Quote:With the resurgence of the women’s rights movement in the middle 1960’s the question of female separatism quickly came to the fore. The critical issue was the demand for groups both of and for women.

Of course, there had been groups of women long before this: in the political spectrum these ranged from Women’s Strike for Peace on the left to the League of Women Voters in the middle to the Daughters of the American Revolution on the right. In addition, there were myriad non-political women’s organizations — ladies’ auxilliaries, women’s clubs, women’s colleges, the YWCA, etc. The exclusively female composition of these groups alarmed no one because their goals, no matter how much they differed from group to group, were the same in the one crucial respect of not addressing the question of women’s rights.

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1. Re/constructing French Feminism by Lisa Adkins and Diana Leonard
   
2. The Category of Sex by Monique Witting 
   
3. The Practice of Power and Belief in Nature by Collete Guillaumin 
   
4. Our Costs and Their Benefits by Monique Plaza
   
5. Natural Fertility and Forced Reproduction by Paola Tabet
   
6. Sexualised/Sexed/or Sex- Class Indentity? by Nicole-Claude Mathieu
   
7. Rethinking Sex and Gender by Christine Delphy.
   

Quote:"Woman as Force in History" by Mary R. Beard is a pioneering work that seeks to explore the historical role and influence of women, challenging the traditional narratives that often overlook their contributions. Beard investigates the dichotomy between the traditions surrounding women's roles and the realities of their experiences, particularly in the context of Anglo-American legal frameworks. The book critically analyzes historical documentation and interpretations, highlighting the omissions and biases present in male-dominated historical accounts.

Beard delves into various aspects of women's lives throughout history—economic, social, educational, and intellectual—while also examining how different scholars, including historians, have perceived women's roles. She critiques prominent historical works for their limited acknowledgment of women's influence, using examples to illustrate how these omissions distort our understanding of past events.

Despite its significance, "Woman as Force in History" garnered mixed reactions from contemporaries, with some praising its efforts to rectify historical injustices, while others criticized its conclusions and writing style. The book's revival in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the women's rights movement, underscoring its lasting impact on discussions surrounding gender and history. Overall, Beard’s work represents a significant step in recognizing and amplifying the contributions of women throughout history.

Quote:This article seeks to establish the connection—via shared discourse—between Incels and mainstream pornography. With an interdisciplinary approach which involves a Corpus Linguistics analysis of Reddit forum data, research into digital behaviors, and a feminist critique, this article focuses on the commonalities between the language of pornography and that of Incels. In doing so, it demonstrates how both pornography and Incels are different manifestations of the same misogyny. The findings of this study highlight the normalization of violence against women (VAW), which continues to be endemic in society, enabled and exacerbated by contemporary technologies.

Quote:Studying the discourse of r/incels allowed us to unveil the ideological context that underpins this community, to identify how assumptions that underpin “extreme” discourse are also present within the mainstream majority, and to demonstrate how these flow into each other in a mutual process of production and reproduction of language, behaviors, and attitudes. While perhaps less pervasive and persistent than other forms of misogyny, Incels’ sexism is one of the faces of societal misogyny based on biological determinism and a binary gender distinction. It is rooted in the same misogyny of ordinary sexist jokes, assumptions, everyday division of labor, and media representations, including mainstream pornography and, for this reason, should not be conceptualized as exceptional or unusual. By continuing to focus on what makes the community “extreme,” the risk is ignoring what makes it similar to the mainstream, thus contributing to the belief, often spread by mainstream media, that misogyny is only a problem of specific individuals and their specific circumstances (Tranchese, 2019, 2020), rather than also linked to institutionalized misogyny, ingrained in the fibers of society. In fact, while some members of the Incel community have committed acts of VAW, informed by their misogynistic attitudes, most crimes against women are not performed by members of this community, but by the mainstream majority. As suggested by Connell (2005), “[o]n a world scale, explicit backlash movements are of limited importance, but very large numbers of men are nevertheless engaged in preserving gender inequality” (pp. 1816–1817).

The issue, therefore, is a broader one and a cultural one; neither Incel ideology nor mainstream pornography should be problematized separately or insulated from discussions of women’s equality, because these practices are not detached from other forms of misogyny but are an extension of these and symptoms of structural misogyny. Neither pornography nor Incels created misogyny, but misogyny underlies and correlates both practices, which, therefore, should be understood as part of a “networked misogyny” (Banet-Weiser & Miltner, 2016) that, separately or cumulatively, causes harm and is not limited to the online world. While the internet, as a “site of social and cultural reproduction that reflects real-world patterns” (Lewis et al., 2017, p. 1464), enables the exponential replication of misogyny by inventing, spreading, and reproducing techniques to attack women (online and offline), online misogyny is not a product of the technology, but a result of the society that shaped it.

Quote:When your rape is entertainment, your worthlessness is absolute. You have reached the nadir of social worthlessness. The civil impact of pornography on women is staggering. It keeps us socially silent, it keeps us socially compliant, it keeps us afraid in neighborhoods; and it creates a vast hopelessness for women, a vast despair. One lives inside a nightmare of sexual abuse that is both actual and potential, and you have the great joy of knowing that your nightmare is someone else's freedom and someone else's fun.

Quote:The reality for women in this society is that pornography creates silence for women. The pornographers silence women. Our bodies are their language. Their speech is made out of our exploitation, our subservience, our injury and our pain, and they can't say anything without hurting us, and when you protect them, you protect only their right to exploit and hurt us.
Pornography is a civil rights issue for women because pornography sexualizes inequality, because it turns women into subhuman creatures.

Quote:As an anthropologist, I am intrigued by the possibility that culture shapes how biological scientists describe what they discover about the natural world. If this were so, we would be learning about more than the natural world in high school biology class; we would be learning about cultural beliefs and practices as if they were part of nature. In the course of my research I realized that the picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female. The stereotypes imply not only that  female biological processes are less worthy than their male counterparts but also that women are less worthy than men. Part of my goal in writing this article is to shine a bright light on the gender stereotypes hidden within the scientific language of biology. Exposed in such a light, I hope they will lose much of their power to harm us.

Quote:During the years in which the women's liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured society in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness.

The idea of "structurelessness," however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women's liberation ideology.

Quote:Ideas have real world consequences. What I want to do today is to compare the ideas in radical feminism with those in feminist Postmodernism, especially as regards two concepts: class identification and the difference principle. I will illustrate how these two notions played out in the case of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears Roebuck (1973-1988).

The central question for feminists has always been: how does the oppression of women work? Where does it come from and how is it maintained? We can’t dismantle any structures that we do not understand. Effecting change depends first on our analysis of the problem.