGB people have to say about the messages children are really getting from these events, including stories that encourage them to believe they may be born in the wrong body, can become the opposite sex, and should change their gender to fit their personalities.

The question isn’t whether LGBT people are perverts or predators. The question is, why do organizations like the Pedophile Information Exchange and the people who associate or sympathize with them always glom onto queer politics? Because the queer community and queer advocacy are usually male-led and unfortunately, male sexuality can be very problematic. Combine that with a movement whose ethos is rainbows and love on the surface and transgressive sexuality de rigueur underneath, and ‘queer’ can either be something beautiful or something monstrous.

Reclaiming the feminist legacy: language and defiance

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If being a feminist means recognizing that women and girls face unique challenges because we’re female and men as a class exert power over us, why do some women, especially some who campaign for women’s rights, reject the label?

One reason proferred is that the words ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ supposedly don’t mean anything anymore because the movement has been astroturfed and is dominated by women who are male-centred. These are the “sex positive” cool girls who go on slut walks and denounce you as a SWERF if you criticize the sex trade’s disproportionate impact on women and girls. They say that talking about this creates the stigma around “sex work,” which then inspires men who purchase sex to assault and kill women. The fact that men who target desperate and underprivileged women to purchase their consent are violent misogynists driven by their hatred of women is not only ignored but unspeakable. These same so-called feminists are also happy to allow male sex offenders into women’s prisons and for men to steal medals from female athletes, represent women in politics, and erase women as the female sex class in law and language. Obviously, they’re the opposite of feminist.

The problem with this stated reason for not identifying as feminist, however, is it’s rife with contradiction. The word ‘woman’ arguably doesn’t mean anything anymore either because trans activists have succeeded in bullying a huge tranche of the population into saying “trans women are women” and defining ‘woman’ as anyone who identifies as one. Should we then abandon the word ‘woman’ because it’s been pretty much mangled beyond recognition, most recently by the Cambridge Dictionary? Of course not. It’s nonsensical for women who oppose male appropriation of womanhood to reclaim the meaning of ‘woman’ but not the meaning of ‘feminist.’

For this reason, I’m suspicious that the real motivation might be a desire to remain in feminist spaces while protecting one’s likeability. Particularly if one has broadened one’s content to non-feminist audiences and makes a living off podcasting and writing. Why else would someone who founded a feminist platform and has published so much clear, uncompromising feminist writing suddenly become sympathetic to the ridiculous claim that incels are misunderstood victims? Women who date men have to make many uncomfortable choices, often between their feminism and their relationships with or appeal to men. They should nevertheless be honest about their motivations.

Another explanation a women’s rights campaigner has given for not identifying as a feminist is she believes some feminists really are man-haters and have gone too far. Standard MRA rhetoric of the “feminism is cancer” variety. Ironically, this person also acknowledges that some women sell other women out. I’ve heard one podcaster, a lesbian who vehemently opposes gender identity, say the word patriarchy is overused. How can it be that naming a system that degrades, brutalizes, and murders girls and women is considered excessive, rather than the system itself? Should we resort to sanitized language to describe our oppression, the same way liberation has been replaced by equality? Notably, the individuals who say these sorts of things frequently criticize liberal feminism, usually on the basis that it’s fake feminism, which is exactly what they’re engaging in when they eschew class analysis and refuse to name the problem. And anyway, why be offended by fake feminists when you don’t want to be a feminist yourself?

We use certain words constantly in feminist circles because the whole point is to talk about feminist concepts. If you get tired hearing about it, do the decent thing and bow out graciously and leave women to do the work. Don’t go whining to men and any woman who will tolerate it that women won’t shut up about our oppression. Outside of those spaces, people aren’t talking about patriarchy enough. Just because men bristle at the mention of male violence, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it.

Some arguments between feminists and not-really-feminists turn on the way in which mothers shield their boys from scrutiny. No mother wants to believe her son hates her and other females on some level. She’s inclined to believe she’s done a good job and may have even tried to avoid pushing masculinity on her son(s). But I suspect a mother who doesn’t want to call herself a feminist and parrots MRA talking points isn’t well prepared to raise a boy/man who supports the feminist struggle and treats women and girls with respect. If boys themselves weren’t a threat, many of us girls wouldn’t have experienced all manner of violence, including sexual violence, at the hands of boys. And yet we have.

There’s also the claim that feminism is the province of middle class educated women: “I’m working class and we don’t do academic feminism (paraphrasing).” A lot of radical feminists are working class and have never taken a women’s or gender studies course. I certainly haven’t and I certainly don’t come from a middle class family. Those of us who don’t fit this characterization are able to understand that naming the class of people who oppress us is critical to our liberation from them even if we believe the oppressive behaviour is learned and not biological. It doesn’t require a degree.

And what’s up with this business of identifying as a feminist, anyway? What does that even mean? Given the nonsense around identifying as a woman, or black, or disabled, we should be clear that some things are objective; words have meaning. Mere utterance doesn’t make something true, e.g. a man who says he’s a woman or non-binary is a man no matter what he says. If you satisfy the definition of feminist (what it actually means, not the bullshit version patriarchy has cooked up), then aren’t you a feminist?

You may not want to stain yourself with the title but you are what you are. You may resist in order to avoid some measure of punishment, just as some women and girls try to identify out of femaleness. The logical parallel should be evident to anyone who rejects gender identity. So if some women don’t want to call themselves feminists for whatever reason, they’re probably more male-centred than they’d like to admit. One might argue that what really matters is the work they do – tireless, brilliant, amazing work which benefits all women. That’s fair. We should give credit where credit is due.

But women aren’t fragile creatures immune to critique. Our predecessors defiantly marched behind the feminist banner. Our rights are once again under attack: our bodies, our spaces, our language. Now is the time to proudly reclaim the legacy of feminism. We don’t need another word to describe who we are. We already have one. It was taken from us. Whichever new one you try to use, they’ll try to take it from you too. Feminism, female, woman, vagina, mother, breastfeeding, menstruation, intersectionality, homosexuality, oppression, biological sex, patriarchy…

I say we stand our ground and say, “No, fuck off, you can’t have it, it’s ours.”

How gender critical are you?

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The phrase ‘gender critical’ has become commonplace in discussions around gender identity. In many ways, however, it mimics gender ideology’s propensity for confusing language and contradiction.

A quick primer if you haven’t read my blog or radical feminist work: humans are a sexually dimorphic species consisting of females and males, the two sex classes. ‘Intersex’ is a misnomer as people referred to as such are technically female or male but have sex organs that haven’t developed properly; they’re not a third sex. Sex is about reproduction, which requires a female and a male. Like other species, we’re wired to instantly recognize sex because our continued survival as a species depends on it. There are physiological differences between the sexes which are designed to facilitate reproduction, but they don’t extend to cognition, personality, aptitudes, hobbies, etc. There’s no female or male brain. There are many boys who take after their mothers and girls who take after their fathers. It’s not as though those genetic traits that females inherit from their male ancestors are rendered inactive. The truth is personality is highly individualized, shaped by genetics, environment, and one’s choices.

Gender, on the other hand, is the social hierarchy that shunts females and males into two separate, opposing, and unequal social classes. Females are trained into femininity and males are trained into masculinity. It starts before birth with ridiculous “gender reveal” parties and continues from there nonstop. The first thing people ask when they see an infant is, “Is it a boy or girl? Adults speak differently to babies once they know their sex. Masculinity encourages males to engage in the sort of behaviour that affords them power and dominance, while femininity encourages females to be self-sacrificing, self-limiting, and obsessed with being attractive and available to males.

Yet how many women who refer to themselves as feminists still perform femininity? Feminists used to recognize that beauty practices rob women of our hard-earned money, time, and focus, and are physically damaging. How many years of the average woman’s life are aggregately spent on hair removal, makeup application, hair styling, fashion and clothing, and other rituals? How many self-described feminists or supposedly gender-critical women take their husband’s last name as though they’re still a man’s property? Germaine Greer is correct that “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” but perhaps even less of an idea of how much women have learned to hate themselves.

There’s a glaring contradiction in being a woman who says girls should be able to be and do whatever they want while performing femininity.

I argue that women have a responsibility to live this message. To show girls that not being feminine isn’t just an option, but a necessary step to liberating themselves from patriarchy. This isn’t a choice men will support, including men who claim to be gender critical. It’s not even a choice many women will encourage other women to make. Because women who perform femininity do so knowing they’ll be judged, mocked, and far less able to attract or keep men as romantic partners if they don’t. This is where liberal feminism creeps in: women feel they’re being attacked personally and claim they just happen to like femininity, that these considerations are superficial and simply a matter of individual choice. But if you’re straight or bi and have hairy legs, don’t wear makeup, and dress solely for comfort as most men do, your dating options pretty shrink drastically.

Radical feminists don’t play these games. They’re not merely critical of gender. They want to abolish it. This means that as much as masculinity is inherently toxic, so is femininity. One can’t exist without the other. There’s no reforming gender roles. Femininity isn’t just harmful when men dress up in lingerie, become submissive or masochistic “sissies,” or perform their fetish in public and in female spaces. Sure, it’s atrocious that gender identity is enabling more and more men to deny their privilege and openly eroticize women’s oppression. But they’ll continue to do this as long as there’s a gender role attached to women to perform, because it’s the act of occupying this inferior sex role that excites them.

Canadian pop music artist Shania Twain has spoken about how sexual abuse by her stepfather made her hide and hate her female body. Every girl experiences female objectification and misogynist discrimination and abuse, and now with the gender identity cult offering them a way to dissociate from girlhood and womanhood and/or alter their body to make it unrecognizable as female, they’re doing exactly what you’d expect girls to do in a world that hates them.

Female celebrities are the most obvious example. Their brand follows the liberal feminist you-go-girl template of self-objectification and overt sexualization. They’re steered in that direction by everyone around them and thought we’re told they’re happy and powerful, they, like all women, know exactly what’s expected of them from years of being groomed by society at large. The path of least resistance is to create a narrative “owning” one’s oppression. The resulting contradictions are exemplified by Twain’s rationalization of how following a personal tragedy at the age of 22 she “began to embrace her identity as a woman”:

“All of a sudden it was like, ‘Well, what’s your problem? You know, you’re a woman and you have this beautiful body.’ What was so natural for other people was so scary for me. I felt exploited, but I didn’t have a choice now. I had to play the glamorous singer, had to wear my femininity more openly or more freely. And work out how I’m not gonna get groped, or raped by someone’s eyes, you know, and feel so degraded.”

Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Twain understands womanhood as an identity because defining womanhood as embodiment means that women are nothing more or less than an adult human female, and that’s just not good enough. It’s not just liberal feminists who perpetuate this message. Though not so overtly, many women who consider themselves gender critical may criticize gender rhetorically, but they don’t quite follow through on that conviction. It’s no coincidence that the women who are most visible in this space are quite feminine-presenting. As the brilliant radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys clearly and concisely explains in the video below, we can’t effectively challenge gender identity or transgenderism while holding onto femininity.

Sexual harassment is so over

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I logged into my Meetup account today because apparently someone sent me a message. I didn’t recognize the name. It was from a man named Ben who is also a member of a nature group. I’ve never attended an event.

Ben thought it was imperative to tell me he thinks I’m looking good. He’s grey-haired, looks like he’s maybe in his 50s and is seated beside a woman who’s wearing a wedding ring and seems close to him. Maybe she’s his sister?

FYI – I look like I’m about 25.

I joined the group because I want to see trees. Not dicks. If I wanted to be looking at dicks instead of getting some wonderful fresh air, I’d be looking at dicks. It’s not all about dicks.

Women are people. Not objects of conquest, robots, blank slates, holes, brainless zombies standing around waiting to be interrupted by a perpetual teenager. When I’m waiting for the bus on a given day, I’m thinking about the errand I have to run after work, what to make for dinner,  or that weird dream I had last night. All of those things are exponentially more important than what Mr. Macho Mouthbreather has on his mind. Nothing says “you’re my property” like assuming your intimate thoughts are important enough to spew to a woman you don’t know.

Of course, it’s about power – not attraction. Sometimes men feel the need to tell a woman that they don’t want to rape them. Like that’s supposed to make them sad.

Almost every day, another allegation surfaces of a powerful man who made a woman feel like garbage because he could. Far too often, a woman is assaulted by a strange man or (more likely) assaulted or killed by a male partner. We’ve gone too far now in mainstream culture to pretend that this is acceptable.

There are some issues that divide feminists. This isn’t one of them. There are two sides in this debate and they’re clear: either you’re committed to challenging male entitlement or you don’t value the lives of women. Call it what you want. Even if you’re watering it down as “sexual harassment” instead of male violence, it’s front and centre in the media now and there are just too many fed up women to let this go.

At around the same time I joined the nature group, I also joined a women’s hiking group. Everyone has been friendly and respectful. Some women met each other on hikes and are now dating. I’ve been an active member for months and have never gotten a creepy message.

To me, women’s spaces aren’t about avoiding men. They’re about connecting with people I feel safe around and realizing how much power women have when we get together.

What Hillary Clinton means for feminism

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Feminist Current has published a fantastic article by Marie Crosswell entitled Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of liberalism, not feminism. I urge you to read it. Everything from the title to the well-argued points are exactly what feminism needs right now. I wanted to add a few points of my own to bolster the great case that Crosswell has made and to put another much-needed article of dissent out there. Nothing I’m saying is original. This started out as a comment posted on the site in response to liberals but I decided it needed its own space.

 

“Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women.” – Hillary Clinton [source]

Scott Eisen/Getty Images

Scott Eisen/Getty Images

It’s the job of feminists to critique and analyze every supposed representative of our movement. Women haven’t died and made incalculable sacrifices so that modern feminists could make excuses and settle for half-assed solutions to the domination of our species by males. We need to carry these women’s work on our shoulders and prove that it wasn’t all in vain. Feminists are having to learn this lesson over and over and over again because the movement coddles people who can’t think beyond their knee-jerk denial.

The question simmering beneath the debate is simply this: Who are you here to defend; one woman or all women?

Patriarchy runs down to the core of this rotten society. It requires a radical solution. At what point do we realize we’re decorating a tree that needs to be taken down? We know the system has many tentacles that women often only have the time or energy to focus on individually. Hillary Clinton is not one of those people. She’s white, rich, and powerful. She’s smart. She could be a formidable force but she has chosen to mold her politics to a template that does not work, and I doubt very much that she doesn’t know that. She could have decided to extricate herself from a party that recently decided, extending the DOJ well beyond its legal mandate, that sex-based protections under Title IX mean nothing because some men have confused the stereotype of femininity with the material reality of womanhood itself. Whoever can’t see how damaging this is – that it is the erasure of females as a distinct class of people whose needs should be protected – needs to call whatever it is they’re doing something other than feminism.

The question of just how feminist Hillary Clinton is has been articulately laid out by many feminists, but some people don’t think they need to internalize that info because Clinton supports abortion. How many feminist-identified politicians are against it? When you’re done counting to zero, ask yourself whether you want to keep running on this hamster wheel. Liberals are never willing to face the ugly truth and stand up for real change – and that’s dangerous.

You might have good reasons for voting for Clinton and we can certainly appreciate the good things she’s said and done. I for one will be celebrating when (I hope) she kicks Trump’s ass and outshines her own philandering husband. But none of these things make her worthy of being the face of feminism. Can we finally admit Clinton’s limitations and instead set our focus on doing the work that we know only we are willing to do?

The world has seen a number of female leaders. Thatcher broke that glass ceiling a long time ago in the U.K. How much of a difference did that make for women? She wasn’t a feminist by any means, so it’s not an apt comparison on that level. But she was a neoliberal – a capitalist individualist – whose policies weren’t so different from those endorsed by Clinton all these years. A leader’s support for women shows not only in the comments they make explicitly about women but also in their policy, particularly as it concerns education and the economy, since these areas are key drivers of sex-based inequality under the current system. Being the most exposed and least valued, women are the first to suffer, forced into work that even the poorest men can avoid, along with the risk of unwanted pregnancy and their role (voluntary or not) as the primary carers of children and other family members.

Stopping at reproductive rights leaves a huge gap that fails to address the cause of sexual violence (masculinity) or the ways in which women who are further marginalized because of their ethnic backgrounds, disability, civic status, etc. are coerced into making impossible ‘choices’. As quoted above, she’s said that she doesn’t even understand why all of this is happening. I too want to believe her heart is in the right place but the depth of her ignorance is disappointing and her contradictions form a clear pattern.

An impressive list of countries including India, Guyana, Mali, Sri Lanka, Nicaragua, Argentina, Indonesia, Liberia, Philippines, Malawi, and Brazil have elected female heads of state. I think it’s important to ask how the lives of women and girls have changed as a result. For instance, what has Angela Merkel in Germany done for female victims of violence, not only at the hands of immigrant gangs but also at the hands of white German men who prey on poor women who are often trafficked from economically depressed regions, in mega brothels? One of the fascinating bits of history revealed in the Ascent of Woman BBC series is that women have taken power many times throughout human history, some of whom used that power to help their sisters while others didn’t or couldn’t. Worse yet, neither Canada nor the U.S. have managed to elect a woman as prime minister or president. So I absolutely want to see that happen.

Ultimately, it’s a trademark liberal strategy to fool the optimistic ranks into believing that a token woman in a powerful position is a sign of fundamental change. Does it make anything more than a little dent in patriarchy? It sure does enrage MRAs to think of a woman representing a state that they believe should be protecting their own privileges. And it gives many women and girls hope. Leaving aside the question of the degree to which a U.S. president is a true leader rather than a figurehead, having a woman in that role means something. The problem is that the liberal elite are very good at exploiting this something, blowing it out of proportion, and hoping that women will be content with it because they didn’t get stuck with an openly fascist president whose hatred of women is part of his appeal.

Women can’t afford to fall for the spectacle. The good news is that feminism is not one woman, and it remains up to all of us, as it always has, to overcome male power.