(Yesterday, 3:30 AM)OffMyTit Thank you! I get so sick of “progressives” angry at republicans for doing the right thing as if the option was denied to them. It’s what makes me worry that they will reinstate all this nonsense the second democrats get back in office.
Of course they will! It'll be among the first things the next Democratic president does, made especially easy by the fact that the Republicans aren't codifying any of this stuff into law properly with actual legislation. Presidential decrees are easily and frequently reversed by the next president from the other party. Frankly though, that is not a serious concern of mine.
From a radical feminist standpoint (or mine), the main purpose of pursuing the advancement of women in the legal arena is the cultivation of a revolutionary climate. Does the pursuit of reforms like these -- whether they're achievable or not -- help clarify the class character of womanhood for the female sex? That's the kind of question it's our purpose to focus on here. Let's not totally lose sight of what our goal is. We are not women's rights advocates, we are women's
liberationists! We are about making revolution. We are about fighting cultural battles that raise the consciousness of the female sex. Maintaining and clearly standing for a correct definition of womanhood is part of doing exactly that. That is what matters the most, not whether these reforms are enacted. Reforms are not our goal. I say this simply to dissuade from obsession with partisan politics. Ours is to stand on principle because the principle is what raises the consciousness of girls and women toward a fuller realization of their interests as a class. If we can tangibly improve the lives of girls and women along the way from here to there, that is a favorable bonus, but not the goal.
(Yesterday, 5:50 AM)YesYourNigel I like how you put that: "fascist crusade against freaks". It really encompasses the whole approach in just a few words.
Thanks.
I try to be good at words anyway, ha ha!
Quote:I wonder if you're assuming that I'm coming from a place of criticising liberals for not doing enough for women while poor poor conservaturds get treated as a random force of nature that can't be judged for what is doing.
Not at all!
Quote:No, rather I am against acting as if these policies are anything other than an extension of the conservatives' erosion of women's rights that objectively place women in a worse position than we were at before. Falling to recognise that is how you get dumb women getting convinced that conservatives care about them because trans is the litmus test of women's rights issues (because eww men in dresses, we hate how humiliating that is compared to real virile male abusers) instead of, ya know, the entirety of women's rights themselves.
This is also the same trickery that gets used to (re)sell religion to women who take issue with some of the godawful "sexualised is empowerment" parts of liberalism, because see, they want you to cover up your sinful body and they don't like porn for making us stray from our reproductive duties! It's feminism!
You can't view these policies in a vacuum because they are informed by the rest of misogynistic attitudes that WILL extend to the rest of their policies. You can't cherrypick it and pretend we're on the same side as long as you ignore the other 90% of what they're doing against women.
No one here is "pretend[ing] we're on the same side" as Trump or thinks he's anything other than a disgusting, lifelong sexual predator and a fascist, we are lauding a singular positive development for women. That is all.
If there's one sense in which I agree with the crux of your argument here though, it's that sometimes certain corners of this movement (mostly the older ones) become so fixated on combating the gender identity movement that I think they lose perspective. The younger women, who bring any social movement its real energy, are drawn to radical feminist scenes by their sexual politics (by which I mean their sex lives, their dating lives) and frankly are often bringing their queer politics with them. The 4B movement subreddit, for example, mandates trans acceptance, which means that I can say nothing about queer politics there. Hell, even some black pilled women's spaces are open to trans-identified men these days! I think here in the United States, the reality is that the radfem movement and perhaps even some of the post-radfem zones out there, are just going to wind up generationally conceding the gender ID issue in effect and I worry about that a little.
That said, what 4B and Escape the Corset represent is definitely more important to me than what like Vexxed and Reduxx do. The emerging crisis of heterosexuality is the heart and soul of (serious) feminism's future and I am all in on that front regardless of how the feminist fight against male appropriation of our identities concludes.
