TERFs don’t want to save trans men and AFAB nonbinarys who don’t look like GNC women.
The want to detransition us, force us to accept our “role” as women, make us proud of the parts of ourselves that often make us the most uncomfortable in our own skin.
If the trans person in question is white, they want to use our wombs to produce more white babies. Because don’t forget, you can never part the racist from the sexist.
And if someone’s too far gone, if they’re too loud and brash and wield their words like a baseball bat. If they can’t be silenced, then they want to kill us. Demean us, dehumanize us, use us as a warning to younger, closeted trans people.
Look at them. Look at what testosterone has done to their bodies, the personalities, their souls. You don’t want to be like that, do you?
TERFs say the want to save us. They don’t.
They want to kill us.
y'all have exactly 0 experience w radfem ideology and it shows
Telling this to a former non-TERF borderline radfem is honestly hilarious~
So you agree? You have no experience with actual radical feminism
“borderline radfem” lmao
@happysadyoyo Your post is so completely wrong about radical feminism that I am certain you were never a “non-TERF borderline radfem”, this lie doesn’t take. We are left-wing and our feminism is logically intersectional, in the original and true definition of the word, coined by black feminist and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw. “TERF” is a word you use against such a broad range of people (but, what a surprise, all women !) that I have no doubt there’s women in there that are indeed racist and agreeing with this white supremacist fantasy of birthing white babies, however they are not feminists and even less radical feminists (you know the RF in the acronym), I can’t believe we even have to say that. It’s as if talking to toddlers, trying to explain to them basic facts, that’s how uneducated you are about this movement.
Radical feminism is also known for its anti-natalism but sure do talk about how we want to “use our (trans men) wombs” for racist reasons. We advocate for the right for women to get an abortion if they want it, no exception, this includes trans men of course (I’m sure you know that, since we’re demonized for saying that trans men and women share the same biology, are female). All of your pamphlet is ridiculous if you care to read even just ten per cent of anything we write/say). Wanting to kill you ?! False. I’m going to surprise you tonight but wow we even want trans people to be treated equally to everyone else and not be discriminated when it comes to work/ housing/medical care, etc. “Look at their soul”, we don’t even believe in the religious concept of a soul, that’s something you people from the gender crowd believe in toughly though.
Why do you think it’s so bad that we want to “make (you) proud of the parts of (y)ourselves that often make us the most uncomfortable in our own skin.” Many of us were dysphoric ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with feeling better, with healing. We don’t want to force that on you though, this is something only you can do, in your own pace. There’s no “role” inherent to being a woman (you did put the word role yourself in quote, so why continuing the sentence ? Was this a spark of clarity about woman not being a role ?) femininity is the role and as feminists we criticise gender/gender roles. The term “gender critical” may help you to see that, this is if you choose to not be intellectually dishonest.
I will finish with this : I’m a radical feminist and I came across trans men heavily brainwashed by porn and bdsm who are on this very website indulging in a “kink” of forced detransition. I didn’t linger but it seems to be a growing community since I’ve noticed a good number of them in a short amount of time in these “nsfw” circles. Like any of my feminist sisters I could recognise that as self-harm, self-hatred, not authentic, unhealthy, and I did send a few messages about how they shouldn’t force themselves to detransition. Such thing should come from a place of healing, like I said, not because you were forced by someone else or because you now think “god didn’t intend you to be trans but to follow your feminine essence” or whatever religious sexist nonsense the detransitioners who did it for religious reasons are on. If anything any of what these trans men wrote about their “fantasy” of forced detransition (mind you, they can be very active trans activists all the while doing that) was sad and honestly enraging. It comes with sense there was a big layer of sexism in these posts, wanting to be reduced to a subservient place, to be used by men, to have no authority on their own body, etc, and some are so brainwashed by the “culture” of these porn-addicted spaces that they’re getting closer and closer to doing it.
Do you really think we would be in favour of that ?! Everything in this type of behaviour screams “needs therapy”, a real one, which is exactly the most “extreme” solution we push for. Radical feminists don’t want to harm trans men and non-binary identifying females, we recognise an experience, a pain, more and more our own, and being honest about it as feminist women does not equal any of the word you tried to put together here.
Jamie Read, 31, attacked his girlfriend so ferociously, she thought she was going to die. He had followed her home after drinking in a pub. In court last year, Ramsay Quaife, prosecuting, said: “All of a sudden, he grabbed her throat and squeezed her hard. The victim was barely able to breathe… She saw him take six steps back before lunging at her and kicking her in the face with the sole of his trainer. He repeated this twice more.”
Read admitted assault occasioning actual bodily harm. The judge, Recorder John Trevaskis, said Read wouldn’t receive rehabilitative help in prison and gave him a 16-month jail term suspended for two years. Read walked free from court.
Next month, on 7 June, as part of the Domestic Abuse Act (2021), non-fatal strangulation (NFS) and suffocation becomes a free-standing offence, punishable by up to five years in prison in England and Wales. Campaigners including the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) and We Can’t Consent To This – who challenged the defence where the perpetrator claims it happened as part of “rough sex gone wrong” – have long argued that NFS, if prosecuted at all, was frequently charged as common assault, receiving a sentence of a few months.
An estimated 20,000 strangulations a year are reported to women’s charities. “The vast majority are a way of exerting power, fear and control – but not fatal,” says CWJ’s Nogah Ofer. Prosecution is also impeded because it is often treated as a private matter, normalised by the increasing use of pornography. Yet NFS increases the odds of a woman being killed by a staggering seven times.
According to the Femicide Census, established by Karen Ingala Smith and Clarrie O’Callaghan, with whom the Observer has collaborated in a year-long campaign to better tackle femicide and violence against women and girls (VAWG), a woman is killed by strangulation every two weeks.
“The Femicide Census has consistently found that strangulation is the second most common method after stabbing that men use to kill women,” says O’Callaghan. “It’s long overdue that the criminal justice system catches up.”
In 2021, Anthony Williams, 70, “choked the living daylights” out of his wife, Ruth, 67. He received a five-year sentence after pleading guilty to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. The new NFS offence is a vital opportunity to put a brake on coercion, control, intimidation, violence and killing – all of which statistically impact on women far more than men.
However, while senior judges and the judicial colleges are in discussions with the Ministry of Justice, nationwide training for police, health workers and all those engaged in bringing a perpetrator to trial, so far, appears non-existent. “Women’s lives are at stake. The government should be seizing the initiative and ensuring that everyone involved is trained,” says Julia Drown, patron of the charity Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse (AAFDA), and a member of small group of experts who have been lobbying for accelerated action.
Last year, Sam Pybus, 32, pleaded guilty to manslaughter after strangling Sophie Moss, 33, during what he alleged was consensual sex. He was jailed for four years and eight months – a sentence that triggered a public outcry but was upheld by the appeal court. A pathologist’s report found Moss’s injuries “do not suggest a very prolonged or very forceful strangulation”. Strangulation does not need to be prolonged or forceful to cause serious long-term damage.
Dr Catherine White is the foremost expert and researcher in strangulation in the UK. She is scathing about the lack of progress. The voluntary expert group of which she and Drown are a part has struggled for months to raise £7,000 to pay for two excellent half days of free training in NFS. Finally, NHS England provided the funds.
“Hopefully, we can ignite a fire in the belly for more training. But why are we volunteers doing this?” White says. “The Ministry of Justice should be knocking on my door, asking for training. The government says it is spending millions on VAWG but, when you look at the scale of the challenge, it’s peanuts.
“No one seems to be in overall control, driving forward a co-ordinated response. It feels like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The impact of strangulation, control and sexual violence is huge, yet the societal and government response is so lacking.”
Last year, White and colleagues published I Thought He Was Going to Kill Me, a three-year study of 204 adult cases of NFS as part of a sexual assault. Some 96.6% of the victims were female. In 27% of the cases, the woman had been strangled before by the same perpetrator. Over one in six had been strangled to the point where they lost consciousness.
It takes skill and training, often not found in GPs’ surgeries to detect the signs. One American study reported that “NFS might well be the equivalent of waterboarding – both leave few marks; both can be used repeatedly with impunity”.
White’s study reported that a male handshake has 80-100lbs per square inch (psi) of pressure. It takes 20psi to open a fizzy drink can. It takes only 4psi to occlude a jugular vein.
Strangulation is external pressure to the neck that cuts off air, or the flow of blood to the brain (choking is different, caused by an internal obstruction to the airwaves). For those who survive, symptoms include strokes, depression, memory loss, seizures, motor and speech disorders and paralysis. The connection of these symptoms to NFS is often not recognised.
White’s commitment to properly tackling NFS was triggered by taking a course at the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention, Texas, co-founded in 2011 by lawyers Gael Strack and Casey Gwinn. The institute now trains thousands of frontline workers every year across the US.
A medical assessment, vitally, has to include imaging (MRI and CT scan) and forensic documentation of internal and external injuries. This approach has helped the San Diego domestic violence homicide rate to drop by 90% since the 1980s.“Strangulation is much more common than we realised – but also so much more serious then we ever gave it credit for,” says trainer Cat Otway.
Forensic physician Dr Helena Thornton has worked at St Mary’s Sexual Assault and Referral Centre, Manchester, with White for 27 years and is registrar of the faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine. The General Medical Council refuses to allow forensic and legal medicine to become a specialisation so, incredibly, there are no national guidelines on training, qualifications and exams. In addition, senior forensic clinicians are retiring and not being replaced – so who will give evidence in court?
“St Mary’s is commissioned by police and the NHS but, in a lot of areas, the service has been outsourced for the lowest price, as cheap as possible,” Thornton says. “In some parts of the country, you might see someone who has received only three days’ forensic training. The faculty sets out what to expect from good treatment.
“When I see a patient, questions have to be asked, such as did you black out? When you came round, had you wet or pooed yourself? If you lose control of your bowel, that isn’t fear. It means you are seconds away from death.
“It’s embarrassing so a woman is unlikely to volunteer that information. If you haven’t been properly trained, you’re not capturing the evidence.”
Alarmingly, if you have been strangled but not sexually assaulted, it will be extremely difficult to find the level of examination required. White would like to see a branch of Strack’s institute in the UK, but that, too, has proved a struggle. “Everyone thinks it’s a good idea but, like training, no one seems to have a budget. I’ve seen statements where it’s just said, ‘red mark on neck’. What the heck is that – a felt-tip pen? A bruise?
“That lack of information influences whether the police and the Crown Prosecution Service decide to continue with the case. When you see the unfairness of the system for patients, that’s what gives me the energy to keep on fighting.”
Over the past two years, a national conversation about VAWG has been prompted by lockdowns, rising rates of domestic abuse, the exposed criminality of some police, and the shocking deaths of Sarah Everard, Bibaa Henry, Nicole Smallman and Sabina Nessa, among many others. Still, as O’Callaghan and Ingala Smith have argued for years, little attention is paid to the misogyny that is VAWG’s root cause – and to prevention.
The three aims of the Observer’s End Femicide campaign, now concluding, are: name it (government is reluctant to use the gendered word “femicide”, a killing of a woman by a man). Secondly, know it, for example, by improving data on racially minoritised women; and thirdly, stop it.
The government has a number of initiatives, including a domestic abuse plan and a VAWG strategy, while investing small pots of money, for instance, in police training (£3.3m). However, weighed against the estimated cost of domestic abuse alone, £66bn a year, and the plummeting rates of conviction – 90% of cases of domestic abuse brought to the police in 2020 did not end in a charge or summons – so much more is required.
“It feels as if government is only scratching the surface of the transformation we need,” says Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) Coalition, representing over 120 women’s specialist services, activists and survivors. “Who is holding all these strains of work together? Who is accountable when policies fail?
“The hypocrisy of the government is that in the Queen’s speech there was a raft of alarming legislation that directly attacks women’s and survivors’ rights, such as scrapping the Human Rights Act, an essential tool in challenging failures by the state to protect women and girls.”
On 8 June, it’s the 10th anniversary of the government’s signing of the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, known as the Istanbul Convention (IC). The IC’s articles cover issues such as high-quality holistic services and appropriate funding and support for victims, overseen by a monitoring group. Once ratified, a government is legally bound to comply with the review process. The government has announced it will ratify in July but not yet include women with insecure immigrant status who have no recourse to public funds. (A pilot study is examining the experiences of migrant women.)
Hannana Siddiqui of Southall Black Sisters says she is “extremely concerned” about this two-tier system. “All women have a human right to protection from abuse.”
“While this reservation stands,” says Lisa Gormley who helped to draw up the IC, “women’s rights’ advocates will continue to call for justice and safety for all women and girls without discrimination, without limitations.”
“The convention is the gold standard in how you prevent and tackle VAWG,” Simon says. “It’s vital that there aren’t gaps in support. It’s a fundamental human right for all women to feel safe and free.”
Sex positive feminism is a bit like communism: to a certain type of person — one who has never had to live at the sharp end — it will liberate us all. It just hasn’t been done properly yet.
Come the true sexual revolution, there will be no violence, no exploitation, no coercion masquerading as choice. If, as Eva Wiseman recently wrote in the Guardian, we are currently facing an anti-sex backlash, it’s only because “we were never truly liberated”, not least because “the sex-negative feminism of the 1970s and 80s never really went away”.
Damn those sex-hating prudes of yore! You’d have thought, given that the year is 2022 and we’ve had three decades of third-wave liberal feminist enlightenment, we’d have successfully destroyed the evil legacy of feminism past.
After all, there’s no doubt who won the Sex Wars, and it wasn’t Andrea Dworkin. Never has good ol’ agency-enhancing, stigma-destroying porn been more available. That’s good, right?
Yet self-styled “sex positive” feminists still behave like lost soldiers, unable to accept the war is over, even one in which they are the victors. They’re feminism’s Brexiteers, who won but can’t get over it, unable to admit that every challenge they now face is a practical consequence of their own politics.
But what else can a sex positive feminist do? As Louise Perry argues in her provocatively titled new book,The Case against the Sexual Revolution, “they have made the error of buying into an ideology that always best served the likes of Hugh Hefner and Harvey Weinstein, his true heir”:
And from this they derive the false belief that women are still suffering only because the sexual liberation project of the 1960s is unfinished, rather than because it was always inherently flawed. Thus they prescribe more and more freedom and are continually surprised when their prescription doesn’t cure the disease.
This argument has particular resonance for me; it’s what I used to believe, too.
Like most Generation X women, I was born too late to play any part in the “sex negative feminism” derided by Eva Wiseman. A young liberal feminist of the nineties, I was exactly the type of woman about whom Ariel Levy complained when she wrote 2005’sFemale Chauvinist Pigs, her trenchant critique of third-wave “raunch” feminism.
I refused to read Levy’s book when it first came out, certain it indulged in precisely the kind of puritanical slut-shaming which fuelled the sexual double standard which my generation of women were slowly dismantling, one blow job at a time. If women were still being treated like objects, it couldn’t possibly be because the so-called “sex-negative feminism of the 1970s and 80s” had been onto something.
On the contrary, I felt it far more likely that these older feminists’ view of women — a sexless, virtuous caricature — was to blame. They were the ones persuading men that women were incapable of being sexual subjects in their own right.
Like many early third-wavers, I largely invented what second-wave feminists believed, making liberal use of stereotypes. As Astrid Henry noted in 2004’sNot My Mother’s Sister, “reading some self-described third-wave texts […] one wouldn’t know that feminists in the 1970s and 80s even considered some of the issues that the third wave now champions as its own: masturbation, non-monogamy, bisexuality, pornography, sex work and, of course, orgasms”.
A feminism that makes of older women a prudish, pearl-clutching enemy, creates an illusion of control in the midst of chaos. It’s easier to kick back at Mummy than to challenge the men around you, easier to denigrate the past than to question the present, easier to say yes — and to work at reframing any personal misgivings as caused by “stigma” — than to face the social consequences of saying no.
It is painful to view your female body as a site of vulnerability, so why not treat it as the offering with which to bargain for its own liberation? And if liberation is not forthcoming? If the promised rewards — no more rape, free abortion, the end of shame — are nowhere to be seen?
Well, then, you always have more to offer. Maybe unlimited blow jobs and the end of pubic hair weren’t enough. What about anal? How about choking? Perhaps there’s another female orifice we just haven’t found yet.
No one can say my generation of women did not put the hours in. If the cure to the sexual oppression of women had been more sex and more porn, magically eradicating “stigma” and “shaming” one shag at a time, we’d all have been sorted long before Geri left the Spice Girls. Instead we’re watching the women who came after us face a sexual landscape even more violent and misogynistic than anything we had to endure.
his is why books such as Perry’s matter, and also why I fear there are many who may respond to it in the same way I responded to Levy’s. It is hard to abandon the security of a well-maintained lie, even one that ultimately hurts you. While I have misgivings about some of Perry’s practical suggestions, many of her arguments — that consent is an inadequate measure of what is and is not abuse, that the valuing of sexual freedom over mutual dependency benefits the most privileged at the expense of the least, that physical strength differences between men and women matter enormously — seem to me hugely important, yet completely absent from so much of the feminism I have known.
As Perry documents harm after harm inflicted on female bodies and minds in the name of “choice”, “freedom” and “empowerment”, it becomes more and more amazing to think that there are some who will call her bigoted or unsympathetic to the most marginalised, simply for telling the truth. That the sexual revolution has failed women ought to be uncontroversial, yet to say this is to risk accusations of prejudice, far-right leanings, anti-feminism, frigidity, puritanism and a host of other sins. Most women who are willing to do this are older than Perry herself.
The sexual liberalism of Generation X women is well-documented. To suggest that we were never ourselves cheerleaders for self-objectification requires a rewriting of history. Convenient though it would be to conflate us with 1970s anti-porn feminists, or 1950s housewives, these are different cohorts of women, each misrepresented in their own way. The truth is that today’s Helen Lovejoys are yesterday’s female chauvinist pigs.
There is a pretence that the ageing, “sex negative” prude is a cohort-specific phenomenon, a creature who will die out once the next batch of women, born on the right side of history, come to take her place. This is nonsense. “Sex negativity” — more accurately put as a clear-eyed awareness of the realities of male sexual entitlement — tends to be a lifecycle phenomenon. This is why the “frigid older woman” is such a longstanding stereotype, coming into being, as Sheila Jeffreys documents inThe Spinster and her Enemies, long before the start of feminism’s second wave.
By the time we reach middle age, we have lived through enough false dawns to know a remarketing of “just let the men do whatever they want” when we see it. Ageing has meant leaving the eye of the storm, then watching our own daughters enter it, transforming our own perspective on how much choice we ever had. We tried this solution already; we know it doesn’t work.
I can predict what the “sex positive” response to me telling the truth about Generation X’s sordid past might be: we just didn’t do things properly. We didn’t shag hard enough, or imaginatively enough, or in a sufficiently binary-breaking manner. We must have been retaining some residual prudery, even when insisting, Cool Girl-style, “go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind”. We still retained some ludicrously outdated beliefs, such as kink might be “unfit for children”.
It cannot possibly be that the more boundaries we ceded, the more we were expected to cede, with the promised payback in respect and safety always kept just out of reach. The spiral will continue unless we start to think differently. Or until the next generation of women runs out of pieces of herself to give.
Never did I think I would be explaining to my children’s teacher why I was concerned about a Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) organisation that promotes the use of butt plugs whilst simultaneously proclaiming that “virginity benefits no one” being brought into the classroom — but welcome to 2022.
The teaching of RSE became compulsory in secondary schools in England in September 2020. No doubt in part because of the understandable reluctance of teachers towards sliding another condom on a cucumber, many schools are opting to bring in external providers to deliver RSE.
These external providers, however, are subject to little regulation or scrutiny. According to Department for Education guidance, schools should be ensuring that external organisations deliver lessons which are evidence-based, age-appropriate and avoid reinforcing stereotypes or promoting political positions — in order to help pupils “be safe, happy and prepared for life beyond school”.
When I got the letter from my children’s school stating that RSE would be delivered by an external provider, I immediately looked them up on the internet. Scrolling down their Instagram page, I discovered that the organisation which would be running sessions with my 11-year-old daughter was promoting “world hand job day”.
Expanding my research across a range of RSE providers delivering sessions in schools, I came across content aimed at children and teenagers, including promotion of Bondage and Discipline + Sado Masochism (BDSM), explanations of what a swinger is, and celebrations of “sex toy day” which included a handy link to purchase a toy called an “anal training set” (a fancier name for butt plugs).
I discovered that there is a National Lingerie Day (who knew), where children are invited to celebrate the fact that “some people choose to wear lingerie for lots of different reasons” — the associated hashtags were #MensHealth and #MensSexualHealth. I assume this is advocating for kink practices or perhaps the fetish of Autogynephilia — where men are sexually aroused by the thought of themselves as female. For the parent who might be a bit concerned about the suitability of this messaging for their child, fear not, because our kids are reminded of their obligation to the planet and urged to “buy sustainable” when purchasing their lacy undies.
Let’s be clear, if any of the above practices float your boat, crack on, you’ll get no judgement from me. But why it might be necessary for children and young people to be educated through a tick-list of adult sexual practices, in order for them to be “safe, happy and prepared for life beyond school”, is far from clear.
Indeed, some of the “boundary pushing” appears downright dangerous. One Instagram post declared, “virginity benefits no one” and another stated, “Virginity is a Myth”. I vociferously beg to differ on that — virginity benefits children a great deal.
This is safeguarding in the simplest of forms. The age of consent is set at 16 years old for good reason. Undermining this basic premise reduces the boundaries of children, which makes it easier for child sex offenders to take advantage of them. Unfortunately, there will be children in every school who are being sexually abused. These messages risk normalising the abuse they are experiencing and the narrative of the sexual predator abusing them.
Clearly this is not the intention of RSE providers. I presume what they are trying to get at is a critique of the patriarchal construct of virginity and the ways in which women’s hymens continue to be policed — literally as well as metaphorically depending on where you are in the world — as evidence of their “purity”. “Virginity benefits no one” show the dangers of reducing these complex, adult conversations to four-word Instagram posts. Children are highly likely to take these messages very literally (“I need to have sex as soon as possible”, “If an adult makes me have sex, it’s OK”) because, well, they are children.
Basic facts and nuanced conversations reduced to simplistic hashtags is evident in how such RSE providers discuss sex, gender and gender identity. The result is a confusing mess. Females are erased from their own bodies through persistent references to “people with vulvas” and “people with periods”. In one cute meme, two penises chat to each other. Funky penis one says, “Hey, mate, looking good” and happy penis two replies, “Thanks, gal, you too”. The take-away from this is, according to the tagline, “your genitals do not define your gender”. They do, however, define your sex, and children need to know this.
RSE providers justify this sexually explicit language, discussion of adult sexual preferences and blurring of boundaries as necessary to convey a “Sex Positive” message. An RSE provider described sex positivity to me as about “choice, explicit consent, communication, freedom [and] body autonomy”.
Sounds good, right? Except in a world in which children and young people (and let’s face it, especially girls) are sexually harassed in the street walking to school, under pressure to conform to impossible beauty standards and forced to “prove” they are not “frigid” or a “slut”. The idea that they are free agents wandering around the pick-n-mix of sexual practices which they might or might not fancy trying out later in life is ludicrous. As one feminist academic who works on violence against women and the media put it to me, “through the ‘Sex Positive’ lens, everything is about ‘consent’, saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and other similarly simplistic ideas which make everything about the individual”.
The “Sex Positive” message also relies on mischaracterising what an alternative sex education might look like. Not convinced by “Sex Positivity”? Its supporters will tell you that you are “Sex Negative”, advocating for abstinence, creepy ceremonies in which daughters pledge their virginity to their fathers, and metaphorical conversations about the birds and the bees which are almost as confusing as the talking penises.
This is not true. Between stigmatising sex and promoting BDSM to teenagers, there is a balance to be struck. Getting RSE right is of vital importance for children and young people. Children need to be taught about their bodies and how they work. The stigma and shame which is still associated with girls on their periods needs to be broken down. The mechanics of reproduction need to be clearly explained so that a teenage girl knows that the risk of pregnancy depends on the sex, not the gender identity, of her partner. As children and teenagers are increasingly exposed to violent, degrading pornography, the ways in which this promotes misogynistic and racist stereotypes about women alongside unrealistic — and often painful and dangerous — ideas about what sex is, needs to be discussed in an age-appropriate way.
My advice to parents is that it’s always worth digging a little deeper into RSE sessions. Culture Reframed is an excellent resource for parents, Transgender Trendand Sex Matters have guidance for schools, and Safe Schools Alliance have some examples of concerns about some RSE organisations operating in the UK.
I suspect many will philosophise on the need to expand children’s learning on these topics, but for me one thing is certain: I will never agree that butt plugs and BDSM are a necessary topic for my child’s learning journey to healthy relationships.
To learn more about the harms of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, please visit our page on this topic and The National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s page on it:
Many thanks and well done to Stop Porn Culture, the London Abused Women’s Centre and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Pornography Harms) for their important efforts in creating, running or sponsoring this vital effort! Please like and support their Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and their other social media accounts and efforts as well!
~ Special thanks to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation for creating the graphics in this post and many other great ones like it for this campaign. You can find ALL the helpful graphics at the 50 Dollars not 50 Shades Facebook page, or at the page below by NCSE. We encourage you to share all of them!
It’s by our new anti-BDSM ally and collaboration partner RepublicofSandals, who does a great job explaining how sadomasochism exemplifies the contradictions, double-think and insanity found in “1984.”
To sum it up, BDSM is SEXUAL ABUSE and a form of OPPRESSION. It is NOT any form of love, freedom, liberation, play, or healthy sexuality.
Please watch it and share your thoughts! Let us know if you agree. Thanks! :-)
B = Bondage D = Domination, Dominance, Discipline S = Sadism, Sadist, Submission, Submissive, Slave M = Masochism, Master
OTHER DEFINITIONS (From Random House Dictionary)
SADISM
1. Sexual gratification gained through causing pain or degradation to others. (Psychiatry)
2. any enjoyment in being cruel.
3. extreme cruelty.
MASOCHISM
1. The condition in which sexual gratification depends on suffering, physical pain, & humiliation (Psychiatry)
2. gratification gained from pain, deprivation, degradation, etc., inflicted or imposed on oneself, either as a result of one’s own actions or the actions of others, especially the tendency to seek this form of gratification
3. the act of turning one’s destructive tendencies inward or upon oneself
4. the tendency to find pleasure in self-denial, submissiveness, etc
SADOMASOCHISM
1. interaction, especially sexual activity, in which one person enjoys inflicting physical or mental suffering on another person, who derives pleasure from experiencing pain
2. gratification, especially sexual, gained through inflicting or receiving pain; sadism & masochism combined
Practicing BDSM often leads to SEVERE ABUSE: A mentally disabled teen girl was imprisoned, trafficked and tortured — for SIX YEARS — by a couple who pimped her out for profit to other sadists for their sick sexual pleasure.
First she was groomed with pornography, as is often the case with sexual abuse victims:
“She described how the Bagleys initially showed her images and videos of people practicing bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism — or BDSM — and told her it was fun. She signed a contract on her 18th birthday that Bagley said made her his sex slave for life.”
Then she was imprisoned and tortured — sometimes for just for personal gratification, and sometimes being pimped out or turned into live pornography so others could take sexual pleasure in her suffering:
“The girl allegedly suffered water-boarding, electric shock, piercing and mutilation, according to the Kansas City Star.
Four other men have been charged for allegedly paying Bagley to have sex with his ‘slave’ and to watch webcam sessions of her being tortured.”
Clearly sadomasochism, pornography, prostitution and sex trafficking are all very closely related, and if one is against any one of them, one needs to take a stand against ALL of them.
READ THE REST of this tragic story that demonstrates the truly horrific harms of pornography and sadomasochism. WARNING – GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING!
I think the real key to helping women unpack why they claim to enjoy BDSM is asking not about their own arousal, but their boyfriend’s. Example:
Why does he get off on you saying “no” and “stop”?
Why doesn’t he get turned off when someone begs him to stop during sex?
Why does he get hard to see you bruised and hit?
Why isn’t he turned off at the thought of you being hurt?
Why is he turned on by thinking about you beingc hurt?
These are questions that just don’t have ~sex positive~ answers. They shine a light on how men are into role playing sexually assaulting their girlfriends.
And take sex out of the equation for a minute. Ask her who her best female friend is. Then ask her if she would punch this woman square in the face if her friend asked her to.
If her friend said her father used to punch her in the face and she’d like to be punched again to work through the trauma.
If her friend said she’d been watching people punch each other and that it seemed cool and fun.
If her friend boasted about how she wasn’t scared of a broken nose. If her friend said she would enjoy watching her cry.
Would she deck her friend? Or would she feel uncomfortable about being asked, and incredulous at the notion someone would do that to somebody they supposedly cared about?
Somehow when it comes to men’s sexuality women are often too forgiving. If you just focus on the violence and the brutality and point out that wanting to hurt someone you care about isn’t normal even if it is common, you might get her to see that BDSM is abuse.
There’s this new trend on TikTok (and probably elsewhere) of creepy males unloading their violent and misogynistic sexual fantasies onto public videos on their account and uploading it, in fact I’ve seen some on my FYP. If a single comment says anything about it being creepy or inappropriate, girls as young as fourteen respond with condescending emojis lamenting about “the VANILLAS finding this”.
Porn is getting more violent and our youth is consuming it, seeing effects of it in their peers, maybe even being asked by their boyfriends to perform degrading and humiliating acts meant specifically for male enjoyment. It’s awful name-calling, physical abuse. And there’s always this feeling that you have to push yourself to be comfortable with worse and worse treatment.
If the notion of being beaten during sex makes you uncomfortable, you’re “boring”, “vanilla”. I suspect more girls than one may think are being pushed into tolerating this kind of sexual treatment to please their male partners with such fantasies–partly because I’ve had that mindset before.
“safe words” are the most evil shit i’ve ever heard of like why do you need to make up safe words. why aren’t “no” or “stop” enough. like you guys are capable of hearing those words from your partner and carrying on having sex in spite of that? y’all belong in jail
the words “no” and “stop” should be enough to turn off every single person. Like regardless of your “kinks uwu” how can you hear someone begging “no” and “stop” and not feel disgusting????
It’s because men are getting off on doing things to women as we are begging them to stop, and women like feeling as though ~consenting~ gives us power over abuse we believe is inevitable.
The idea that recreating victims’ trauma as a kink is somehow good or “healing” in any way whatsoever is a dangerous lie crafted by abusers seeking to perpetually control/revictimize/take advantage of and attract a ready pool of fresh victims while absolving themselves of wrongdoing. All available evidence from research on trauma and related elements of psychology and neuroscience suggests it isn’t just useless to victims, it compounds preexisting harm.
A moment of silence for this person I just blocked.
But if anybody else is wondering:
Immersion therapy is a phobia treatment, i.e. it’s used to control irrational, disproportionate anxieties whose objects are in fact harmless. Variations on it may sometimes be used to manage triggers or avoidance issues descending from trauma—if certain loud noises cause panic attacks in a bombing survivor, or if a car crash survivor develops a fear of car travel, for example. To treat PTSD closer to its core, patients are encouraged to talk about or retell their trauma; “immersion” in this sense is immersion in one’s memory. The goal is to help curb distress during future instances of involuntary recall. The patient isn’t subjected to more bombings or car crashes.
If a doctor ever suggests reenacting a rape or similar event, CALL THE POLICE.
Hey! I’m going to pause my retching for a little bit to provide a source because apparently it’s just so goddamn important for someone to mention sources, mention their own (fucked up) stance, and then not provide their own sources, apparently. How’d we get here, again?
This is from Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Bessel is a psychiatrist focused on PTSD and trauma, and has done this since the 90s. Emphasis mine. Note that, shockingly, there’s not one positive implication of directly re-experiencing traumatic stimulus:
CBT was first developed to treat phobias such as fear of spiders, airplanes, or heights, to help patients compare their irrational fears with harmless realities. Patients are gradually desensitized from their irrational fears by bringing to mind what they are most afraid of, using their narratives and images (“imaginal exposure”), or they are placed in actual (but actually safe) anxiety-provoking situations (“in vivo exposure”), or they are exposed to virtual-reality, computer-simulated scenes, for example, in the case of combat-related PTSD, fighting in the streets of Fallujah.
The idea behind cognitive behavioral treatment is that when patients are repeatedly exposed to the stimulus without bad things actually happening, they gradually will become less upset; the bad memories will have become associated with “corrective” information of being safe. (33) … It sounds simple, but, as we have seen, reliving trauma reactivates the brain’s alarm system and knocks out critical brain areas necessary for integrating the past, making it likely that patients will relive rather than resolve the trauma.
Prolonged exposure or “flooding” has been studied more thoroughly than any other PTSD treatment. Patients are asked to “focus their attention on the traumatic material and … not distract themselves with other thoughts or activities.” (35) … Exposure sometimes helps to deal with fear and anxiety, but it has not been proven to help with guilt or other complex emotions.(37)
In contrast to its effectiveness for irrational fears such as spiders, CBT has not done so well for traumatized individuals, particularly those with histories of childhood abuse. Only about one in three participants with PTSD who finish research studies show some improvement.(38)Those who complete CBT treatment usually have fewer PTSD symptoms, but they rarely recover completely: Most continue to have substantial problems with their health, work, or mental well-being. (39)
…
Patients can benefit from reliving their trauma only if they are not overwhelmed by it. A good example is a study of Vietnam veterans conducted in the early 1990s by my colleague Roger Pitman. (44) … Roger would show me the videotapes of his treatment sessions and we would discuss what we observed. He and his colleagues pushed the veterans to talk repeatedly about every detail of their experiences in Vietnam, but the investigators had to stop the study because many patients became panicked by their flashbacks, and the dread often persisted after the sessions. Some never returned, while many of those who stayed with the study became more depressed, violent, and fearful; some coped with their increased symptoms by increasing their alcohol consumption, which led to further violence and humiliation, as some of their families called the police to take them to a hospital.
I really, sincerely hope anyone capable of firing about ten neurons of critical thought can piece together, from that last paragraph, the implications of trying to reenact a rape or other sexual trauma through kink when even talking about experiences makes people shut down jesus fucking christ.
Here are Bessel’s citations:
33. E. Santini, R. U. Muller, and G. J. Quirk, “Consolidation of Extinction Learning Involves Transfer from NMDA-Independent to NMDA-Dependent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 21 (2001): 9009–17.
35. C. R. Brewin, “Implications for Psychological Intervention,” in Neuropsychology of PTSD: Biological, Cognitive, and Clinical Perspectives, ed. J. J. Vasterling and C. R. Brewin (New York: Guilford, 2005), 272.
37. E. B. Foa and R. J. McNally, “Mechanisms of Change in Exposure Therapy,” in Current Controversies in the Anxiety Disorders, ed. R. M. Rapee (New York: Guilford, 1996), 329–43.
38. J. D. Ford and P. Kidd, “Early Childhood Trauma and Disorders of Extreme Stress as Predictors of Treatment Outcome with Chronic PTSD,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 18 (1998): 743–61. (There are 3 other articles lumped into this one.)
39. J. Bisson, et al., “Psychological Treatments for Chronic Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” British Journal of Psychiatry 190 (2007): 97–104. See also L. H. Jaycox, E. B. Foa, and A. R. Morrall, “Influence of Emotional Engagement and Habituation on Exposure Therapy for PTSD,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 66 (1998): 185–92.
Did anyone mention that exposure therapy is supposed to be done by a trained goddamn therapist, not your sadistic boyfriend?
BDSM is rape culture. Point blank.
Re-traumatizing oneself is a direct symptom of PTSD, not a coping mechanism. And it only reinforces the trauma response of the brain, so, yeah. Sadists sexually preying on traumatized people and causing them to re-traumatize themselves over and over is SEXUAL ABUSE
yeah, the ~it’s exposure therapy~ line doesn’t work anyways because your sadistic boyfriend who never even took a psych 101 course, let alone has a psyd, is absolutely not your fucking therapist and doesn’t know jack shit about therapy techniques. he also literally doesn’t care about ~helping you work through your trauma~ - he gets a free pass to rape you and hurt you without fearing repercussions. he’s taking advantage of your belief that retraumatizing yourself will be therapeutic.
