Honestly the amount of “anti radfems” who eagerly spread their posts, their articles, or their most famous quotes, recommend their books, praise them, use their rhetoric, etc…. it’s shocking sometimes.
If you want to claim you’re anti radfem, maybe you should look into what radfems believe, who spreads their rhetoric, what their rhetoric sounds like, who is famous among them, what works they produce, etc., so you can stop saying you hate them and never want to show them support while simultaneously actively supporting them all the time and gushing about how great or smart or wonderful they are?
I mean doesn’t it seem counterproductive to make no effort to make sure you’re not knee deep in radfem rhetoric before you share something while also saying you don’t want to share stuff dripping with radfem rhetoric?
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to see a post that’s basically like “I support sex workers and hate swerfs and also here is why I love Andrea Dworkin and her explanations of why sex work is evil and anti women.” Which might sound like an exaggeration, but a lot of you “anti swerfs” really seem to love famous swerfs… And the same can be said of “anti twerfs” who seem to love transmisogynists…
You need to learn that something doesn’t have to say “I hate trans women and sex workers” to be radical feminism and that it often can sound like a really reasonable, well thought out, meaningful and deep analysis of society to the untrained ear that can’t pick up the tiny little signals that tell you a radfem wrote it. So train yourself!
And don’t expect trans women and sex workers to train you and do all the work of making sure someone isn’t a twerf or swerf for you. You have to pull your own weight here.
At the very least, look up famous radfems! Read a wikipedia article on radical feminism! Something! That knowledge would really help a lot of you and would make a huge difference for you.
Just think about it, okay? Because if we want to make safe spaces for trans women and sex workers, what is currently happening is not going to do it. So let’s change what we are doing. Okay?
this website has got to stop treating sex as something that’s inherently impure, dangerous, and disgusting
Funny, from where I’m sitting, it looks like sex is treated as compulsory, and even if you’re asexual you’re weird if you don’t at least want to read porn.
the thing is, these perspectives aren’t as exclusive as they sound at first
sexual moors are contradictory and impossible all the time. you can have people who are simultaneously aphobic and bigoted towards even the most vanilla of kinks. You have a ton of people who see sex as natural, inevitable - and therefore people who don’t want it as unnatural - but also as something dangerous, something that has to be strictly controlled and something that’s only morally ok in narrowly defined circumstances. that’s the dominant cultural perspective, but shades of it travel into queer spaces all the time, removing some gender barriers but maintaining the same fundamental “you must experience attraction to the people and ideas that we’ve decided are ok”.
It’s the classic “if you don’t want it, you’re a prude; if you want it, you’re a slut” catch-22, with a socially progressive hat. It’s not really a good situation for anybody.
You really nailed this description, thanks.
This goes with how radfem rhetoric is often essentially patriarchal and conservative in nature, due to being a re-skin of the authoritarian cultures its adherents were usually raised in.
the 80s was such a weird time to like be doing feminism. You might think you see some bad things on tumblr but like people were publishing things like this back then. The more things change the more they stay the same I guess
Love that you can just drop this weird sentence in a footnote at the beginning of a chapter as if that statement on its own doesn’t require like a massive amount of theoretical work behind it that is just handwaved away. Like a ‘realization’ is self authenticating evidence. This is like Berdyaev “this was once revealed to me in a dream” level citation but not even in theology.
I think mainstream academic feminism might have been at its absolute worst in the 80s
That would certainly make sense with how the people saying these things today are also usually anti-intellectual. Their shit is out of fashion in academic circles, so suddenly they think education is fake.
The Dworkin-MacKinnon (Anti-Pornography) Model Ordinance was written in 1983, and it defined pornography:
1. “Pornography” means the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also includes one or more of the following:
a. women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; or
b. women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy humiliation or pain; or
c. women are presented as sexual objects experiencing sexual pleasure in rape, incest, or other sexual assault; or
d. women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or
e. women are presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or
f. women’s body parts-including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, or buttocks-are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or
g. women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or
h. women are presented in scenarios of degradation, humiliation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.
2. The use of men, children, or transsexuals in the place of women in (a) of this definition is also pornography for purposes of this law. 3. “Person” shall include child or transsexual.
Note that this means ANY erotic depiction of anyone being submissive, would be porn. Any use of dildos or sex toys makes something “pornography.” Any focus on body parts, also.
The law also wanted to criminalize production of pornography: “It is sex discrimination to coerce, intimidate, or fraudulently induce (hereafter, “coerce”) any person into performing for pornography, which injury may date from any appearance or sale of any product(s) of such performance(s).”
The producer could be sued, even if the performers had signed a contract; even if the performer was paid, knew it was for porn, and cooperated with the production. This was intended to stop all erotic movies and artwork - if the models and actors could sue you, years after the fact, even if they were entirely willing - you can’t run a business with that risk.
Note that it also includes text. All H/C fic with an erotic component would be considered illegal pornography under this proposed law. (It did not become actual law, but anti-porn laws in various areas may have been inspired by it.)
“Any woman may bring a complaint hereunder as a woman acting against the subordination of women. Any man, child, or transsexual who alleges injury by pornography in the way women are injured by it may also complain.”
“ (It did not become actual law, but anti-porn laws in various areas may have been inspired by it.)“
it did somewhere in Indiana with the help of some christian fundamentalists (which is the first sigh you might be on the wrong track) but got struck down.
also, Trans-inclusionary radical feminism is odd to think about. it’s like “yeah let’s ban porn to protect women, but let’s throw a bone to trans women while we’re at it”
Love when terfs start replying to my posts thinking they’ve found some argument that’ll make me stop and go “shit. maybe you’re right? maybe treating people like they’re subhuman is the way to go?”
If a trans woman became chess world champion, terfs would unironically go: “It’s unfair, male brains are much smarter than female brains. It’s well known that women are fucking stupid. #feminism”
They literally did this to a trans woman who won a game of jepoardy named Amy Schneider.
Like they unironically argued that men are “socialized to like trivia more than women” and “men are genetically predisposed to have faster reaction times than women” and other complete nonsense.
“Women are fucking stupid and inherently inferior to men” - terfs, without a single fucking shred of irony or self-awareness
And then they do backflips to say how Not Misogynist this is.
