Queer Theory has caused this. Liberal anti-feminist women certainly joined the Queer Theory cause and championed rape and abuse of women and children along with the men, and liberal anti-feminist women have helped promote the queer movement, while calling it feminist. All of this is true. But liberal anti-feminism and Queer T…
Queer Theory has caused this. Liberal anti-feminist women certainly joined the Queer Theory cause and championed rape and abuse of women and children along with the men, and liberal anti-feminist women have helped promote the queer movement, while calling it feminist. All of this is true. But liberal anti-feminism and Queer Theory are two flanks of the same Trojan horse to feminism the left served up a long time ago—pornographers and the beauty and plastic surgery industries had a huge hand in co-opting the mainstream feminist movement, just as the trans humanists and the medical industrial complex have co-opted the “queer” movement—in order to avoid the real threat that real feminism posed to both capitalism and patriarchy; the anti-feminist feminist movement and anti-gay LGBTQ movement are, unsurprisingly, both great for business.
Radical feminism has always been much more focused on the material conditions of women, which is to say, reality. Protecting the most vulnerable women of society is a priority for radical feminism, eg the focus on combating prostitution violence and sex trafficking; whereas the priority for liberal feminism is getting rid of the wage gap for upwardly mobile women (the wage gap is a real problem—as with all inequality, it affects poor and racialized women the most—but it’s not the most important issue women are facing).
For me personally, the fact that rape is essentially decriminalized in the Western world should be an enormous scandal; fewer than one percent of rapists are estimated to see jail time, rape kits degrade in warehouses, most rape survivors know this and don’t bother reporting, most reported rapes aren’t investigated, and meanwhile at least twenty percent of Americans women are raped at least once in their lifetimes (many of us many more times than that), most of the resources to help us recover have dried up, we don’t even have female only groups in which we can talk about our experiences with other women anymore, or safe spaces of any kind (finding myself naked in a locker room when a man walks in would be absolutely terrifying for me), and this huge percentage of the population who has trauma related to sexual violence is as afterthought—or worse, “bigots in need of reeducation”—when it comes to the question of our safe spaces; the epidemic of rape and society’s indifference and mistreatment of survivors is a bigger scandal that the corporate wage gap, in my opinion. That’s why I care about this issue, among many other reasons (I also care about gender nonconforming children a great deal, and young gays and lesbians).
Real feminism also isn’t misandrist. Radical feminists don’t believe men are “just like this.” Rather, men are made like this like by society, and femininity can be likewise toxic (toxic submissiveness, as we see now with the “be kind” liberal anti-feminists). Not all men are violent, but all people in society are raised with these ideas—women can be horribly sexist to other women, too—and all men do benefit at women’s expense, while suffering from their own travails, because the patriarchy also entails a hierarchy of men, and indoctrinates men into stifling roles as it does women. Plenty of men resist this programming and are well-rounded and decent people, just as plenty of women resist our programming (often over many years of our lives), too.
This is not to say the idea of there being such a thing as masculinity and femininity (roles gravitated towards by the sexes) is inherently bad. Egalitarian cultures often also have gender roles, for example; there’s just no hierarchy based on them, and no one is assigned superiority or dominance on the basis of personality traits. Another key aspect of these cultures is that they do not mind when people stray out of their sex roles, since they don’t assign status to them, meaning that gender nonconformity (wanting to be more like the opposite sex, a common human variant) becomes a non-issue.
In any case, although individual feminists may hate men, often not without reason as our cultures are still insanely violent, from all my discussion in radical feminist spaces I can safely say that readers of radical feminist theory are not misandrists, they just believe that we live in an unhealthy culture, which raises boys and girls both in ways which are damaging to them and their relationships to their own and the opposite sex. And we know that men suffer, too.
I think how misogynistic our culture has become—we’ve basically just removed all of women’s rights in the USA—bears out the radical feminist argument. The very fact that any of this is happening—that the mainstream feminist movement was hijacked by pornographers and gender theorists—shows just how misogynistic our society is, and how indoctrinated women are; again, they’re not “misandric” at all; most women of my generation (Millennial) and younger are traumatized by the culture, support abusive men (which is why so many liberal women support the gender movement, despite it being distinctly anti-feminist in its embrace of sex role stereotypes), stay with, date and are used by abusive men, experience high rates of anxiety, depression, PTSD, are in complete denial (as most victimized women and men alike do tend to remain; I didn’t admit anything had happened to me until I was 30), and dealing with massive cognitive dissonance. Suicide rates in girls and young women are on the rise, due to the depression induced by the intensely gendered and increasingly predatory beauty culture standards and practices, and by spending long hours on social media, comparing themselves to these perfect airbrushed model women; the objectification of women is reaching new heights, and meanwhile, girls are so scared of boys and sex—and everyone is so online all the time—that as the porn addiction spirals out of control, and more and more porn is consumed and spycams and revenge porn become a problem, girls and young women are having less and less sex, and the youngest generation is having way less sex than Millennials or Gen Xers had (or have, for that matter)…as the culture becomes digitized and sexually violent, and all online, women have stopped having sex with men as much (it’s become a “crisis of single men,” and women opting out of dating, apparently).
So that’s how I see these women. They may be performatively misandric and also woke, but I know the women of my generation, the trauma they’ve been through, and the way they continue to engage in repetition compulsion of it, while promoting it; it’s really sad, actually. They promote prostitution while traumatizing themselves, they promote a degrading lifestyle to other women, all while talking about their man hate out of the other sides of their mouths; man hate one sentence, empowering blowjobs the next. “Consent is sexy, and sexy is mandatory” is the infamous motto of this crowd, and that’s how I see them: as women in an abusive relationship with the liberal left (and often, liberal men).
The relationship between the sexes has become quite toxic, as men do become more unsuitable and often angry partners. Promoting “sex positivity” has turned into rape culture, unsurprisingly, and is destroying relationships. This isn’t something actual feminists think is a good situation…the promotion of all these different new sexual identities, talking about sex all the time, being pro-kink, etc. are not “feminist” positions, while I would think pro-family positions are feminist positions (motherhood especially, and families in different types and structure, even if there’s criticism of the nuclear family). And I personally think respectful monogamy is a better setup for women than this type of performative sexuality.
However, there are roles put on us, which is all that actual feminist analysis points out. Lots of matriarchal cultures have extended maternal clans which raise children together, a different form of family bonding; we think of the nuclear family as being natural when it actually separates women from each other, when women could all help each other with the raising of babies. This is an example of being critical of roles in patriarchal society, for example. In no way does that deny the physical differences between men and women, nor the maternal desires of women. That’s just one example. There are many criticisms to be made of all aspects of the dominant culture, quite apart from its patriarchal structure.
I think feminism examines different types of societies and compares them, and studies the history of kinship, family, and the history of matriarchies and patriarchies. The Mosuo are a Chinese culture where the women live in kinship groups, and practice “walking marriage;” oftentimes couples do form a bond and practice monogamy, though a girl is free to take whatever lover she likes. She leaves the window open for him to come into her bedroom in the night. When women have children, they’re raised in the homes of mothers and grandmothers. The sons stay in the home, so male children get plenty of male role models from their uncles and cousins.
The society is peaceful and pastoral. The men have power too, and seem happy with the arrangement regarding family and kinship ties. It’s an egalitarian society in which the women live and raise their children in matrilineal clans, and adult men live with their families and court women from other clans. The women work harder than the men, I think, and the society seems fairly happy, overall.
A Mosuo man, when he heard about the nuclear family, said “why would you mix something as sweet as love with economics?” He was completely baffled by the idea, which just goes to show that we’re all a product of our cultures. I think that’s all that feminism is pointing out, regarding gender roles. Women are adult human females, regardless of how they behave or present themselves. Men are adult human males, regardless of how they behave and present themselves. Cultures vary widely on these points. There are cultures in which men dress up and dance for women! This more closely mimics male animals in nature, putting on a performance to catch the female eye. Western society might be the skewed society on that front too, who knows?
Certainly, though, for all its philosophizing, real feminism has never said that men and women were anything but their age, species, and sex, so I don’t think it’s fair to blame feminism or feminist analysis for this mess, especially as, which you say yourself, gender critical and radical feminists (actual feminists) are now most under attack. Liberal feminism bears some of the blame, though far from all or even most (that’s Queer Theory), but I don’t think it can even lay claim to feminism at this point, it’s so anti-woman, and so male-centering. The centering of male women proves the point about liberal women of a certain generation being actually quite male-centering… this is why they are so sympathetic to gender-confused men, even at the expense of their own rights.
(Continued)
Queer Theory has caused this. Liberal anti-feminist women certainly joined the Queer Theory cause and championed rape and abuse of women and children along with the men, and liberal anti-feminist women have helped promote the queer movement, while calling it feminist. All of this is true. But liberal anti-feminism and Queer Theory are two flanks of the same Trojan horse to feminism the left served up a long time ago—pornographers and the beauty and plastic surgery industries had a huge hand in co-opting the mainstream feminist movement, just as the trans humanists and the medical industrial complex have co-opted the “queer” movement—in order to avoid the real threat that real feminism posed to both capitalism and patriarchy; the anti-feminist feminist movement and anti-gay LGBTQ movement are, unsurprisingly, both great for business.
Radical feminism has always been much more focused on the material conditions of women, which is to say, reality. Protecting the most vulnerable women of society is a priority for radical feminism, eg the focus on combating prostitution violence and sex trafficking; whereas the priority for liberal feminism is getting rid of the wage gap for upwardly mobile women (the wage gap is a real problem—as with all inequality, it affects poor and racialized women the most—but it’s not the most important issue women are facing).
For me personally, the fact that rape is essentially decriminalized in the Western world should be an enormous scandal; fewer than one percent of rapists are estimated to see jail time, rape kits degrade in warehouses, most rape survivors know this and don’t bother reporting, most reported rapes aren’t investigated, and meanwhile at least twenty percent of Americans women are raped at least once in their lifetimes (many of us many more times than that), most of the resources to help us recover have dried up, we don’t even have female only groups in which we can talk about our experiences with other women anymore, or safe spaces of any kind (finding myself naked in a locker room when a man walks in would be absolutely terrifying for me), and this huge percentage of the population who has trauma related to sexual violence is as afterthought—or worse, “bigots in need of reeducation”—when it comes to the question of our safe spaces; the epidemic of rape and society’s indifference and mistreatment of survivors is a bigger scandal that the corporate wage gap, in my opinion. That’s why I care about this issue, among many other reasons (I also care about gender nonconforming children a great deal, and young gays and lesbians).
Real feminism also isn’t misandrist. Radical feminists don’t believe men are “just like this.” Rather, men are made like this like by society, and femininity can be likewise toxic (toxic submissiveness, as we see now with the “be kind” liberal anti-feminists). Not all men are violent, but all people in society are raised with these ideas—women can be horribly sexist to other women, too—and all men do benefit at women’s expense, while suffering from their own travails, because the patriarchy also entails a hierarchy of men, and indoctrinates men into stifling roles as it does women. Plenty of men resist this programming and are well-rounded and decent people, just as plenty of women resist our programming (often over many years of our lives), too.
This is not to say the idea of there being such a thing as masculinity and femininity (roles gravitated towards by the sexes) is inherently bad. Egalitarian cultures often also have gender roles, for example; there’s just no hierarchy based on them, and no one is assigned superiority or dominance on the basis of personality traits. Another key aspect of these cultures is that they do not mind when people stray out of their sex roles, since they don’t assign status to them, meaning that gender nonconformity (wanting to be more like the opposite sex, a common human variant) becomes a non-issue.
In any case, although individual feminists may hate men, often not without reason as our cultures are still insanely violent, from all my discussion in radical feminist spaces I can safely say that readers of radical feminist theory are not misandrists, they just believe that we live in an unhealthy culture, which raises boys and girls both in ways which are damaging to them and their relationships to their own and the opposite sex. And we know that men suffer, too.
I think how misogynistic our culture has become—we’ve basically just removed all of women’s rights in the USA—bears out the radical feminist argument. The very fact that any of this is happening—that the mainstream feminist movement was hijacked by pornographers and gender theorists—shows just how misogynistic our society is, and how indoctrinated women are; again, they’re not “misandric” at all; most women of my generation (Millennial) and younger are traumatized by the culture, support abusive men (which is why so many liberal women support the gender movement, despite it being distinctly anti-feminist in its embrace of sex role stereotypes), stay with, date and are used by abusive men, experience high rates of anxiety, depression, PTSD, are in complete denial (as most victimized women and men alike do tend to remain; I didn’t admit anything had happened to me until I was 30), and dealing with massive cognitive dissonance. Suicide rates in girls and young women are on the rise, due to the depression induced by the intensely gendered and increasingly predatory beauty culture standards and practices, and by spending long hours on social media, comparing themselves to these perfect airbrushed model women; the objectification of women is reaching new heights, and meanwhile, girls are so scared of boys and sex—and everyone is so online all the time—that as the porn addiction spirals out of control, and more and more porn is consumed and spycams and revenge porn become a problem, girls and young women are having less and less sex, and the youngest generation is having way less sex than Millennials or Gen Xers had (or have, for that matter)…as the culture becomes digitized and sexually violent, and all online, women have stopped having sex with men as much (it’s become a “crisis of single men,” and women opting out of dating, apparently).
(End)
So that’s how I see these women. They may be performatively misandric and also woke, but I know the women of my generation, the trauma they’ve been through, and the way they continue to engage in repetition compulsion of it, while promoting it; it’s really sad, actually. They promote prostitution while traumatizing themselves, they promote a degrading lifestyle to other women, all while talking about their man hate out of the other sides of their mouths; man hate one sentence, empowering blowjobs the next. “Consent is sexy, and sexy is mandatory” is the infamous motto of this crowd, and that’s how I see them: as women in an abusive relationship with the liberal left (and often, liberal men).
The relationship between the sexes has become quite toxic, as men do become more unsuitable and often angry partners. Promoting “sex positivity” has turned into rape culture, unsurprisingly, and is destroying relationships. This isn’t something actual feminists think is a good situation…the promotion of all these different new sexual identities, talking about sex all the time, being pro-kink, etc. are not “feminist” positions, while I would think pro-family positions are feminist positions (motherhood especially, and families in different types and structure, even if there’s criticism of the nuclear family). And I personally think respectful monogamy is a better setup for women than this type of performative sexuality.
However, there are roles put on us, which is all that actual feminist analysis points out. Lots of matriarchal cultures have extended maternal clans which raise children together, a different form of family bonding; we think of the nuclear family as being natural when it actually separates women from each other, when women could all help each other with the raising of babies. This is an example of being critical of roles in patriarchal society, for example. In no way does that deny the physical differences between men and women, nor the maternal desires of women. That’s just one example. There are many criticisms to be made of all aspects of the dominant culture, quite apart from its patriarchal structure.
I think feminism examines different types of societies and compares them, and studies the history of kinship, family, and the history of matriarchies and patriarchies. The Mosuo are a Chinese culture where the women live in kinship groups, and practice “walking marriage;” oftentimes couples do form a bond and practice monogamy, though a girl is free to take whatever lover she likes. She leaves the window open for him to come into her bedroom in the night. When women have children, they’re raised in the homes of mothers and grandmothers. The sons stay in the home, so male children get plenty of male role models from their uncles and cousins.
The society is peaceful and pastoral. The men have power too, and seem happy with the arrangement regarding family and kinship ties. It’s an egalitarian society in which the women live and raise their children in matrilineal clans, and adult men live with their families and court women from other clans. The women work harder than the men, I think, and the society seems fairly happy, overall.
A Mosuo man, when he heard about the nuclear family, said “why would you mix something as sweet as love with economics?” He was completely baffled by the idea, which just goes to show that we’re all a product of our cultures. I think that’s all that feminism is pointing out, regarding gender roles. Women are adult human females, regardless of how they behave or present themselves. Men are adult human males, regardless of how they behave and present themselves. Cultures vary widely on these points. There are cultures in which men dress up and dance for women! This more closely mimics male animals in nature, putting on a performance to catch the female eye. Western society might be the skewed society on that front too, who knows?
Certainly, though, for all its philosophizing, real feminism has never said that men and women were anything but their age, species, and sex, so I don’t think it’s fair to blame feminism or feminist analysis for this mess, especially as, which you say yourself, gender critical and radical feminists (actual feminists) are now most under attack. Liberal feminism bears some of the blame, though far from all or even most (that’s Queer Theory), but I don’t think it can even lay claim to feminism at this point, it’s so anti-woman, and so male-centering. The centering of male women proves the point about liberal women of a certain generation being actually quite male-centering… this is why they are so sympathetic to gender-confused men, even at the expense of their own rights.