Why, Yes, Feminism Does Have To Support All Women, Even The Ones You Don't Like, That's Kind Of The Whole

we need more mean bisexual radfems.

Boston Bisexual Women’s Network (Sep/Oct/Nov, 2008)

my professor spent our entire seminar whining about how there’s too many girls in our group and not enough boys. he was like “i’m not saying women can’t be good surgeons but we need more men” no, we don’t. men suck. deal with it.

National Biways (Aug/Sep, 1994)

"is xyz rape, is abc rape" is just the wrong way to approach discussing rape as a feminist. what you're doing when you're concerned about absolute parameters is centering what we should consider allowable by men. why center that. it's not that "everything" is rape, it's that you need to completely shift your paradigm. you need to consider what it means for women to move in a world where their sexual violation is essentially a given and up for negotiation. what does discussing rape actually look like when completely, one hundred percent centering the experiencing and feelings of violated women and completely disregarding what would be helpful for men to think is "only so bad."

My “all rich people are bad” brother would lose his fucking mind if I said “All men, including you”.

“Errr I don’t exploit you”, oh but when I had to walk to school in a dense black abaya and long hijab under the sweltering heat and you walked alongside me in your loose dress shirt, your privileged ass never showed any meaningful sympathy?

When you got to play sports outside all day but we girls couldn’t because of our restrictive wear and fear of male discrimination and sexual harassment, was it not your privileged ass that didn’t mind?

When we went to the beach and or swimming pools, it wasn’t you that only wore shorts swimming comfortably while I was covered head to toe in my burkini, still being leered at by the creep across the pool so I couldn’t even enjoy myself?

When our male cousin lived with us during the summer, was it not us girls that had to dress modestly and ‘behave’ in our own fucking homes while you played video games shirtless?

When our baby brother was growing up, was it not you that never changed his diaper once in your fucking life despite us being only a year apart in age?

When you started studying Islam just like me, was it not you that accused me of being blasphemous when I brought up concerns about sexism?

You saw obvious discrimination, you experienced privileges and benefitted, and you never once helped. I don’t care that you were ‘nice’ to me and joked around with me and hung out with me sometimes— the structure of inequality that you never cared to address is clear in my mind.

All men, INCLUDING YOU.

Thank you! I'm currently reading (Un)kind by Victoria Smith on a recommendation from here, and it's incredible just how much weaponised kindness from female socialisation has weakened us as a class.

I think it's also important to remember that few women would even recognise throwing other women under the bus for "acceptable feminism."

I know that I was abused, and when I was safe, I sought out therapy. It was that work with my therapist that allowed me to see just how bad it was. When she first mentioned that I was made to constantly question my reality, that sounded absolutely absurd. To cut a long story short, with her help, I ended up realising that I didn't just "need a little support," I had CPTSD and the abuse was horrendous.

Going through that shifted my perspective about feminism. Patriarchy and female oppression is that abuse, but on a global scale and spread across every woman in different ways.

The reason that I mention all that is that abuse survivors sometimes can't see the abuse that they're going through. They don't even register that they're avoiding words or phrases. They might not even recognise how much of their perspective has been deliberately warped by their abuser(s). It might not even occur to them that putting themselves first is even an option.

When that's scaled up and made much more subtle, and the patriarchy works to whisper more manipulation, it's not a surprise that there are a fair number of women who are trapped by "be kind!"

Feminism is only kind to women. We can choose or not to be compassionate and supportive of men, but the point of feminism is to be technically unkind by taking away things that men have felt entitled to for so long. It's not a surprise that the patriarchy is obsessed with ensuring that we know that we're supposed to be the kind ones.

The greatest trick of the patriarchy was to teach countless generations of women to be kind.

We can talk about statistics all day long, but the weaponisation of our compassion is what keeps us on our knees.

When we see studies about violence, the immediate reaction is but men can be victims, too, and examples like that are why the false ideas of the patriarchy hurts men, too and feminism is for everybody are so prevalent. Women have been so broken down by generations upon generations of manipulation through be kind that is feels wrong, that it feels psychologically painful to centre ourselves.

Instead of women being able to come together and fight for our rights as one, this malicious forced compassion makes us sideline and silence ourselves, with the reward being tricked into feeling like I'm a good and selfless person. When women dare to centre ourselves and put ourselves first reasonably, then we're gaslit into believing that we're being selfish, cruel and even violent, and when other women snap and snarl, tired of our treatment, then they're entirely dismissed as being any modern version of hysteric.

Men like to hide behind the idea that we're the manipulative ones that psychologically damage, but without a thousand generations of men reinforcing that we should think again and actually have kindness and compassion for others, women as a whole would be able to see through the blinders of oppression.

After all, to be anti-prostitution has been reframed as hating sex workers.

Fighting against systemic violence and rape against women is ignoring male victims and supporting female perpetrators.

Protecting female-only spaces is excluding a vulnerable minority's right to exist.

Few ordinary women want to be made to feel like they're hateful or cruel. As soon as we talk about women's issues, examples of individual men are brought up, and women are tricked into talking about them by either proving how kind we are ("of course I don't want anyone to be raped, male victims deserve help!") to distract us from our issues and re-centre men again, or women dismiss that obviously malicious call for compassion ("feminism isn't about men, sort your own issues out!") and then men use it as a reason as to why feminism is evil, because anything without kindness and compassion is wrong.

Women need to be taught that it's not unkind to put ourselves first, and that men use our compassion against us.

In feminism, our kindness and compassion must be reserved for our fellow women.

Women can be kind and compassionate to men in their private lives if they want, but that isn't part of feminism - and they need to be reminded that they won't get that kindness and compassion returned.

Ways In Which Harry Potter Is Bigoted Trash

Rowling uses names like Cho Chang and Kingsley Shacklebolt for her Characters of Color.

Werewolves are a metaphor for HIV. Fenrir Greyback is a werewolf who likes to infect young children. Seeing as the Aids Crisis primarily affected gay men and there is a stereotype that gay men are sexual predators, this is pretty damning. Especially seeing as she has no visibly queer characters in her story.

Dumbledore is the only confirmed queer character in her story and she kills him off. I suppose Grindelwald was also confirmed as being gay, but that's not the best representation seeing as he was evil. She never explicitly states either of these characters are queer in the text, though.

Dobby wanting to be free is treated as an anomaly amongst the house elves. The rest are content being slaves.

When Hermione creates S.P.E.W. to try to help free the house elves and gets them rights, Ron and Harry both become annoyed with her and Ron outright mocks S.P.E.W.

The book treats any character who is overweight poorly. Typically, heavier characters are either nasty people or incompetent people whom she makes fun of.

The whole thing where the girls can get into the boys' dormitories but the boys can't get into the girls'. You could probably find something transphobic here, especially since JKR is a TERF, but even so, she ignores that through the use of magic, the girls could be just as dangerous as the boys.

She is oftentimes misogynistic, as seen when Mrs. Weasley believes the rumors spread by Rita Skeeter in Witch Weekly and begins to treat Hermione, a fourteen-year-old girl, poorly for them, but treats Harry just the same.

Even characters we are supposed to like, like Hagrid and Ron, make nasty comments about Muggles. And not just the Dursleys. Ron even makes ignorant comments about Muggle doctors, calling them people who "cut people up" and acting like they aren't as good as wizards. Considering they can't just wave a wand and make everything better, what Muggle doctors do is amazing and we all know it.

The goblins are antisemitic caricatures.

Feel free to add onto this if there's any I missed. It's been a long time since I read the series, so there's probably something in there that I've forgotten about.

Evening Silence (c. 1900)

Wilhelm Kotarbiński (1848 - 1921)