Old Misogyny: She Was Asking For It

Old Misogyny: “She was asking for it”

New Misogyny: “We need to critically examine the notion that all women are victims under a monolithic patriarchy and stop assuming that women need to be protected from sex and that they can’t make their own choices and be empowered by [prostitution/porn/surrogacy/statutory rape/bdsm], women who consider themselves victims need to take accountability for the choices they had.”

Sometimes it boggles my mind that women can spend decades of campaigning and get hardly anywhere, still have their rights up for debate as a political ploy or chipped away over time, and can have statistics and research to back up every claim and be laughed at, but some males go “actually, we’re women because we say so” and they’re let into female spaces like ????

due to some stuff happening in radblr recently i think it's time to say something about the nature of this space:

radblr is not a community, and i don't think anyone should be expecting us to behave like one.

and not because we don't deserve to be called out on bad behavior or for saying something that directly works against the goals of radical feminism, but because in the end, you are going to hurt and disappoint yourself if you enter this space and uphold it to the same standard than an actual, real-life community.

look, we all think we know what radical feminist theory is and how it resonates within each of us, but the truth is, this is an anonymous online space where anyone can enter and say anything about anything. we can say we do not tolerate specific beliefs (e.g. lesbophobia/racism/ableism), we can say you have to educate yourself and become an actual activist before you get to call yourself a radical feminist. but in reality, we have no way of moderating this space. we do not have control over anyone here, and it's very easy for blocked/deactivated people to come back under a different name.

what that means in practice is that there will be all sorts of women orbiting around the space, women who think they're radfems, women who think they agree with half of the stuff that is being said, women who believe in one single thing about the whole theory and nothing else, women who have no clue what they're talking about and women who are actively trying to work against the goals of radical feminism... and yes, unfortunately, also women who are passionate women's rights activists but who still have problematic beliefs about other marginalized people, and the depth and harmfulness of those beliefs will greatly vary between each and every such woman.

there will be women from different cultures and languages who get constantly misunderstood because they do not know the connotations of a certain phrase they keep repeating. there will be women who keep misinterpreting your posts on a regular basis because they think you're being too harsh about something, and defending their stance is personally important to their own identity. there will be women who have difficulties admitting they are wrong because they're scared of being humiliated. there will be women who are going to appear passively accepting even when they witness someone being bullied because they're tired, shocked or it triggers them. there will be women who consistently take the centrist route even when it makes them appear undecided and insecure. there will be women who are very quick-tempered and overreact to everything. there will be women who claim they're women, but they are actually not. and there will be girls who act like they do because they do not yet possess the analytical skills of an adult.

you can't tell the difference between these different people by a single glance. and you can't meaningfully tell the whole collective of radblr that "we should have known better" because even if we are supposed to hold onto a single belief system, we still interpret it from a wide variety of perspectives.

and look, that's annoying, because of course we all want more. we want to seek support from each other because it's so rare to see true female solidarity anywhere else. we crave these discussions because it so often feels like there's no one else we can talk to about feminism. we are desperate to have a community that we can rely on, women who will always have our back.

but radblr is not actually that. as long as we are operating on an online platform that is anonymous and not moderated, we are far from a safe space of any kind.

now what that doesn't mean is that radblr doesn't serve a purpose. in very literal terms, it changed my whole life - just by reading tumblr posts made by radfems helped me leave a religion, helped me understand my sexual orientation better, understand women's oppression at its entirety, develop critical thinking skills, unlearn a lot of female socialization, prioritize my own self-growth over the convenience of men, verbalize my vague discomfort around liberal feminist/queer theory, to mention some. that's far from nothing, especially when i know that's a common experience among radblr users in general.

but it bothers me to see women place all their trust on other users here and then curse the whole space and everyone in it once they receive resistance. it bothers me to see women show so much mercy and compassion toward any and all women across the board, just like they learned to do as feminists, extending their sympathies toward anti-feminists, tradwives and trans activists all alike... and then turn around and decide that radblr is a lost cause because a few random accounts here seem to think, idk, that lesbian women have privileges over straight women, or whatever the hell else they sometimes believe.

it bothers me to see you lose your patience over other women in this space so quickly. it bothers me that you are so ready to assume the absolute worst in all the other radfems because they see nuance in an issue that you think is black and white. it bothers me that you're so unwilling to be resilient for a movement that probably changed your life for good, but that has been forced to hide in an anonymous troll space like tumblr because there are so few other places where we can congregate freely. it bothers me that you want to throw out a whole garden of feminist thinking because it has a lot of weeds and you have no way of removing the weeds permanently.

again, i must repeat: this is not a community and women you see here are not any better or worse than the women you see anywhere else. we are not smarter or kinder, and we are not always who you think we are. while unlearning internalized misogyny, we did not immediately become enlightened about all other axes of oppression, and sometimes we are reluctant learners. sometimes we even lie about being a radical feminist.

now there's three things you can actually do about this:

1) build an actual community outside of tumblr. a place where women meet face-to-face and where their words have real-life consequences. that's not going to be a perfect space by any means, but it should be a space where you can expect to build actual interpersonal relationships with the others and rely on them more as a result.

2) withdraw from radblr and start reading actual radical feminist theory to give yourself perspective and clarity. give yourself a little distance, and then the potential bullies start losing their power over you.

OR, 3) you can hold your ground and remind yourself to not lose the focus of why you're here - to free women the same way you were freed when you first came here. call people out on their bullshit wherever you are able to and when you can find the energy to do so, but accept that this is an ongoing marathon that requires persistence and repetition, and it doesn't need to be perfect in order to bring change.

whatever you end up doing, do not lose hope. not even when those women you admired and looked up to, those women you considered educated and full of class-consciousness, turned out to be flawed in a way you didn't think they could be. they're still more similar to you than they are different, and your collective voice is still more effective than the voices of each of you if you decide to go separate ways.

I moral lesson I wish literally everybody would learn is this: the very same actions that keep you safe when you are powerless can be abusive when you hold power over someone. The difference between resisting subjugation and subjugating others is often more a matter of context than anything else. And when context changes, it can be hard to relearn one's behavior—it requires an active effort. Probably all of us have hurt others needlessly, in some way or another, by doing things out of a reactive instinct for self-preservation. Probably all of us have been hurt by others, sometimes very deeply, when they were acting out of the same instinct.

I don't like speaking about ethics in the language of blame, but insofar as blame is a coherent notion to begin with, I'll say this: neither is anyone evil for the failure to fully rework themselves and free themselves of bad habit after struggle, nor does the difficulty of reworking oneself excuse the abuse of others. Nor, though we may wish otherwise, is it always epistemically possible to our own actions with confidence in one camp or the other. We can only do our best to treat others well and at the same time ourselves, though it is often not clear how.

Chrysina sp., focus stacked