<![CDATA[clovenhooves - Feminist Discourse]]>

<![CDATA[clovenhooves - Feminist Discourse]]> https://clovenhooves.org/ Wed, 06 May 2026 13:29:40 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[Please recommend me some feminist novels written by women]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1855 Sun, 04 Jan 2026 09:24:23 +0000 liping]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1855 I’ve read quite a few novels set in all-female societies, but they all depict men entering these societies, followed by the emergence of romantic or sexual relationships or the men’s prolonged stay—and I really dislike this trope. What I want to see is women entering all-female societies, with men either dying off or being driven out.
I know books like this are super rare, so could you recommend some female-centric books instead? No romantic relationships, and not too many male characters—ideally, women should make up two-thirds of the cast. I hope the stories highlight connections between women—they can be friends or foes, but these dynamics should never revolve around men. Also, I’d prefer if none of the female characters wear makeup.]]> I’ve read quite a few novels set in all-female societies, but they all depict men entering these societies, followed by the emergence of romantic or sexual relationships or the men’s prolonged stay—and I really dislike this trope. What I want to see is women entering all-female societies, with men either dying off or being driven out.
I know books like this are super rare, so could you recommend some female-centric books instead? No romantic relationships, and not too many male characters—ideally, women should make up two-thirds of the cast. I hope the stories highlight connections between women—they can be friends or foes, but these dynamics should never revolve around men. Also, I’d prefer if none of the female characters wear makeup.]]> <![CDATA[“True love” is sexist propaganda]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1835 Sun, 28 Dec 2025 04:22:32 +0000 ShameMustChangeSides]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1835 https://open.substack.com/pub/parisgitobu/p/true-love-is-sexist-propaganda?r=3aln0f&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Quote:Under a patriarchy, women are raised to be subservient to men. This service manifests mostly in the home, in child-raising and in community building. From this, men gain the invaluable labor of having someone take care of them and their kids. How men encourage women to continuously engage in this system is to romanticize it–literally.

]]> https://open.substack.com/pub/parisgitobu/p/true-love-is-sexist-propaganda?r=3aln0f&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Quote:Under a patriarchy, women are raised to be subservient to men. This service manifests mostly in the home, in child-raising and in community building. From this, men gain the invaluable labor of having someone take care of them and their kids. How men encourage women to continuously engage in this system is to romanticize it–literally.

]]> <![CDATA[My Journey Through Bolshevism]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1829 Sat, 27 Dec 2025 07:39:36 +0000 Impress Polly]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1829
My Normie Progressive Years

The September 11th terrorist attacks were what first got me interested in matters of public policy. Or more correctly, the way my country (the United States) chose to respond did. You know that one impractical person you knew back then who questioned whether the government should be allowed to keep track of what books you check out at the library (...well people still used those back then) and thought the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp was a bad idea from the outset? That was me. While even I wanted something done militarily about Al Qaeda after the attacks, I really, reeeeeaaaaally hated the suffocatingly jingoistic atmosphere that defined the media climate at that moment in time. For you Americans younger than me who think you've seen that before, no you haven't! You have seen nothing that way unless you lived through 2001-3 and were old enough at the time to know what was going on. Nothing like it has again happened since. Not here. To me, it was pretty fucking scary! I literally went to school on September 12th and there was a lengthy debate in our history class of whether we should abolish air travel. I am not shitting you! I overheard a couple guys at lunch the previous day suggesting we should nuke Afghanistan until the whole place is nothing but a giant crater. The media climate, which revolved around replaying the footage of the towers being struck from new angles over and over and over again and telling the stories of the deceased and their harrowing final moments seemingly one at a time for like six months straight, made it impossible to convince anyone that we were overreacting except for a fringe minority of hippie peacenik types who nobody took seriously (including me).

I was that one person who never bought the official narrative that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were teaming up to nuke us or that we were on a mission from Isaiah and noticed that both the sitting president and VP had extensive experience in the oil business. By 2003, I wasn't quite alone anymore and the previous governor of my state (Howard Dean) jumped in the presidential race as an anti-Iraq-War candidate. I voted for him. He lost the nominating contest though, so I didn't vote in the 2004 general election, as there were no anti-war candidates who were relevant. I voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party's 2008 nominating contest mostly because the political establishment had abandoned her in favor of Obama, so her's just felt like the more outsider campaign atm. She lost. I still voted for Obama in the general election because...the Iraq War, the economy (the crash had just happened), the cost of health care, warrantless wiretapping, gay rights (I was starting to come out of my shell that way), you name it frankly, though I think it worth saying that that was also the beginning of the end of my mainstream progressive era. I say "progressive era" because I never really was much of a proper liberal. Anyway, by this time I had already read Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Female Chauvinist Pigs, so my journey toward radical feminism had begun. I'd also started dabbling in Marxist politics though and you might say that disappointment with the early Obama years took me further down that road.

Into Marxism: Orbiting the Revolutionary Communist Party

The first stop on my journey through Marxist fringe politics was a little group called the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, or RCP for short. I never did develop much interest in the Frankfurt School type stuff you got on college campuses, as it seemed to me that that stuff never made a difference in the real world. I looked for something that had before and the RCP at the time had a Maoist reputation. It was this position paper of theirs on women's emancipation that ultimately sold me on their specific brand. I was impressed specifically by their concurrent opposition to both American imperialism and Islamist politics (as not all Bolshevik parties were equally against both), by their audacity to be not only pro-choice, but specifically take the stance that justice for women means there should be, if anything, more, not fewer, abortions happening, and by their principled stand against the sex industry (which was matched by few other Bolshevik groups that I found in my online research; the bulk embracing a frustratingly tolerant attitude toward spaces like Craig's List) and sexual violence against women of both consensual and non-consenting varieties. It almost felt like a Catherine MacKinnon sort of way of thinking to me; like how MacKinnon attempts to fuse Marxism and radical feminism together into a singular persuasion.

The reason I took inspiration from Maoism specifically was because over in Nepal a party of Maoist fighters led a successful revolt against their country's monarchy that resulted in it becoming a republic and adopting a new constitution. The story of their revolutionary struggle was in the news on occasion in that general window of time (mainly the late 2000s) as it unfolded. I thought it was awesome and that convinced me to look into Maoist parties here in the U.S. There was more than one of those here in America, but I landed on the RCP for the aforementioned reasons. I never formally joined, but I did participate in their orbit of front groups and help distribute their newspaper, simply titled Revolution. In 2010, I learned from a departing member of the RCP that the party was actually undergoing a transition away from Maoism and into frankly being a personality cult geared around the ideas of the party chair, Bob Avakian. He pointed out to me that the primer on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that used to appear on the site's left side had disappeared and explained to me that that was why, and also why all the new position papers had been coming out rapid-fire lately. BA considered his way of thinking to represent a new stage in the evolution of Marxist thought. (In fact, the RCP still believes this today.) ...Yeah. Suddenly the whole site dedicated just to Bob Avakian and his works and the constant references to BA across like every Revolution article made sense. That was the point where I knew their orientation was wrong and started looking for the next thing. This is when I discovered a fascinating Wordpress blog called Monkey Smashes Heaven.

Discovering the Leading Light Communist Organization

I was drawn to Monkey Smashes Heaven by its quirky title that was obviously intended to get attention. The title, I found, was a reference to a Red Guard pamphlet from the Chinese cultural revolution of the 1960s that read:

"Revolutionaries are Monkey Kings, their golden rods are powerful, their supernatural powers far-reaching and their magic omnipotent, for they possess Mao Tsetung’s great invincible thought. We wield our golden rods, display our supernatural powers and use our magic to turn the old world upside down, smash it to pieces, pulverize it, create chaos and make a tremendous mess, the bigger mess the better!"

And I was like... :meowwow:

I loved this geeky agent of chaos aura! :meowknife:

To top it all off, the masthead was a super-cool masterpiece of socialist realism (so-called) depicting a dancing, female People's Liberation Army soldier in the style of cultural revolution-era big-character posters and clearly taking inspiration from Jiang Qing's (Mao's last wife's) ballets. But like these things should be, the silly clickbait title and unapologetically retro Maoist styling concealed serious and thought-provoking content. MSH turned out to be the official blog of a new group called the Leading Light Communist Organization that promoted an ideology they (at least at first) called Maoist Third Worldism. The essence of Third Worldism, as distinct from other branches or offshoots of Maoist thought, is the idea of global people's war being the path to a communist future for humanity. Summed up originally in a celebratory text written by Mao's top military commander, Lin Biao, in 1965 called Long Live the Victory of People's War!, it calls for the worldwide emulation of the particular kind of revolutionary war that Mao had led against first the Japanese enemy during the Second World War and then from there to what was considered the country's national independence in 1949. More specifically, it calls for this model of struggle, built around the idea of identifying a main social problem to focus on and galvanize the public around and then gradually organizing and mobilizing mainly the peasantry into armed forces and encircling the urban centers from there, to be replicated by all poor countries as part of a single, global struggle against imperialism; mainly American imperialism specifically. But where Lin Biao's piece comments little on why this approach is necessary, simply remarking that communist revolution has been "delayed" in the Western world "for various reasons", the MSH journal expanded on this premise greatly, seeking to fill in the gaps as to why global people's war is needed to achieve a communist future. This is where we get to the key: the concept of bourgeois nations and proletarian nations.

MSH made a shockingly compelling case that the reason no communist revolution had ever taken hold in a First World country was because First World peoples had become bourgeoisified, which is to say bought off by plunder from abroad, and thus had no genuine working class anymore. The systematic theft of resources from Third World countries that were used to enrich First World populations as a whole in turn arrested the economic development of the former, making the overthrow of lackey regimes controlled by the imperial powers the primary task necessary to move humanity forward both in terms of economic and social development. Essentially they took the old labor aristocracy theory to its logical extreme, in other words, redefining the global proletariat more in terms of poverty than in terms of wage labor. What made this theory of the case so compelling to me were the statistics they brought to bare to substantiate it. The most powerful of all to me was their estimation of total global wealth and what it would look like for all of it that existed in the world to be redistributed equally. They took a generous estimation of the total global product and broke it up along equitable per capita lines and found that, as of 2010, an equal distribution of all the world's resources would allow each person the equivalent somewhere between $6,000 and $11,000 per year in contemporaneous American purchasing power, which they averaged out to realistically around $8,400 per person per year to be more precise. By contrast, the average person at the time was making roughly the American purchasing power equivalent of $1,000 to $2,000 a year, while the typical American was making more than $30,000 a year. Based on this breakdown of the global wealth distribution, the vast majority of the world's population stood to greatly benefit from a communist redistribution of the world's resources while, by contrast, nearly all residents of First World countries, certainly including practically all Americans, belonged to the richest 10% more specifically, including most of those classified as below the American poverty line. More detailed analysis from their various articles and commentaries revealed that the only reason the official poverty rate in America remained above 2% was because it had been generously redefined in the 1990s. Americans had trouble affording homes mostly because they kept buying bigger and bigger ones. More and more Americans gained access to a college education, bigger homes, more property in general. For perspective, at the time I myself was making around $16,000 a year, which meant that I was richer than at least 85% of the world's population, and yet I thought I was poor because the U.S. government defined me as poor! Then the difference in average hours worked per week by country put the whole matter into even sharper relief for me.

These revelations stunned me and turned my mental world -- my whole concept of what it meant to be exploited and poor -- upside-down. For the first time in my life, I felt shame in my country, not just for the actions of my government that I had no control over, but because I myself, so this data made me feel, was materially benefiting to a tremendous extent from the exploitation of others much worse off than myself all around the world. I felt ashamed not just of my government, but of being alive. I wanted to do something about it! I decided to join the Leading Light Communist Organization.

This was a fundamental turning point in my relationship to all political dogmas. Where I had initially dismissed Third Worldism as a crackpot, racist fringe theory of the case, by the time I'd read a handful of MSH articles, I came to feel like "Oh my god, the fringe weirdos are right and everyone else is wrong!!" Never again would I dismiss an idea just because of it's seeming oddity, offensiveness, or lack of popularity. This experience, frankly, taught to me truly to think for myself. Where during my time orbiting the RCP I had really just trusted in the wisdom of their leaders and experienced activists, assuming they knew better than me and really just wanting to believe what they said was true emotionally, now I had found something deeper through my own exploration and morbid curiosity. ...Well anyway, philosophizing aside, on to what my brief experience was like in the LLCO because that was pretty damn clarifying of a lot of things to me in its own way.

The Reality of the LLCO: I Was Cult-Hopping

I was with the LLCO for a period of some six months across the first half of 2011. Joining the organization was as easy as having a web chat with the party's two top leaders. Since it was a new institution, there was no formal process beyond that. From there, I was mailed a small number of copies of the zine version of Monkey Smashes Heaven (the first issue, which was the only one that existed at the time) to try and distribute around my area. It was a very small group at the time composed of about 25 people at any given point, roughly 20 of whom were male and nearly all of whom were white, with nearly all living specifically in Denver, Colorado. Like other Bolshevik groups though, they also operated fronts with larger membership and participation. One of these was the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement, which was an issue-driven organization focused on organizing protests against American militarism, which in this window of time mainly meant protests against the bombing of Libya, whose dictator was facing a pro-democracy revolt that most all of the world's governments were supporting (even Russia and China), led by ours. The other front, which was being developed during the time I was with the LLCO, was to be essentially a hippie one where we appealed to like rave-goers and ecology students' willingness to make sacrifices for the betterment of the planet to get them into simple living for the sake of the Third World; minimizing people's participation on the system of imperialism, as far as we were concerned. Where RAIM could mobilize around 50 people sometimes, playing propaganda videos at Denver raves seemed to be more effective at generating interest, so that was to be the main promo work in the short run.

The truth is that the LLCO was another personality cult organized around a guy who went by the screen name Prairie Fire. Officially there was a democratic process by which decisions were made, but in reality he personally ran everything and made all kinds of decisions for the group unilaterally. He also, frankly, wrote about 80% of its articles on Monkey Smashes Heaven, was invariably the star of all our propaganda videos, etc. It all revolved around him. For the most part, he was the LLCO. The name and organization themselves were his ideas. He also wanted to change the name of the theory it was built on to "leading light communism". If that sounds like a fruity, vaguely religious title then you're getting the idea. He often wrote of forces of "light" and "darkness" and other quasi-religious terms. I learned in the course of my stay (because he told me in our occasional check-in group chats) that he, along with another top leader who went by the screen name Jacob Brown (obviously a fake name), was a former drug dealer who made the mistake in the past of becoming addicted to what he was selling and had been sentenced to seven years in prison for it, but was now on probation. His real plan for the organization, he disclosed, was to return to drug dealing, this time with us in tow helping him out. It would work out differently this time, he explained to me. He reasoned that this was the best means by which to fund a party that was hostile to the American public since voluntary donations and dues-paying memberships for such a cause as ours with be hard to accrue organically, and that it served our purposes of weakening the nation's population as well. We might also, he suggested, adopt a bunch of kids and raise them to be "leading light communists" in some remote area together closer to where I lived.

Speaking of all this, there was a method by which Prairie Fire was able to get the LLCO's propaganda videos shown at local raves. Namely, he was involved with an erotic dancer there, whom he spoke of eventually making the public face of the organization. I always felt like something was wrong with this, but was new and didn't want to start out by complaining, but focus on learning the line better. There were so few women involved in or orbiting the group though that it ultimately got to me and I came to feel like the only way for me to be noticed by the leadership was to try and compete for Prairie Fire's affections myself. And I wasn't good at it, lol. :meowdisappointed:

I'll spare you the finer details of the very lame intrigue, but shit like this was a reality of the misogynistic culture the group had. Ideologically, our line on feminism centered on the idea that there was no universal sisterhood and that First World women were privileged enemies of Third World women who should be opposed. It made sense within the framework of our proletarian nations vs. bourgeois nations conception of the world, so I accepted it, but in practice this thinking was used to excuse shit like our men going around proclaiming "FW" women sluts, bimbos, and whores and whatnot. It felt like a hostile atmosphere.

I rebelled against this climate in my own little way by quietly creating a cheesy Third Worldist blog of my own called "I.O.U." under the screen name Monkey Queen, which was also my code name with the LLCO. (Yes, I apologize for the incredibly lame blog title. I just couldn't think of a better one, what can I say? :catcringe:

) There I could do what I really wanted to, which was mainly theory work and education. It still exists (though I haven't updated it since before leaving the LLCO for obvious reasons), so, to provide you with a few examples of what I mean, here was my intro to classical Marxism, for example, my later breakdown of what Maoism entails, and a commentary on the relationship between Libyan dictator Muamar Qaddafi, the U.S.-led bombing compaign, and Al Qaeda, which was also involved in the conflict. I also sometimes re-posted MSH/LLCO theory articles that I found especially helpful. Here was one of my favorites on the relationship between emergent global slums and imperial mall economies, among other things. The blog was eventually discovered by our leadership. Fortunately, they liked it and even briefly endorsed it, including a link on the LLCO main page.

It wasn't long though before this chapter came to a close. In June, Prairie Fire created a new official blog to replace Monkey Smashes Heaven and I was to run it together with him and another of our members. I was to cease posting on my I.O.U. blog and post only to the new one as part of this, and would be permitted to write only "newsy" articles, like articles denouncing the latest American village bombing in Afghanistan and hyping the resistance of the Taliban, stuff like that. No more theory work. I was to become a mindless cog churning out low-effort, generic propo material. ...I hated this. It was kind of the final straw really on top of my increasingly long list of grievances. Another issue was that I'd come to increasingly disagree with Third Worldism / "leading light communism" at a baseline theory-of-the-case level over time, thanks in part to an inadvertent revelation written by Prairie Fire himself about the nature of global value accumulation since World War 2.

Leaving the LLCO

My differences with the LLCO's theory of the case began with our line on women's emancipation. We weren't actually the only organization holding a Third Worldist political line that championed global people's war. A number of our members were defectors from an older such group called the Maoist Internationalist Movement that held more or less the same opinion on the nature of the world's class composition and distribution. This group of ex-MIM people were, I found, the ones most insistent on 1) maintaining the Maoist-Third Worldist theory title instead of branding ourselves "leading light communists" and 2) respecting the democratic process of the new party rather than just going along with Prairie Fire's whims. I soon wound up looking into what was left of MIM because, like I said above, I just didn't like our climate very much. I liked MIM's line on feminism much better. They actually had a fleshed out theory of the case on gender politics. Much of their theory work on this still exists, so I can still link you to a lot of it. Much of it seemed to be built on a more Maoist-specific variation on the thinking of the Marxist radfem lawyer and personal friend of Andrea Dworkin's, Catherine MacKinnon, who I briefly mentioned earlier in this thread. (Here's their original summary/review of her work.) I was quickly drawn to their stark slogans like "all sex is rape" and "Sterilize All Men!". As I read, I found some pretty damn interesting ideas that continue to influence my thinking about women's oppression today. In particular, I found their point that the concept of consent is meaningless in a context of unequal socio-economic relations powerfully compelling. Someone is always richer than the other. Someone is usually taller and stronger than the other. Differences of wealth, differences in physical ability, differences in mental acuity (someone being sober or more mentally competent, another not or less), game-playing (lying to acquire sex you wouldn't receive otherwise)...all of these circumstances influence our choices. Choice exists in degrees, in other words, not just in absolute terms like the liberals insist, and therefore so too does coercion, including sexual coercion, exist in degrees. Truly free choices under unequal conditions are a myth. Thus, to MIM's way of thinking, mutual inclination toward sex while class distinctions and money exist is nonsense. That made sense to me! It still makes sense to me. What we formally call rape right now and what we currently call regular sex is really just a difference of degrees, to which end society's accepted definition of rape keeps changing, expanding when women become more powerful and contracting when patriarchal social relations are more fully cemented.

Another thing I liked was their propensity to use terms like "womyn" for 'woman', "wimmin" for 'women', and "persyn" for 'person'. I thought it silly and childish at first, but by the time I got done reading a few paragraphs that read like that, I noticed that I had actually begun to feel qualitatively better about myself, like I was genuinely respected. I hadn't realized the extent to which I'd internalized the idea that I'm just an extension of men! I kind of wish these words were always written like that.

But alas, nothing is perfect and MIM's line on women also gets very bizarre in other areas. For example, they also embrace non-biological definitions of "men" and "women", going as far with their theory of imperialism as to define First World countries as male nations and Third World countries as female nations. Thus their call to "sterilize all men" in reality is actually a call to sterilize First World populations in general, including the women, and not to sterilize Third World populations. And that is the kind of crackpot metaphysics that kept me away from their organization in the end. Still, I admired their principled commitment to the eradication of women's oppression, which was well-illustrated in the above-linked article on their formulation that all sex is rape: "If money and property are gone and we still have physically strong people sexually exploiting weaker people, then communists will be the ones looking for a solution to that, whether it takes bio-engineering, control of gender ratios, organizing the weak into collectives suitable for self-defense or anything else." In my present worldview, I basically just skip ahead right to these questions because it's obvious that abundance doesn't end male violence and exploitation. How many ultra-rich women of Hollywood and the music industry have to share with us their stories of rape and battery and manipulation before we get this point? Men don't need money to abuse women, they do so because they can! They do so because they are, on average at least, taller, stronger, and faster than we are, and because they have more testosterone than we do. They can, so they do. Marxists believe that more or less everything boils down to socialization, not biology, but sorry, biological differences are the underpinning of women's oppression by men!

But there was something else. In Prairie Fire's article The Slum Within the Global Countryside (it's linkable because it was re-posted to their new site in 2016; it was originally written and published to their old site in 2011 during the time when I was a member), he briefly mentions that since the end of the Second World War, America and other imperialist countries have shifted their approach toward the poor nations of the world toward economic development -- however warped. Hence why most of the world's population today lives in urban areas, not the countryside. He means this to highlight the existence of a new form of economic underdevelopment, but I found that it had a way of invalidating some of the central premises of Third Worldism. The Third Worldist theory is an expansion on the labor aristocracy theory, which is a Marxist POV meant to explain how feudal countries can essentially bypass a capitalist stage of development and leap directly to socialism: because the imperialist stage of capitalism makes it necessary for the economic development of the world to continue. Foreign empires prop up kings and feudal lords and extract natural resources for themselves, stunting both the economic and political development of the victim countries, thus preventing them from developing the industrial working class that Marx saw as the engine of communism. Thus you must throw off the yoke of these empires in order to resume the natural development process. And yet since World War 2, that has proven unnecessary. Instead, empires themselves have worked to accelerate the economic development of poorer countries, if only to win them over as well and have them replace us as the manufacturing sector of the world so we can just focus on consuming. And yet one thinks about how far in debt we are right now and to whom we owe that money. The end of our particular empire is in sight. Sooner or later, China and our other creditors are going to insist on collecting and at that point we become the next Greece. Put all these things together and you get a picture of the world's human population itself slowly becoming more bourgeoisified and its working classes edging ever more toward an equal station with each other at least, with the working classes of the First and Third World ultimately destined to meet each other somewhere in the middle of their current wealth gap. And what's more, how does a global people's war work without much of a global countryside left to serve as its base of operations anyway? That much the LLCO has never been able to make very clear.

But if people in general are trending richer and richer, is it just because or does that value still come from somewhere? It still comes from somewhere. The world's wildlife population, for example, declined 73% in the half-century between 1970 and 2020! In this and a thousand other ways, it seemed clear to me after a time that the real main contradiction in the world wasn't in fact between rich and poor nations, but between human beings and the natural world. This, of course, raises a fundamental dilemma: animals and plants cannot develop a shared consciousness of their shared interests and overthrow human beings, so, outside of the Hoppers hypothesis, how do we establish harmony with nature? We have to get the oppressing class to care enough to make serious sacrifices. This led me out of the LLCO and toward participation in PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) campaigns.

Becoming Female-Centered

Well...my PETA phase didn't last long. Even shorter than my LLCO adventure. It took only a few months for me to become fed up with with their frequent recourse to using female nudity to get the public's attention. Tbh, it just made me stop caring about this whole concept of like "main problems" with the world. Frankly, I just stopped caring about saving the world because I found that I just couldn't get past the extent of the world's hatred for me, specifically because of my sex. There was a SlutWalk I attended in New York that October (of 2011). In many ways, it felt more like an exercise in self-objectification than a march against rape. The Occupy Wall Street movement happened in that same time window. Soon there emerged a raft of rape accusations at encampments and they quickly developed a reputation for pressuring the victims not to report these incidents to the police for fear that they'd become a pretext to tear down the encampments and undermine the movement. And of course the following year became the year that Republicans were accused of waging a "war on women" for a thousand reasons ranging from increasingly opposing birth control to voting against renewing the Violence Against Women Act and much more. It just seemed like everywhere I turned, whether it was to the Marxists, the animal liberation crowd, the anarchists, the conservatives, or even the feminists, there was the same issue -- the issue of male power and privilege over women -- getting in the way of my sympathy. They all had the same problem, just in slightly different expressions, and I increasingly found that I couldn't dwell on anything else.

The world of online radical feminism unfortunately had been pretty invisible to me up to that point, so I'd been reliant on a handful of women's liberationist books and whatever overlap with radical feminist politics I could find in existence on the Revolutionary Left message board, which was very minimal. That's when I discovered, oddly through a gaming site that I frequented, a woman named Anita Sarkeesian.

For those who don't know, Anita Sarkeesian was the creator of Feminist Frequency, which was a small group that did feminist critiques of pop culture, like movies and TV shows, Lego sets and marketing campaigns, this sort of thing. Her most famous work by far though was a five-year project called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games: an extensive web video series analyzing in-depth and critiquing the representation of women in video games throughout the history of the medium. I discovered it through coverage of the consequent MRA harassment campaign in gaming media, which began the second the project was announced in 2012, a year before even a single installment had been published, and donated toward its creation in response. You can still find the entire series here. It was pretty good! Early installments like the Damsel in Distress trilogy and The Ms. Male Character proved award-winning material.

The next several videos in the series though centered on the sexual objectification of women in the medium in ways that included critiques of "mainstream" pornography and the prostitution of women, thus drawing the ire of liberals and praise from radical feminists over on the Feminist Current blog. (No more awards for you! [Image: laugh.gif]

) In fact, the linked article by site owner Meghan Murphy was how I originally discovered the blog, which in turn became my first real window into the radfem internet! The infamous 2014 Gamergate misogynist harassment campaign against female and "pro-feminist" video game developers and critics (a handy, comprehensive and well-sourced timeline of which can be found here for the edification of anyone wishing to dispute that characterization) was in part a direct response to the first batch of these videos, called Women As Background Decoration. Anita was forced to flee her home more than once during this window of time. To me, the ferocity of this reaction, if anything, proved the importance of those sorts of critiques. Over-sexualization of women in the gaming landscape was, and to a much more limited extent remains, a problem that most women ourselves I think find more demeaning and alienating than patriarchal chivalry and such, and also clarifying of the cultural battle lines; clarifying of who is really on your side and who is not. (It was very clarifying, for example, that the sex industry directly participated in Gamergate. Example)

It may be worth noting that, in larger feminist politics, Anita had notably been an early critic of the SlutWalk movement and of liberal "choice feminism" and, to some extent, hook-up culture itself (to which I reference her positive takes on the 2016 indie game One Night Stand). Indeed, as you can see at the first link in this paragraph, Anita back then described radical feminism in positive terms and would cite areas of agreement with thinkers like Gail Dines and the aforementioned Meghan Murphy, in addition to more conventional theorists; stuff she certainly wouldn't do today. On the flip side though, Anita's work was also always heavily infected with intersectionality nonsense, e.g. trans-inclusive, very concerned with race in ways that were by no means always women-focused, etc., though mercifully during the time of the Tropes vs. Women series that stuff was hardly the focus of her work. My point here being that, if some of her critiques -- particularly the stuff from 2014-15 (Women As Background Decoration part 1 and part 2; Women As Reward main video and follow-up) -- feel different from / less sexually liberal than what other feminist commentators of the time were offering, that's because they were indeed coming from an unorthodox place that was not strictly liberal-minded or strictly woke, though definitely not conservative either, and one that I connected to a lot. The reason I'm spending so much time on this somewhat frivolous subject is because Anita was the first vaguely radfem-adjacent "celebrity" figure I learned of who wasn't dead and gaming was, and is, an important part of my life/coping. I had strong feelings. :coy:

All that said, this is a bit of a frivolous subject because ultimately both Sarkeesian and Murphy abandoned anything resembling radical feminist politics they might have once embraced. After the Trump election in 2016 (which occurred near the end of the Tropes vs. Women series), Anita much more fully indulged the woke side of her philosophy, became "sex-positive", and directed Feminist Frequency toward an educational focus on such important topics as "Islamophobia" and "transphobia" and explaining how "sex work is work" and how terribly homofobo and wrong it is to portray Trump and Putin kissing on your protest placards (which I'm linking because it's my favorite example of the kind of cartoonish, virtue signalling political correctness the site came to exemplify after Trump's election), called for the abolition of police, and the rest of the rather familiar package. Meghan, meanwhile, basically lost her entire fucking mind after she got banned from Twitter for cruelly "misgendering" a male rapist in late 2018 after the site changed their policy to require denial of biology, established frequent (and just as frequently flirtatious) contact with the full breadth of the bro podcast network, and before long went MAGA (you become like the company you keep) and denounced radical feminists (especially the lesbians and female separatists) for being inhuman, apparently in contrast to her new friend network of nice guys. Heterosexuality compromises women no matter their politics. Consequently, most of her site's followers, who were mainly radfems, left and stopped donating, causing the site to become the mere shell of its former self that it is today. But neither of them (Anita or Meghan), it's worth pointing out, ever proclaimed themselves radfems. These were simply women who were willing to associate with them and absorbed some of their ideas in the process, it would seem. In spite of these eventual destinies though, Feminist Current became my first real connection to radfem culture and their articles and near-daily news round-up links were how I first discovered places like r/GenderCritical and Magdalen Berns' YouTube channel, which in turn led me to the discovery of places like r/TruFemcels, r/FemaleDatingStrategy, r/BlackPillFeminism, and more over the course of 2018-20, so it was a useful and important politically formative experience for me. The Gender Critical sub wasn't my first experience on Reddit. That honor belongs to r/GirlGamers, which I learned about through gaming sites during the initial men's rights activist meltdown over Anita Sarkeesian in 2012. I wasn't a frequenter of Reddit more broadly though until 2018.

The final major transformation of my worldview occurred after I read this 2018 Feminist Current article on an emerging wave of radical feminism in South Korea that had young women proudly destroying their beauty products. The article, authored by Hyejung Park, Jihye Kuk, and Caroline Norma, passingly introduced me to a female supremacist site called Womad, which was an abbreviation of "woman" and "nomad" meant to articulate their separation from a previous radfem site called Megalia and their independence in general. The site was at its peak of popularity at the time. The key thing about it for me was the discovery of mirroring as a way of combating cultural misogyny. Mirroring is the defining trait of South Korean feminism and the feature that separates it from the Western varieties. South Korean feminists are often alternatively just called "Megalians", such was the influence of the Megalia site specifically during its brief period of existence, and the name "Megalia" is a combination of the term "Mers Gallery" (a reference to a site they defected from) and "Egalia", which is a reference to Gerd Brantenberg's classic 1977 novel Egalia's Daughters, which satirizes gender roles by reversing the traditional, patriarchal ones in every way possible. That is the essence of what the South Korean feminist tend to do: they satirize misogyny by flipping the script and deploying misandry in response, often to comical and highly satisfying effect. :meowshock:

...

This dedication to proportional responses is what gives it its distinctive lack of political correctness; it's about vice signaling rather than virtue signaling. Especially in the case of Womad. I was both like :catwhaaa:

I loved this geeky agent of chaos aura! :meowknife:

...

and immediately drawn to this concept when I discovered it through Womad! In fact, I'd like to discuss the concept of mirroring in a separate thread sometime.

Anyway, I could currently be best described as a pessimistic proponent of matriarchy. I champion this concept, but believe the complete opposite is humanity's more plausible future.

What I've Retained From My Marxist Days

1. Materialism. I continue to find historical materialism a valuable tool for understanding events. In other words, I see social change in human history as driven by technological advancements. For example, women's modern freedom is in essence a byproduct of women gaining leisure time, which is in turn substantially a byproduct of having fewer children, which is in turn a byproduct of families requiring fewer children to achieve population replacement, which in turn is a byproduct of the advent first of heavy industry, with opportunity maximized by the advent of semi-reliable birth control. Modern improvements in communication also play a major, defining role in the advancement of women's class consciousness. There are material reasons why these advancements for women have happened at the particular times in history that they have, and that will go on being the case for future developments. It's not just a matter of willpower. History works in a more deterministic way than that.

2. Socialism. I just find that women tend to place more of a premium on equitable social relations in general than men do. I can't help doing so myself. But I think the way men tend to approach "socialism" reflects their own nature. It becomes very rigid, inflexible, authoritarian when they are the ones to organize it. I favor a kind of market socialism wherein the government owns businesses and provides them with startup capital, but wherein those businesses are managed by their workers collectively. I feel like this would balance out the human need for a motivation to invent and produce and distribute and just generally do work in a dynamic way that responds to what people want and need while minimizing opportunities for exploitation.

3. Concept of Bourgeoisification. I definitely think the fact that First World women have won many legal victories and generally gotten a good amount of access to a college education and the professions and whatnot and tend to have a fairly high level of income, globally speaking -- a lot to lose -- plays a role in their audacity, or more correctly their lack thereof. Comparatively favorable conditions tame revolutionary zeal. Radicalization is a byproduct of opportunity and motive and I find that those are maximized for women generally under what we might call Second World conditions, and South Korea is a good example. So has been Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and more over the last decade or so. There are many forms women's radicalization can take. In South Korea, it's mainly been the advent of a female separatist culture. In Mexico, it has involved women's strikes in protest of femicide. In 1960s-80s Japan, it meant the formation of all-female gangs. One just doesn't see comparable audacity either in heavily rural nations or here in what's considered the West today. It's just an observation.

4. The Vanguard and the Mass Line. Marxists have a valid point about the working class tending to lack a reasonable amount of leisure time, and leftover energy to exercise in that leisure time, with which to seriously invest themselves in theory work and political strategizing and thus benefit from the leadership of professional revolutionaries who do. This is easy to see in the women's movement, which itself is dominated by professionals, white collar workers, and small business owners, not so much your menial or manual laborers (like yours truly), yet it's ideas tend to work their way down to the grocery store floor. Elitism, you say? I call it realism. In Maoist theory and practice, though, this is balanced out by establishing connections to the general population through peripheral fronts dedicated to specific causes orbiting the revolutionary vanguard. You both influence these fronts and also learn from them in a back-and-forth way while recognizing your role of radicalizing them. This concept of populism with radicalizing leadership is known as the mass line. I believe these principles can be useful for grasping what the proper relationship between women's liberationists and phenomena like the Female Dating Strategy or Vexxed or what have you should be when they arise. We shouldn't view these groups as enemies or competitors, but as groups that help us reach, and radicalize, the larger public and which also may have valid lessons to offer us in the process that we should be open to. We shouldn't be open to becoming reformists or mere lifestylists, but other lessons, I mean.

What I've Ditched

1. Male-centered thinking. For example, I believe in socialism. For women. In our own societies with no men. The subjugation of women caused private property, not the other way around. It's more basic. The Marxists think the sex-based oppression of women -- if they can even recognize it as sex-based anymore -- is all about economics and not physical power and thus if we do away with class distinctions and establish a world composed entirely of shared property, male violence against and control of women will just sort of metaphysically disappear. They don't recognize the obvious primacy of our different biology as a causative agent. They're fucking delusional that way. Only women can truly understand our own oppression. I am also done trying to save the world. Those who claim we have to save the world to end our own class oppression as women can only reach this conclusion by conflating our interests with those of our oppressors: men.

2. Blank slate theory. Like most leftists, Marxists tend to believe that human nature is infinitely malleable. They often use this belief to justify extensive social engineering and slave labor, only to have the impact thereof overwhelmed by the realities of human nature, like people generally requiring motivation to work, to invent, etc. etc.

3. Communism. Modern Marxists are just utopians, frankly. Marx himself defined utopian socialism as the notion that communism is achieved through simple willpower rather than a product of human necessity. (He, incidentally, used the term "communism" and "socialism" interchangeably, as was common back in the 19th century.) If communism isn't historically necessary, it won't come about. Marxism, properly understood, is the theory that communism is the inevitable future of humanity because capitalism abolishes scarcity yet concentrates both wealth and workers together. Events have proven though that capitalism doesn't abolish material scarcity, and for that matter that workers are no longer being concentrated together in increasing volumes anymore. Communism is therefore not historically inevitable and therefore will not happen. Even compromised versions of it have proven less than especially productive and in fact better suited to agrarian settings where the means of production don't change as much than to the types of places people are being increasingly concentrated in. As a matter of fact, as experiments like the Great Leap Forward in China and the Super Great Leap Forward in Kampuchea/Cambodia show, the more purified a socialist system is, the lower the rate of material output in general. It's a testament to inefficacy of planned economies that proponents thereof today often hang their case on the idea that we should aim for zero economic growth for ecological reasons.

4. Optimism. Unfortunately, matriarchy, or even just the continuation of the status quo in gender relations, is likely itself a utopian pipe dream. Our gains can be easily reversed by changes in human necessity. If women's liberation from male oppression means imposing extinction on our species, for example, human survival instinct can kick in and impose the full force of patriarchal social conditions upon us anew. And I believe that is our most likely future. Ways out like the advent of artificial wombs and sex-selective birthing can and most likely will be utilized to drive women extinct before we will have sufficient access to drive men extinct with these technologies instead. We are, on average, weaker, shorter, and slower, so fighting our way out is something that can only be done with the great equalizers: firearms. Unfortunately, most owners of firearms are also men, to which end women tend to see gun control as an equalizer instead and demand that. The only firearms that should actually be controlled are those sought by men. Statistically speaking, they're the ones who use them for murder, not us. We need them for self-defense (against men) and our right to self-defense should not be impeded by men's choices. I don't see a plausible way out of our dilemma. In fact, I see few feasible ways of even mitigating the return of patriarchy in earnest. The national liberation cause, for example, has also taken a turn for the worse in the last half-century, in my observation, with its general ideological leadership shifting from Marxists, who tended to be more accommodating to women, to Islamists instead. In a way the simple fact that such a shift has been possible captures the religiosity of Marxism itself; that it's functional role in the world could be so easily subsumed by an actual religion. My understanding of imperialism itself has also evolved over the years to a recognition that imperialism is itself a social system that functions like capitalism. Just as there may be large and small businesses, winners and losers, in capitalism, so too are there powerful and weaker nations, winners and losers in the imperialist system, but no nation that doesn't aspire to imperial status of its own. Like how capitalism can only function on a pro-growth, for-profit basis, nations likewise can only function by continuous expansion, be it financial or territorial. There are no heroes to root for. I fight for the cause of women in my own way, but recognize the ultimate vanity of it. It's just like an uncontrollable impulse that I have. I feel like my whole life has been defined by misogyny that I've become too aware of not to care about. But pessimism is actually kind of healthy, IMO. It brings ones expectations closer to reality. It helps me keep developments in perspective and avoid over-investing myself emotionally in losing causes.]]> <![CDATA[How we got here]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1657 Mon, 27 Oct 2025 20:53:43 +0000 YesYourNigel]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1657
LIBERALISM

The starting point, the notion that people should just be free to do whatever they want, unless/until they literally get someone killed or physically hurt. Gets used to justify ticking-bomb men because the porn and violence they consume is just fun and games haha and they are all very rational and self-critical otherwise. Not sure how that very rational very critical attitude that make most men easily compartmentalise patriarchal violence as pure fiction bodes with the fact that this violence is part of day-to-day life for most women and the fact that most men are not feminists nor engaged in feminist musings, but there we go. Also this isn't unique to liberalism since conservatives also love enabling ticking-bomb dysfunctional men (including as president of the United States) under the guise of freedom and individualism but liberals are the ones that package it under layers upon layers of wishy-washy progressive language.

Liberal Feminism - feminist ideas on gendered socialisation are at odds with the liberal notion that everyone is born being a special snowflake and the best we can do is learn to tolerate people in all shapes and sizes. In this way, liberalism normalises bog standard male misogyny and female exploitation as an inherent part of individuals' unique personality and preferences ("if a man or a woman is attracted to male violence, that is just their preference"). It doesn't concern itself with why these preferences are in place or with recognising the larger systems enforcing them or the physical and psychological harm that they cause because the only thing it cares about is enabling men's super unique dicks that somehow all fall into the same patterns despite how unique they are. Liberal feminism needs to somehow fit its ideas on the patriarchy and socialisation into these limitations so the solution it offers is "sure, people overwhelmingly do what they're brainwashed to do, but this is okay so long as they'd made their choice informed by feminism". It promises to keep the norms people are most attached to - porn and patriarchal sex acts for men, and beauty standards for women - and only go after those villains who hold women at gunpoint to become housewives, and promise to go after the real criminals because recognising any man as a ticking time bomb is fascist until he actually harms a woman. Full on rape is bad, but it's fine to jerk off to rape porn and engage in dangerous kinks that are likely to hurt women, you're the bigot if you think that says anything about the person or makes them misogynistic and dangerous. And if this actually leads to rape or physical harm, that is completely accidental and we should all offer hope and prayers that such an unexpected random occurrence doesn't happen to often, because it makes people push back against rape-fetishising men 😢
And it's okay to don tons of makeup and dress in a male-gaze-pandering way and engage in whatever kinks that get pushed on you as long as you consent to them (and you WILL consent, surely? You're not going to be a prude, are you?)! In fact, because old boomer prudes don't like overly sexual hyperfemininity, it's actually daring and rebellious, despite not doing anything differently from what you're expected to. Which also appeals to the laziest choice feminism notion that feminism is about "supporting women", instead of, ya know, actually increasing women's quality of life. If a woman wants to do things that the patriarchy pushes her to do and promises to reward her for, and feels bad when she loses this societal approval and gets vilified, well then clearly she should just follow her heart and do what makes her feel best! Who cares if it puts her in blatantly unequal, unhealthy and straight up dangerous dynamics? What matters is that she's so cool and independent because she's making her free choice!

Generalising is Bad - Because everyone is a special snowflake under liberalism, you can't make any wide observations on groups of people because that is fascist and reductive. Again this is at odds with feminism because this attitude was made to justify and excuse hedonistic men and make them seem as more of a special snowflake than they are. It's impossible to even acknowledge the harm the patriarchy and the men do to women if you can't even talk about societal trends. But because liberal feminism tries desperately to use the language of liberalism that can apply to everyone, it continues to fall into the same loop of arguing men's "If you think it's bad to generalise women as inept sex objects, why is it okay to generalise men as oppressors? Check-mate, feminazi!". And while women might overwhelmingly be feminine, we don't like literally saying women are meant to be feminine and sexually submissive, because that implies that women didn't freely make that choice. We like to use the rare token non-feminine (or better yet, feminine alt or feminine overweight woman) to prove that there is an alternative, that we're not doing any of this for the male gaze, because women come in all shapes and sizes.

Denying Women Agency - A similar "gotcha" is also used to call feminists bad for doing this when they talk of the harms of the patriarchy. It's basically just the "choice feminism" argument. Women can't make bad choices because the only real misogyny is in telling them their choices are bad. Again, these are ideas that libfems don't understand and they just use them because it makes feminism sound nice and applicable to everyone in the world. They think they've won by getting a man to call himself feminist, even if he's only doing it because he wants to validate his visits to prostitutes. Because most women operate by naive ideals and fiction-informed ideas about men (given that they either don't have many male friends and/or these friends keep a lid on their locker room talk in front of a "lady"), it's easy for them to delude themselves that men are just regular people with a strong sense of ethics and a desire to treat people fairly. And being distrustful of people is after all paranoid and unfair because people know themselves best and certainly wouldn't lie or say deluded things to you in favour of maintaining an ideology, right?

Born This Way - became popular to justify gay rights (because I guess gay people should be sent to concentration camps if it turned out they were willingly being gay), now regularly gets used by liberal men to justify pedophiles, kinksters, poly men etc. and ofc trans.

You can't tell people how to identify / what they are - I'm not sure where this comes from except maybe the mental-illness-lite crowds that love to medicalise problems and so will justify selfdiagnosis as valid because "they know themselves best". Maybe it also comes from gay rights where a part of homophobia was not being believed that you're gay or being told you'll change your mind. So now if you tell a 12 yo that they should maybe wait before identifying as asexual, you're a bigot forcing them into conversion therapy. Gay people have a history of violence associated with attempts to shove them back in the closet. This does not mean it's inherrently violent and genocidal to tell anyone ever that they might change their mind on something or question the motivations and validity of their identity. People with mental illnesses and disabilities experience genuine problems receiving help or having basic quality of life when they are erased. Erasure isn't bad because waaah people aren't paying attention to how special I am!

"The Right to SelfID" - Somehow we ended up with people claiming everyone has a basic human right to "self-identification", even though I can't see it applying to anything but gendersouls, and I guess religion, which is very telling. Like, if an adult came and said they're actually a 5 yo and should sleep with other kindergarteners, no-one in their right mind would agree to that. Or if someone claimed to be the Queen of England, or a dog...the whole concept is so patently absurd that I can't even see it originating from anything more sensible. And why would SELFidentification involve forcing people and even the law to roleplay that you're something you're blatantly not? Selfidentification trumps identification? If someone identifies ad not-a-murderer, well, the court better let them go!

Femininity is Empowering - The desire to avoid narratives of sl*t-shaming lead to the expectation of men to deal with women dressing however they want. This didn't stop at the notion that no woman, no matter how she dresses, should be safe and free from assault, but lead to the idea that women should be able to dress however inappropriately they want without ever being sexualised, even when they're dressed in decidedly sexual ways (I talk more about this paradox here). And horny men latched onto that with gusto to gaslight women - if you dare criticise stripperific women, not only are you a prude, you're also against women's rights. Meanwhile, it allowed women to keep holding onto beauty standards, the only thing that gives them value in a patriarchal society. Just keep doing whatever you've been doing, except say that you chose it, and you're free!
It wasn't enough to just say that feminine presentation is equally as valid as male presentation (which it isn't. Women are consistently saddled with impractical, sexualised, decorative etc. clothes and modes of presentation on purpose and men are not). Attractive feminine women tend to be appreciated by society but also especially preyed on by men who perceive these women as higher-priority targets for male sexual violence and exploitation than other women, due to these women donning the iconography developed through decades of extreme patriarchy into signifiers of one's sex object status (which these women don't recognise as such due to being raised all their lives being told this is just what you wear and that's normal). This observation morphed into the idea that feminine women are uniquely oppressed for daring to be feminine, which morphed into the idea that it's femininity that makes women subject to misogyny, and that misogyny = hatred of femininity. All of a sudden, femininity, the expected patriarchal mode of presentation for all women, became a daring act of resistance, despite doing literally nothing different. Which also lead to femininity being seen as the true target of misogyny, rather than women themselves, i.e. stripper heels and lipstick are the true victims because society thinks those make you a wh*re. Which is like thinking that liking pop music makes you victimised just because certain circles of society scoff at it.

I think part of why progressives are so trigger-happy when it comes to cancel culture (aside from the actually genuine fear of letting conservative fascists sabotage their movement from the inside) is because they have these really obvious contradictions at their core that you're not really supposed to bring up, and because the people in the movement have learned to deal with that doublethink, the only ones who do are the way more numerous conservative bad actors looking for lazy "gotchas".

OPPRESSION IS WHEN FEELSBAD

Conversion Therapy - the term expanded from an actual abusive practice to refer to pressuring a gay person to change their sexuality (which belied a threat of conversion therapy, unemployment, violence) to "you can never question anything anyone says about themselves" with no threat to one's safety except "erasure" (which got expandded to mean genocide). Obviously the various other overly specific sexualities and kinks jumped on board, but also the transgender stuff, which is when it really went crazy - it's conversion therapy to try and cure a mental illness that causes you, in your own words, immeasurable harm to the point of suicide. And any attempts to do so instead of prescribing plastic surgeries is genocide because you've decided this is the only cure you can have and if you don't get it, you'll commit suicide.

Biphobia - This liberal understanding of oppression as "anything that feelsbad" is a big part of how we got to this ridiculous situation where people invent flags and identities and -phobias of said identities left and right. I think biphobia is where progressives completely lost the plot when it comes to what counts as oppression. Oppression stopped being about ideas that are rooted in historical bouts of violence, murder, enslavement and neglect that lead to a measurable drop in one's quality of life. Instead, oppression turned into "people disapprove of what I do". If people finding two same-sex people kissing yucky was the worst thing gay people ever experienced, I would not call that oppression. There has to be a history or violence, legal subjugation and persecution, and an extreme drop in one's quality of life and safety as a result for things to count as oppression. When the worst thing that biphobia gets you (that's not literally just homophobia) are those awful oppressive gay people telling you to "pick a side" or "not believing you", then, I'm sorry but just...grow a spine? People are going to disagree with you. Sometimes they'll even disagree with you for stupid or ignorant reasons. People being stupid is not automatically oppression. Furthermore, it should not be controversial to say that gay people who are forced to deal with the reality of same-sex attraction in any romantic and sexual context shouldn't be shushed by bi people whose only source of difficulty in their life regarding their sexuality comes from gay people being suspicious of them.

Oreogenderphobia - Once biphobia became popular, all sorts of other -phobias started being invented for no reason other than people not agreeing with you or, if all else fails, not even being aware of you enough for you to be controversial. Which is oppression because it makes you "invisible". Nevermind that this invisibility doesn't in any way lead to worse life outcomes for you, unless you count being oh so cruelly expected to explain and defend the validity of your oreogender or sex-repulsed heteroromantic graysexuality to your ignorant oppressors, who are oppressing you either due to not believing you uncritically enough, or for not talking about your identity enough to make it a part of mainstream culture.

The Intersectionalism - The obsessive desire not to get men angry or alienated meant that the patriarchy has to affect everyone. If something hurts women, it's gotta hurt men more in order for anyone to give a shit about it, and ofc it's much cooler to care about all the other intersectionalist issues, even if they are at odds with women's rights. Women love any form of oppression they can talk about normally where they don't need to keep apologising for being such bad self-centered women who hate all men, which is why I think so many of them latched onto the various mental illnesses and trans identities. Part of it was also the non-feminine girls who didn't identify with the stripperific liberal feminism where you need a damn good reason to reject femininity or else you're suffering from internalised misogyny.

Cultural Relativism - another part of it is the interplay between racial and gendered aspects of liberalism where women are expected to lose as soon as you invoke "cultural relativism". Modern ideas on women's rights are a result of colonialist white supremacism and many women from far more strictly patriarchal androcentric cultures agree that other more "general" struggles are more important (I can't imagine why) or are only focused on ending gang rape and domestic violence against mothers while calling white feminists privileged and colonialist for advocating such petty things like no locker room talk or fighting biases in the workplace. This also intersects with anticarceral feminism - the needs of "the community" trump the safety of women.
A big part of this attitude manifests in using different historical cultural ideas on trans people (almost always feminine men who occupy a position of prostitutes so as to compartmentalise and direct masculine male homoeroticism away from each other) as evidence of their validity. Which is kind of like using the long history of human sacrifice to prove that yes, indeed, the Blood God is real and you're the bigot for not seeing it. ofc the horrible mistreatment of women and the violent enforcement of gender roles that goes hand in hand with trans in these "enlightened" societies is always awkwardly ignored or swept under the rug. After all, since women are so privileged, TIMs nees not concern themselves with their rights despite, uh...claiming to be the same as women?

CHRONICALLY ONLINE

Just as Strong as Men - Part of the libfem anti-generalising attitudes was also used to disprove the very obvious notion that men are physically stronger than women, which I can only imagine gained special popularity with the rise of chronically online girls and "girl power" messaging in media, appealing to women's desire for equality, and also to garner respect from the wider androcentric society. And what it ultimately offered us is men in women's sports being lauded as champions of women's rights and female physical ability.

Internet Alter Egos - If you can say women are as strong as men, what else can you say? I think with the rise of all these women who are very stuck online and don't touch grass, as well as the pornsick men who collect kinks like Pokemon, as well as the popularity of drawn porn and fanfiction, we ended up with people who think that just because you can draw a TIM who looks exactly like the opposite sex, that this proves that magical sex change is real. But, ultimately, why does sex change even need to exist? Aren't we all on the internet with our avatars and our Twitter bios and better friends than irl? If a tree falls in the woods and no-one is there to hear it, can I say it was a car, or a dragon, or a TIM? Which is also how you get so much weird wishy washy bullshit like "Your body doesn't define you". This is also why I think a lot of people have these internet sexualities that don't really pan out irl (namely various flavour of bisexuality that still just end up exclusively with the most bland straight relationships imaginable).

Topsy-turvy Bioessentialism - I'm still trying to figure out how tf this happened, but somewhere along the line, bioessentialism went from claiming gender roles and stereotypes are integral to different sexes, to "if you so much as acknowledge that the sexes exist, it means you're demanding they employ the gender roles and stereotypes that are an integral part of them". I don't understand why this is such a common point because the separation of gender roles from sex is a big point in feminism, so why is the "you say I have to be feminine just because I'm a woman?!!" any kind of a gotcha, let alone such a massvely popular one?
A big part of this whole thing has to be fueled by androcentrism, and women being so desperate to define themselves in male "human" terms, rather than as this isolated aberration. If you look at nonbinary gender abolitionist communities, they're rife with women who think they're special and unique for essentially wanting to disappear and not have their subhuman identity ever acknowledged, and that the true cause of the oppression they experience isn't in misogyny, but rather in anyone acknowledging the "private information" of them being female. They don't understand just how much the patriarchy exploits the staggering amount of ignorance over female bodies, such as by blindly applying male studies onto women. They think they're gaming the system by essentialy keeping their heads down and erasing themselves.
Men never liked to let go of their bioessentialism because of how deeply integral it is to their value system so maybe this was just TIMs and liberal mem trying to find a way to vilify feminists by making the problem be about feminazi TERFs rejecting a magical sissified sex change because that is keeping men from making their "free choice" of taking on a feminine gender role...instead of, ya know, the problem being that a magical sex change is needed in the first place for gender roles, or the very concept of gender roles in the first place. And all the libfems kinda just went with it, just as they went with the men's ideas on radical feminists being a bunch of militant murderers who you constantly have to apologise for and assauge men's fears from.

Postmodernism - I think this was initiated or at least passionately embraced by liberal feminism as a way to sort out all the patriarchal contradictions within the GIRL POWER liberal feminism as well as the emerging trans activist community (who were bound to get their turn after force-teaming themselves with gay people in the 90's). Liberal feminism has a very obvious bias in favour of attractive male-pandering feminine women, despite claiming that women can be whatever they want. What about the women who don't fit into this image? Well, liberal feminism gives them the option to be feminine in an alt way (which is totally different and subversive), or to re-examine why they hate femininity and think masculinity is better (definitely internalised misogyny), or...to realise there is no problem with their dislike of femininity because they're probably just a man.
On the other hand we have the very TIM-heavy classic transsexualism whose very male ideology ("I have a pink brain that makes me a woman because I'm a sl*t that likes to wear skirts, tee-hee") is kind of hard to fit in with the whole "don't say women are inherrently girly" idea. Additionally, a lot of chronically online girls don't really have an understanding of what men are like or their socialisation beyond what they see in tv shows and cartoons. So I imagine that's what fueled this drive to not even bother to associate the sexes with anything, but to just say that words are meaningless and you can be whatever you want because telling people what they can or cannot be is oppression.
I think this is indicative of the desire of women to question the patriarchal norms they've been raised with, but also not being able to, given the very male-pandering mainstream feminism they're working with. So instead of doing away with the whole "we have to make men fit into the victim-shaped hole on the Patriarchy box", they go with "Actually men and women shouldn't matter at all and everyone should just be a magical uncorporeal being because I'm too stuck online to remember that I need to eat and piss and sleep and can't philosophise my way out of those"

Women are from porn, men are from tv shows - with more and more boys being hooked on porn and more and more girls being hooked on fiction (and often the associated fanfics and shipping), we ended up with two streams of very gendered trans communities: the TIMs who get their ideas from other men's sissification, femboy, futa etc. porn communities (which as we all know have an excellent record of portraying women and critically examining themselves), and the TIFs who get their ideas about men from female-created yaoi and fanfics. Some of them do also consume gay male porn because women live in a man's world after all (I haven't seen TIMs engage in feminine shipping communities unless it's with very obviously male anime porn), though they are still primarily fixated on men through fictional lens. They tend to be very ignorant of what an average man is like and how deep his misogyny goes because their ideas on men are informed by very idealised fictional male protagonists and Jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold archetypes. These women frequently wear makeup and engage in liberal feminism and demand they be seen as harbringers of social justice. The TIMs are usually hyperfocused on trans rights and couldn't give a shit about women's rights.

THE GAY COMMUNITY

Feminism as activism nanny + eyeliner sharp enough to kill the patriarchy - Once liberal feminism separated the oppression women face for being women into oppression women face due to being feminine, it was only a matter of time before men swooped in to take center stage as the most oppressed of all. I think the domineering part that feminine gay men and drag queens and TIMs play in modern liberal feminism was unsurprising to some degree, given how much they and women get equated in popular imagination (and gay porn categories themselves) combined with the expectation of feminism needing to focus on everyone else's problems but their own. While there are certainly more gay men than straight men who give a shit about women's rights (though part of it might be because they get to sound progressive without having to give up their porn, kinks and no-strings sex), in my experience most gay men are more focused on bootlicking straight men and jerking off to that, than actually caring about anyone's rights, let alone women's. And yet women consistently seem to view them as these universally woman-centered allies. In reality, most gay men love their male privileges and they're used to navigating the world with the resulting confidence, respect and safety in mind.
People find feminine men controversial because they are stooping to the level of a sex object that they shouldn't or even inherrently cannot be, whereas for women, that's the only thing they can be, with maybe a bit of controversy over just how far you can take it before being labeled a wh*re. Liberal feminism decided both of these are the same thing and that they prove the patriarchal contempt for women has nothing to do with being female and everything to do with not being feminine. And that's how you get insane shit like men saying it's misogyny that other men beat them up and call them fags for wearing dresses. Because that's totally what happens to women.

Anti-kink is homophobic - Gay men are the first to be brought out when it comes to the subject of anal sex and kinks to prove that these are not harmful and misogynistic practices, because, see, gay people also engage in them and you are actually homophobic for criticising them. Nevermind how often there are clear heteronormative standards to justify the presence of these kinks, and also how damaging these are to men as well who really just happen to be pornsick enough to justify it to themselves as worth it. Which brings us to the fixation gay people have on imitating straight norms, often in very misogynistic and patriarchal ways, which I feel must've gotten way worse with the rise of internet porn and mainstreamification of homosexuality. From feminine men using the language of female genitalia to describe their assholes or calling it "breeding", to butch women wearing fake rubber penises over their actual female genitals and proclaiming themselves "stone tops" because they don't like any attention on their genitals, in complete opposition to what "top" means for men. Unsurprisingly, for all the magical variety of human sexuality out there, no man is interested in putting a fake rubber vulva or vagina in between his legs, even the most self-proclaimed super ultra turbo real-deal TruTrans dysphoric ones.

Penetrative sex - And because porn always wants more androcentric depravity, instead of the mainstreamification of homosexuality normalising nonpenetrative sex that is common in both male and female homosexual people, the opposite happened where anal sex became normalised, penetrative sex became seen as a default for gay people, and now even pegging is becoming a popular category where even women in straight relationships don fake dicks that cover their own genitals in order to provide one-sided sexual stimulation to men, portrayed as the height of female sexual empowerment right after prostituting yourself.
Which leads us to the batshit norm currently in place where masses of self-proclaimed straight men are attracted primarily to assholes and sometimes even rubber dicks (clits are ofc still neglected unless they're a part of play pretend that a TIM's shrivelled dick is the same as a clit - then all of a sudden clits are the most integral part of straight sex) and also to femininity as the most artificial signifier of female sex object status that liberal feminism has also associated with womamhood itself. Which means that a man who fucks another man in a dress and makeup while said man calls his asshole a vagina now counts as a straight relationship. And because you have butch lesbians with rubber dicks, that's the same as a man with a "permanent strapon", so maybe lesbians need to give men a chance for a change.

Bi people share their straight wisdom - bi people took up the mantle of offering the worst of both worlds - the painfully heteronormative straight ideology combined with a (very unfounded) persecution complex. Since it only takes one visit to the gay or bi porn category online to proclaim yourself bisexual, the movement is full of the most androcentric straight people imaginable who claim to be special and progressive for "looking past genitals". This category is also the one that is the most passionate about pushing the notion of bigotry based on genitals, or, as a corollary, portraying themselves as wise and enlightened for looking past genitals. And when they get told that maybe they're full of shit and shouldn't be telling gay people to look past their sexuality like people have been for centuries, the claims of biphobia immediately come out.

Queer straight people - the word "queer" has been appropriated by all the bi (but really straight for all intents and purposes) people trying to justify liking shit like BDSM as somehow subversive and persecuted. I think in theory straight(ish) people wanting to carve out a space where they can experiment with gender nonconformity and gender roles would've been good, but because they're straight, it mostly turned into celebration of gauche patriarchal kinks while appropriating gay people's history of victimisation to shield themselves from any criticism and refusing to accept that maybe their overwhelmingly straight existence (and no, commenting with your Nigel on how hot a woman is doesn't negate that) doesn't give them the right to speak over gay people who actually deal with the reality of homosexual relationships.

MENTAL HEALTH

Therapy speak - and just the overall over-focus on mental health and navel gazeing, along with various relatively mild diagnosis that are characterised as debilitating illnesses that everyone around you is obliged to walk on eggshells to manage. A lot of entitlement to other people's labour to manage your behaviour with very little in the way of actually holding yourself accountable to not be a burden.

Neurodivergent - What better way to posit yourself as special instead of as having debilitating issues than by calling yourself neurodivergent and everyone else neurotypical normies? Even better is your mental illness isn't in any way dibilitating and you can disprove the stereotypes about mental illness being difficult and debilitating like the brave social justice hero you are.

Chemical imbalance - There's been a push since the 90's to view depression as being due to a chemical imbalance in the brain that you are then obliged to treat with medicine for the rest of your life (needless to say certain parties benefited from hooking people on their supposedly lifesaving drugs forever). The demands for depression to be taken seriously turned from "don't tell me to smile" to "I have depression and there's nothing I can do about it because it's a fundamental part of my identity". Canada is also in the process of extending medically assisted suicide to mental illnesses (one of which, anroexia, has already been "treated" this way once), and I can't see how this could've even been possible at the hands of progressives without these sentiments that have gained ground, sentiments that treat these conditions as fundamental to a person and as such, incurable. Or, if curable, irrelevant if the person doesn't want help because "they know what's best for them".

Fatphobia - This is in a similar basket of issues caused by psychological problems which were turned into a special identity to be proud of and for which you're unfairly oppressed for, including by anyone telling you to change. Libfems recognised that obesity is vilified in women primarily due to beauty standards rather than health. But that soon turned into the idea that being fat is a completely neutral state of being that has nothing to do with health, and even implying that it does is bigotry and oppression. People know themselves best and if an obese person is happy, then you need to accept that and not say that they'd be happier if they could tie their own shoe laces and run more than 5 meters without catching their breath. Again, stuff like this normalised a sense of extreme individualism where no-one can tell anyone what's good for them and if a person wants to be obese while telling themselves it has nothing to do with their health issues or castrate themselves and tell themselves this makes them a woman, you're the bigot for not clapping over how valid they are for being themselves. If the person is hopeless or coping hard or delusional, it just proves how true, valid and unchangeable their condition is.

Destigmatisation - seems to have gone from trying to make people actually get help with their issues to validating said issues as a perfectly normal fundamental part of someone's identity that shouldn't have to be changed. Which brings into question why even get diagnosed? If you're so special and unique but you don't care to get any help because your condition doesn't cause you problems, why even chase the diagnosis?

Not a Mental Illness - This is admittedly a point of contention between some old-school transsexuals and the hip new transgenders - being trans is not a mental illness because, well, homosexuality got removed from that category so trans should be as well. Nevermind that there is nothing inherently harmful about homosexuality whereas dysphoria is literally defined as irrational debilitating distress over a perfectly normal and healthy body. I imagine it's both due to trendy trans teens who "don't need dysphoria to be trans" and also transsexuals who think being trans isn't a mental illness because it is scienficially proven that their gendersoul is magically stuck in the wrong body, and anything other than a hormonal imbalance and plastic surgeries is genociding them. So this delusion is supposed to be treated as a medical issue of gendersoul mismatch, rather than a psychological issue, because....well, trans people know what's best for them! And, as already noted, wow are there unfortunate implications behind this insistance that disability rights means believing delusional people at their word and making science jump through hoops to validate said delusion as totally real and fundamental aspect of a person.]]>
LIBERALISM

The starting point, the notion that people should just be free to do whatever they want, unless/until they literally get someone killed or physically hurt. Gets used to justify ticking-bomb men because the porn and violence they consume is just fun and games haha and they are all very rational and self-critical otherwise. Not sure how that very rational very critical attitude that make most men easily compartmentalise patriarchal violence as pure fiction bodes with the fact that this violence is part of day-to-day life for most women and the fact that most men are not feminists nor engaged in feminist musings, but there we go. Also this isn't unique to liberalism since conservatives also love enabling ticking-bomb dysfunctional men (including as president of the United States) under the guise of freedom and individualism but liberals are the ones that package it under layers upon layers of wishy-washy progressive language.

Liberal Feminism - feminist ideas on gendered socialisation are at odds with the liberal notion that everyone is born being a special snowflake and the best we can do is learn to tolerate people in all shapes and sizes. In this way, liberalism normalises bog standard male misogyny and female exploitation as an inherent part of individuals' unique personality and preferences ("if a man or a woman is attracted to male violence, that is just their preference"). It doesn't concern itself with why these preferences are in place or with recognising the larger systems enforcing them or the physical and psychological harm that they cause because the only thing it cares about is enabling men's super unique dicks that somehow all fall into the same patterns despite how unique they are. Liberal feminism needs to somehow fit its ideas on the patriarchy and socialisation into these limitations so the solution it offers is "sure, people overwhelmingly do what they're brainwashed to do, but this is okay so long as they'd made their choice informed by feminism". It promises to keep the norms people are most attached to - porn and patriarchal sex acts for men, and beauty standards for women - and only go after those villains who hold women at gunpoint to become housewives, and promise to go after the real criminals because recognising any man as a ticking time bomb is fascist until he actually harms a woman. Full on rape is bad, but it's fine to jerk off to rape porn and engage in dangerous kinks that are likely to hurt women, you're the bigot if you think that says anything about the person or makes them misogynistic and dangerous. And if this actually leads to rape or physical harm, that is completely accidental and we should all offer hope and prayers that such an unexpected random occurrence doesn't happen to often, because it makes people push back against rape-fetishising men 😢
And it's okay to don tons of makeup and dress in a male-gaze-pandering way and engage in whatever kinks that get pushed on you as long as you consent to them (and you WILL consent, surely? You're not going to be a prude, are you?)! In fact, because old boomer prudes don't like overly sexual hyperfemininity, it's actually daring and rebellious, despite not doing anything differently from what you're expected to. Which also appeals to the laziest choice feminism notion that feminism is about "supporting women", instead of, ya know, actually increasing women's quality of life. If a woman wants to do things that the patriarchy pushes her to do and promises to reward her for, and feels bad when she loses this societal approval and gets vilified, well then clearly she should just follow her heart and do what makes her feel best! Who cares if it puts her in blatantly unequal, unhealthy and straight up dangerous dynamics? What matters is that she's so cool and independent because she's making her free choice!

Generalising is Bad - Because everyone is a special snowflake under liberalism, you can't make any wide observations on groups of people because that is fascist and reductive. Again this is at odds with feminism because this attitude was made to justify and excuse hedonistic men and make them seem as more of a special snowflake than they are. It's impossible to even acknowledge the harm the patriarchy and the men do to women if you can't even talk about societal trends. But because liberal feminism tries desperately to use the language of liberalism that can apply to everyone, it continues to fall into the same loop of arguing men's "If you think it's bad to generalise women as inept sex objects, why is it okay to generalise men as oppressors? Check-mate, feminazi!". And while women might overwhelmingly be feminine, we don't like literally saying women are meant to be feminine and sexually submissive, because that implies that women didn't freely make that choice. We like to use the rare token non-feminine (or better yet, feminine alt or feminine overweight woman) to prove that there is an alternative, that we're not doing any of this for the male gaze, because women come in all shapes and sizes.

Denying Women Agency - A similar "gotcha" is also used to call feminists bad for doing this when they talk of the harms of the patriarchy. It's basically just the "choice feminism" argument. Women can't make bad choices because the only real misogyny is in telling them their choices are bad. Again, these are ideas that libfems don't understand and they just use them because it makes feminism sound nice and applicable to everyone in the world. They think they've won by getting a man to call himself feminist, even if he's only doing it because he wants to validate his visits to prostitutes. Because most women operate by naive ideals and fiction-informed ideas about men (given that they either don't have many male friends and/or these friends keep a lid on their locker room talk in front of a "lady"), it's easy for them to delude themselves that men are just regular people with a strong sense of ethics and a desire to treat people fairly. And being distrustful of people is after all paranoid and unfair because people know themselves best and certainly wouldn't lie or say deluded things to you in favour of maintaining an ideology, right?

Born This Way - became popular to justify gay rights (because I guess gay people should be sent to concentration camps if it turned out they were willingly being gay), now regularly gets used by liberal men to justify pedophiles, kinksters, poly men etc. and ofc trans.

You can't tell people how to identify / what they are - I'm not sure where this comes from except maybe the mental-illness-lite crowds that love to medicalise problems and so will justify selfdiagnosis as valid because "they know themselves best". Maybe it also comes from gay rights where a part of homophobia was not being believed that you're gay or being told you'll change your mind. So now if you tell a 12 yo that they should maybe wait before identifying as asexual, you're a bigot forcing them into conversion therapy. Gay people have a history of violence associated with attempts to shove them back in the closet. This does not mean it's inherrently violent and genocidal to tell anyone ever that they might change their mind on something or question the motivations and validity of their identity. People with mental illnesses and disabilities experience genuine problems receiving help or having basic quality of life when they are erased. Erasure isn't bad because waaah people aren't paying attention to how special I am!

"The Right to SelfID" - Somehow we ended up with people claiming everyone has a basic human right to "self-identification", even though I can't see it applying to anything but gendersouls, and I guess religion, which is very telling. Like, if an adult came and said they're actually a 5 yo and should sleep with other kindergarteners, no-one in their right mind would agree to that. Or if someone claimed to be the Queen of England, or a dog...the whole concept is so patently absurd that I can't even see it originating from anything more sensible. And why would SELFidentification involve forcing people and even the law to roleplay that you're something you're blatantly not? Selfidentification trumps identification? If someone identifies ad not-a-murderer, well, the court better let them go!

Femininity is Empowering - The desire to avoid narratives of sl*t-shaming lead to the expectation of men to deal with women dressing however they want. This didn't stop at the notion that no woman, no matter how she dresses, should be safe and free from assault, but lead to the idea that women should be able to dress however inappropriately they want without ever being sexualised, even when they're dressed in decidedly sexual ways (I talk more about this paradox here). And horny men latched onto that with gusto to gaslight women - if you dare criticise stripperific women, not only are you a prude, you're also against women's rights. Meanwhile, it allowed women to keep holding onto beauty standards, the only thing that gives them value in a patriarchal society. Just keep doing whatever you've been doing, except say that you chose it, and you're free!
It wasn't enough to just say that feminine presentation is equally as valid as male presentation (which it isn't. Women are consistently saddled with impractical, sexualised, decorative etc. clothes and modes of presentation on purpose and men are not). Attractive feminine women tend to be appreciated by society but also especially preyed on by men who perceive these women as higher-priority targets for male sexual violence and exploitation than other women, due to these women donning the iconography developed through decades of extreme patriarchy into signifiers of one's sex object status (which these women don't recognise as such due to being raised all their lives being told this is just what you wear and that's normal). This observation morphed into the idea that feminine women are uniquely oppressed for daring to be feminine, which morphed into the idea that it's femininity that makes women subject to misogyny, and that misogyny = hatred of femininity. All of a sudden, femininity, the expected patriarchal mode of presentation for all women, became a daring act of resistance, despite doing literally nothing different. Which also lead to femininity being seen as the true target of misogyny, rather than women themselves, i.e. stripper heels and lipstick are the true victims because society thinks those make you a wh*re. Which is like thinking that liking pop music makes you victimised just because certain circles of society scoff at it.

I think part of why progressives are so trigger-happy when it comes to cancel culture (aside from the actually genuine fear of letting conservative fascists sabotage their movement from the inside) is because they have these really obvious contradictions at their core that you're not really supposed to bring up, and because the people in the movement have learned to deal with that doublethink, the only ones who do are the way more numerous conservative bad actors looking for lazy "gotchas".

OPPRESSION IS WHEN FEELSBAD

Conversion Therapy - the term expanded from an actual abusive practice to refer to pressuring a gay person to change their sexuality (which belied a threat of conversion therapy, unemployment, violence) to "you can never question anything anyone says about themselves" with no threat to one's safety except "erasure" (which got expandded to mean genocide). Obviously the various other overly specific sexualities and kinks jumped on board, but also the transgender stuff, which is when it really went crazy - it's conversion therapy to try and cure a mental illness that causes you, in your own words, immeasurable harm to the point of suicide. And any attempts to do so instead of prescribing plastic surgeries is genocide because you've decided this is the only cure you can have and if you don't get it, you'll commit suicide.

Biphobia - This liberal understanding of oppression as "anything that feelsbad" is a big part of how we got to this ridiculous situation where people invent flags and identities and -phobias of said identities left and right. I think biphobia is where progressives completely lost the plot when it comes to what counts as oppression. Oppression stopped being about ideas that are rooted in historical bouts of violence, murder, enslavement and neglect that lead to a measurable drop in one's quality of life. Instead, oppression turned into "people disapprove of what I do". If people finding two same-sex people kissing yucky was the worst thing gay people ever experienced, I would not call that oppression. There has to be a history or violence, legal subjugation and persecution, and an extreme drop in one's quality of life and safety as a result for things to count as oppression. When the worst thing that biphobia gets you (that's not literally just homophobia) are those awful oppressive gay people telling you to "pick a side" or "not believing you", then, I'm sorry but just...grow a spine? People are going to disagree with you. Sometimes they'll even disagree with you for stupid or ignorant reasons. People being stupid is not automatically oppression. Furthermore, it should not be controversial to say that gay people who are forced to deal with the reality of same-sex attraction in any romantic and sexual context shouldn't be shushed by bi people whose only source of difficulty in their life regarding their sexuality comes from gay people being suspicious of them.

Oreogenderphobia - Once biphobia became popular, all sorts of other -phobias started being invented for no reason other than people not agreeing with you or, if all else fails, not even being aware of you enough for you to be controversial. Which is oppression because it makes you "invisible". Nevermind that this invisibility doesn't in any way lead to worse life outcomes for you, unless you count being oh so cruelly expected to explain and defend the validity of your oreogender or sex-repulsed heteroromantic graysexuality to your ignorant oppressors, who are oppressing you either due to not believing you uncritically enough, or for not talking about your identity enough to make it a part of mainstream culture.

The Intersectionalism - The obsessive desire not to get men angry or alienated meant that the patriarchy has to affect everyone. If something hurts women, it's gotta hurt men more in order for anyone to give a shit about it, and ofc it's much cooler to care about all the other intersectionalist issues, even if they are at odds with women's rights. Women love any form of oppression they can talk about normally where they don't need to keep apologising for being such bad self-centered women who hate all men, which is why I think so many of them latched onto the various mental illnesses and trans identities. Part of it was also the non-feminine girls who didn't identify with the stripperific liberal feminism where you need a damn good reason to reject femininity or else you're suffering from internalised misogyny.

Cultural Relativism - another part of it is the interplay between racial and gendered aspects of liberalism where women are expected to lose as soon as you invoke "cultural relativism". Modern ideas on women's rights are a result of colonialist white supremacism and many women from far more strictly patriarchal androcentric cultures agree that other more "general" struggles are more important (I can't imagine why) or are only focused on ending gang rape and domestic violence against mothers while calling white feminists privileged and colonialist for advocating such petty things like no locker room talk or fighting biases in the workplace. This also intersects with anticarceral feminism - the needs of "the community" trump the safety of women.
A big part of this attitude manifests in using different historical cultural ideas on trans people (almost always feminine men who occupy a position of prostitutes so as to compartmentalise and direct masculine male homoeroticism away from each other) as evidence of their validity. Which is kind of like using the long history of human sacrifice to prove that yes, indeed, the Blood God is real and you're the bigot for not seeing it. ofc the horrible mistreatment of women and the violent enforcement of gender roles that goes hand in hand with trans in these "enlightened" societies is always awkwardly ignored or swept under the rug. After all, since women are so privileged, TIMs nees not concern themselves with their rights despite, uh...claiming to be the same as women?

CHRONICALLY ONLINE

Just as Strong as Men - Part of the libfem anti-generalising attitudes was also used to disprove the very obvious notion that men are physically stronger than women, which I can only imagine gained special popularity with the rise of chronically online girls and "girl power" messaging in media, appealing to women's desire for equality, and also to garner respect from the wider androcentric society. And what it ultimately offered us is men in women's sports being lauded as champions of women's rights and female physical ability.

Internet Alter Egos - If you can say women are as strong as men, what else can you say? I think with the rise of all these women who are very stuck online and don't touch grass, as well as the pornsick men who collect kinks like Pokemon, as well as the popularity of drawn porn and fanfiction, we ended up with people who think that just because you can draw a TIM who looks exactly like the opposite sex, that this proves that magical sex change is real. But, ultimately, why does sex change even need to exist? Aren't we all on the internet with our avatars and our Twitter bios and better friends than irl? If a tree falls in the woods and no-one is there to hear it, can I say it was a car, or a dragon, or a TIM? Which is also how you get so much weird wishy washy bullshit like "Your body doesn't define you". This is also why I think a lot of people have these internet sexualities that don't really pan out irl (namely various flavour of bisexuality that still just end up exclusively with the most bland straight relationships imaginable).

Topsy-turvy Bioessentialism - I'm still trying to figure out how tf this happened, but somewhere along the line, bioessentialism went from claiming gender roles and stereotypes are integral to different sexes, to "if you so much as acknowledge that the sexes exist, it means you're demanding they employ the gender roles and stereotypes that are an integral part of them". I don't understand why this is such a common point because the separation of gender roles from sex is a big point in feminism, so why is the "you say I have to be feminine just because I'm a woman?!!" any kind of a gotcha, let alone such a massvely popular one?
A big part of this whole thing has to be fueled by androcentrism, and women being so desperate to define themselves in male "human" terms, rather than as this isolated aberration. If you look at nonbinary gender abolitionist communities, they're rife with women who think they're special and unique for essentially wanting to disappear and not have their subhuman identity ever acknowledged, and that the true cause of the oppression they experience isn't in misogyny, but rather in anyone acknowledging the "private information" of them being female. They don't understand just how much the patriarchy exploits the staggering amount of ignorance over female bodies, such as by blindly applying male studies onto women. They think they're gaming the system by essentialy keeping their heads down and erasing themselves.
Men never liked to let go of their bioessentialism because of how deeply integral it is to their value system so maybe this was just TIMs and liberal mem trying to find a way to vilify feminists by making the problem be about feminazi TERFs rejecting a magical sissified sex change because that is keeping men from making their "free choice" of taking on a feminine gender role...instead of, ya know, the problem being that a magical sex change is needed in the first place for gender roles, or the very concept of gender roles in the first place. And all the libfems kinda just went with it, just as they went with the men's ideas on radical feminists being a bunch of militant murderers who you constantly have to apologise for and assauge men's fears from.

Postmodernism - I think this was initiated or at least passionately embraced by liberal feminism as a way to sort out all the patriarchal contradictions within the GIRL POWER liberal feminism as well as the emerging trans activist community (who were bound to get their turn after force-teaming themselves with gay people in the 90's). Liberal feminism has a very obvious bias in favour of attractive male-pandering feminine women, despite claiming that women can be whatever they want. What about the women who don't fit into this image? Well, liberal feminism gives them the option to be feminine in an alt way (which is totally different and subversive), or to re-examine why they hate femininity and think masculinity is better (definitely internalised misogyny), or...to realise there is no problem with their dislike of femininity because they're probably just a man.
On the other hand we have the very TIM-heavy classic transsexualism whose very male ideology ("I have a pink brain that makes me a woman because I'm a sl*t that likes to wear skirts, tee-hee") is kind of hard to fit in with the whole "don't say women are inherrently girly" idea. Additionally, a lot of chronically online girls don't really have an understanding of what men are like or their socialisation beyond what they see in tv shows and cartoons. So I imagine that's what fueled this drive to not even bother to associate the sexes with anything, but to just say that words are meaningless and you can be whatever you want because telling people what they can or cannot be is oppression.
I think this is indicative of the desire of women to question the patriarchal norms they've been raised with, but also not being able to, given the very male-pandering mainstream feminism they're working with. So instead of doing away with the whole "we have to make men fit into the victim-shaped hole on the Patriarchy box", they go with "Actually men and women shouldn't matter at all and everyone should just be a magical uncorporeal being because I'm too stuck online to remember that I need to eat and piss and sleep and can't philosophise my way out of those"

Women are from porn, men are from tv shows - with more and more boys being hooked on porn and more and more girls being hooked on fiction (and often the associated fanfics and shipping), we ended up with two streams of very gendered trans communities: the TIMs who get their ideas from other men's sissification, femboy, futa etc. porn communities (which as we all know have an excellent record of portraying women and critically examining themselves), and the TIFs who get their ideas about men from female-created yaoi and fanfics. Some of them do also consume gay male porn because women live in a man's world after all (I haven't seen TIMs engage in feminine shipping communities unless it's with very obviously male anime porn), though they are still primarily fixated on men through fictional lens. They tend to be very ignorant of what an average man is like and how deep his misogyny goes because their ideas on men are informed by very idealised fictional male protagonists and Jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold archetypes. These women frequently wear makeup and engage in liberal feminism and demand they be seen as harbringers of social justice. The TIMs are usually hyperfocused on trans rights and couldn't give a shit about women's rights.

THE GAY COMMUNITY

Feminism as activism nanny + eyeliner sharp enough to kill the patriarchy - Once liberal feminism separated the oppression women face for being women into oppression women face due to being feminine, it was only a matter of time before men swooped in to take center stage as the most oppressed of all. I think the domineering part that feminine gay men and drag queens and TIMs play in modern liberal feminism was unsurprising to some degree, given how much they and women get equated in popular imagination (and gay porn categories themselves) combined with the expectation of feminism needing to focus on everyone else's problems but their own. While there are certainly more gay men than straight men who give a shit about women's rights (though part of it might be because they get to sound progressive without having to give up their porn, kinks and no-strings sex), in my experience most gay men are more focused on bootlicking straight men and jerking off to that, than actually caring about anyone's rights, let alone women's. And yet women consistently seem to view them as these universally woman-centered allies. In reality, most gay men love their male privileges and they're used to navigating the world with the resulting confidence, respect and safety in mind.
People find feminine men controversial because they are stooping to the level of a sex object that they shouldn't or even inherrently cannot be, whereas for women, that's the only thing they can be, with maybe a bit of controversy over just how far you can take it before being labeled a wh*re. Liberal feminism decided both of these are the same thing and that they prove the patriarchal contempt for women has nothing to do with being female and everything to do with not being feminine. And that's how you get insane shit like men saying it's misogyny that other men beat them up and call them fags for wearing dresses. Because that's totally what happens to women.

Anti-kink is homophobic - Gay men are the first to be brought out when it comes to the subject of anal sex and kinks to prove that these are not harmful and misogynistic practices, because, see, gay people also engage in them and you are actually homophobic for criticising them. Nevermind how often there are clear heteronormative standards to justify the presence of these kinks, and also how damaging these are to men as well who really just happen to be pornsick enough to justify it to themselves as worth it. Which brings us to the fixation gay people have on imitating straight norms, often in very misogynistic and patriarchal ways, which I feel must've gotten way worse with the rise of internet porn and mainstreamification of homosexuality. From feminine men using the language of female genitalia to describe their assholes or calling it "breeding", to butch women wearing fake rubber penises over their actual female genitals and proclaiming themselves "stone tops" because they don't like any attention on their genitals, in complete opposition to what "top" means for men. Unsurprisingly, for all the magical variety of human sexuality out there, no man is interested in putting a fake rubber vulva or vagina in between his legs, even the most self-proclaimed super ultra turbo real-deal TruTrans dysphoric ones.

Penetrative sex - And because porn always wants more androcentric depravity, instead of the mainstreamification of homosexuality normalising nonpenetrative sex that is common in both male and female homosexual people, the opposite happened where anal sex became normalised, penetrative sex became seen as a default for gay people, and now even pegging is becoming a popular category where even women in straight relationships don fake dicks that cover their own genitals in order to provide one-sided sexual stimulation to men, portrayed as the height of female sexual empowerment right after prostituting yourself.
Which leads us to the batshit norm currently in place where masses of self-proclaimed straight men are attracted primarily to assholes and sometimes even rubber dicks (clits are ofc still neglected unless they're a part of play pretend that a TIM's shrivelled dick is the same as a clit - then all of a sudden clits are the most integral part of straight sex) and also to femininity as the most artificial signifier of female sex object status that liberal feminism has also associated with womamhood itself. Which means that a man who fucks another man in a dress and makeup while said man calls his asshole a vagina now counts as a straight relationship. And because you have butch lesbians with rubber dicks, that's the same as a man with a "permanent strapon", so maybe lesbians need to give men a chance for a change.

Bi people share their straight wisdom - bi people took up the mantle of offering the worst of both worlds - the painfully heteronormative straight ideology combined with a (very unfounded) persecution complex. Since it only takes one visit to the gay or bi porn category online to proclaim yourself bisexual, the movement is full of the most androcentric straight people imaginable who claim to be special and progressive for "looking past genitals". This category is also the one that is the most passionate about pushing the notion of bigotry based on genitals, or, as a corollary, portraying themselves as wise and enlightened for looking past genitals. And when they get told that maybe they're full of shit and shouldn't be telling gay people to look past their sexuality like people have been for centuries, the claims of biphobia immediately come out.

Queer straight people - the word "queer" has been appropriated by all the bi (but really straight for all intents and purposes) people trying to justify liking shit like BDSM as somehow subversive and persecuted. I think in theory straight(ish) people wanting to carve out a space where they can experiment with gender nonconformity and gender roles would've been good, but because they're straight, it mostly turned into celebration of gauche patriarchal kinks while appropriating gay people's history of victimisation to shield themselves from any criticism and refusing to accept that maybe their overwhelmingly straight existence (and no, commenting with your Nigel on how hot a woman is doesn't negate that) doesn't give them the right to speak over gay people who actually deal with the reality of homosexual relationships.

MENTAL HEALTH

Therapy speak - and just the overall over-focus on mental health and navel gazeing, along with various relatively mild diagnosis that are characterised as debilitating illnesses that everyone around you is obliged to walk on eggshells to manage. A lot of entitlement to other people's labour to manage your behaviour with very little in the way of actually holding yourself accountable to not be a burden.

Neurodivergent - What better way to posit yourself as special instead of as having debilitating issues than by calling yourself neurodivergent and everyone else neurotypical normies? Even better is your mental illness isn't in any way dibilitating and you can disprove the stereotypes about mental illness being difficult and debilitating like the brave social justice hero you are.

Chemical imbalance - There's been a push since the 90's to view depression as being due to a chemical imbalance in the brain that you are then obliged to treat with medicine for the rest of your life (needless to say certain parties benefited from hooking people on their supposedly lifesaving drugs forever). The demands for depression to be taken seriously turned from "don't tell me to smile" to "I have depression and there's nothing I can do about it because it's a fundamental part of my identity". Canada is also in the process of extending medically assisted suicide to mental illnesses (one of which, anroexia, has already been "treated" this way once), and I can't see how this could've even been possible at the hands of progressives without these sentiments that have gained ground, sentiments that treat these conditions as fundamental to a person and as such, incurable. Or, if curable, irrelevant if the person doesn't want help because "they know what's best for them".

Fatphobia - This is in a similar basket of issues caused by psychological problems which were turned into a special identity to be proud of and for which you're unfairly oppressed for, including by anyone telling you to change. Libfems recognised that obesity is vilified in women primarily due to beauty standards rather than health. But that soon turned into the idea that being fat is a completely neutral state of being that has nothing to do with health, and even implying that it does is bigotry and oppression. People know themselves best and if an obese person is happy, then you need to accept that and not say that they'd be happier if they could tie their own shoe laces and run more than 5 meters without catching their breath. Again, stuff like this normalised a sense of extreme individualism where no-one can tell anyone what's good for them and if a person wants to be obese while telling themselves it has nothing to do with their health issues or castrate themselves and tell themselves this makes them a woman, you're the bigot for not clapping over how valid they are for being themselves. If the person is hopeless or coping hard or delusional, it just proves how true, valid and unchangeable their condition is.

Destigmatisation - seems to have gone from trying to make people actually get help with their issues to validating said issues as a perfectly normal fundamental part of someone's identity that shouldn't have to be changed. Which brings into question why even get diagnosed? If you're so special and unique but you don't care to get any help because your condition doesn't cause you problems, why even chase the diagnosis?

Not a Mental Illness - This is admittedly a point of contention between some old-school transsexuals and the hip new transgenders - being trans is not a mental illness because, well, homosexuality got removed from that category so trans should be as well. Nevermind that there is nothing inherently harmful about homosexuality whereas dysphoria is literally defined as irrational debilitating distress over a perfectly normal and healthy body. I imagine it's both due to trendy trans teens who "don't need dysphoria to be trans" and also transsexuals who think being trans isn't a mental illness because it is scienficially proven that their gendersoul is magically stuck in the wrong body, and anything other than a hormonal imbalance and plastic surgeries is genociding them. So this delusion is supposed to be treated as a medical issue of gendersoul mismatch, rather than a psychological issue, because....well, trans people know what's best for them! And, as already noted, wow are there unfortunate implications behind this insistance that disability rights means believing delusional people at their word and making science jump through hoops to validate said delusion as totally real and fundamental aspect of a person.]]> <![CDATA[Southall Black Sisters Statement on Filia Conference]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1644 Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:57:15 +0000 eyeswideopen]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1644 https://southallblacksisters.org.uk/news/sbs-statement-on-filia-conference/

Quote:Southall Black Sisters (SBS) has unequivocally condemned the actions of both Hamas and the Israeli state. Yet when SBS’s Chair c alled on women at the FiLiA conference to stand against the genocide in Gaza, she was heckled and accused of anti-semitism. Very few women, mainly minoritised women, stood with her in solidarity with the Palestinian people. While she was being trolled on social media by women who were at the conference, FiLiA trustees asked our Chair to make a public statement distancing FiLiA from her call for solidarity with Palestine. It was a shocking denial of responsibility and a refusal to confront those responsible for the harm on the part of FiLiA.

Not even going to bother posting this at Vexxed. The genocide apologists will downvote it into oblivion. You can digitally sign this to show your support.]]> https://southallblacksisters.org.uk/news/sbs-statement-on-filia-conference/

Quote:Southall Black Sisters (SBS) has unequivocally condemned the actions of both Hamas and the Israeli state. Yet when SBS’s Chair c alled on women at the FiLiA conference to stand against the genocide in Gaza, she was heckled and accused of anti-semitism. Very few women, mainly minoritised women, stood with her in solidarity with the Palestinian people. While she was being trolled on social media by women who were at the conference, FiLiA trustees asked our Chair to make a public statement distancing FiLiA from her call for solidarity with Palestine. It was a shocking denial of responsibility and a refusal to confront those responsible for the harm on the part of FiLiA.

Not even going to bother posting this at Vexxed. The genocide apologists will downvote it into oblivion. You can digitally sign this to show your support.]]> <![CDATA[Updating the resources on kindrad.org, suggestions?]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1605 Fri, 10 Oct 2025 23:53:39 +0000 Clover]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1605 kindrad.org resources page is due for an update. I've been meaning to update it since Ovarit went down. The most obvious change would be Ovarit to Vexxed. Since clovenhooves.org is now a thing since I created kindrad, I'll add that to the list of websites too.

I think I'm going to remove the "support" kindrad webpage, and have the "Support organizations that benefit women" section instead point to the "Women of the World Unite" forum. (I'll need to go make posts for every women's organization on that webpage that I have not shared on here yet, before I remove that page.) Kindrad is meant to be pretty static and unchanging website, and the support web page is a bit too likely to need changes too often, as a new organizations are created and old ones might cease to exist.

Maybe I should replace Feminist Current with like Total Woman Victory and Medusa Rising. Wasn't that Megan Murphy's website and then she decided to pivot to conservative talking points or something..? Can't remember.

If you have any recommended books, videos, websites that you think would be a good addition to the kindrad resources page please let me know! 💜

TODO list:

Change Ovarit to Vexxed
Add clovenhooves.org
Port all women's organizations in the "support" page over to their respective countries in the Women of the World Unite forum, have the support women's organizations section point to that forum, remove the support web page
Add Total Woman Victory and Medusa Rising
Add Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender?
Verify all the website resources are still relevant and functioning

]]> kindrad.org resources page is due for an update. I've been meaning to update it since Ovarit went down. The most obvious change would be Ovarit to Vexxed. Since clovenhooves.org is now a thing since I created kindrad, I'll add that to the list of websites too.

I think I'm going to remove the "support" kindrad webpage, and have the "Support organizations that benefit women" section instead point to the "Women of the World Unite" forum. (I'll need to go make posts for every women's organization on that webpage that I have not shared on here yet, before I remove that page.) Kindrad is meant to be pretty static and unchanging website, and the support web page is a bit too likely to need changes too often, as a new organizations are created and old ones might cease to exist.

Maybe I should replace Feminist Current with like Total Woman Victory and Medusa Rising. Wasn't that Megan Murphy's website and then she decided to pivot to conservative talking points or something..? Can't remember.

If you have any recommended books, videos, websites that you think would be a good addition to the kindrad resources page please let me know! 💜

TODO list:

Change Ovarit to Vexxed
Add clovenhooves.org
Port all women's organizations in the "support" page over to their respective countries in the Women of the World Unite forum, have the support women's organizations section point to that forum, remove the support web page
Add Total Woman Victory and Medusa Rising
Add Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender?
Verify all the website resources are still relevant and functioning

]]> <![CDATA[Iran makes hijab voluntary, says report]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1591 Tue, 07 Oct 2025 17:10:01 +0000 Wrongtoy]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1591 https://x.com/mog_russEN/status/1975536136375136498

Ingenious move, really. Takes away israelamericas tiredexcuse they’re invading over women’s rights]]> https://x.com/mog_russEN/status/1975536136375136498

Ingenious move, really. Takes away israelamericas tiredexcuse they’re invading over women’s rights]]> <![CDATA[Andrea Dworkin Saw Trump’s Female Enablers 40 Years Ago]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1357 Tue, 08 Jul 2025 15:34:49 +0000 Elsacat]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=1357 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/andrea-dworkin-right-wing-women-feminism-trump.html

https://archive.ph/dDpGo

I haven't read "Right-Wing Women" yet but think I need to bump this one up on my reading list.

Quote:Dworkin asked. “The freedom of women from sex oppression either matters or it does not; it is essential or it is not.” We must agree that it is essential. In doing so, we must also understand why liberal “war on women” rhetoric has failed. Misogyny is one reason, but misogyny serves a purpose, and today’s anti-feminist moment was orchestrated by political forces that rely on our collective submission. The right wing tells all of us to bargain against our own liberation. They tell men that women’s advancement deprived them of economic and emotional security, and they tell women that safety depends on the prosperity of men. All they can offer is hierarchy.

]]> https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/andrea-dworkin-right-wing-women-feminism-trump.html

https://archive.ph/dDpGo

I haven't read "Right-Wing Women" yet but think I need to bump this one up on my reading list.

Quote:Dworkin asked. “The freedom of women from sex oppression either matters or it does not; it is essential or it is not.” We must agree that it is essential. In doing so, we must also understand why liberal “war on women” rhetoric has failed. Misogyny is one reason, but misogyny serves a purpose, and today’s anti-feminist moment was orchestrated by political forces that rely on our collective submission. The right wing tells all of us to bargain against our own liberation. They tell men that women’s advancement deprived them of economic and emotional security, and they tell women that safety depends on the prosperity of men. All they can offer is hierarchy.

]]> <![CDATA[What's on your feminist/women's studies reading list?]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=386 Wed, 20 Nov 2024 21:36:43 +0000 Clover]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=386
For starters, I need to finish the last chapter of Right-Wing Women! I had started that as a bookclub on Ovarit and then I got busy and never got to the last chapter. 🥲 It's so quotable.

Then I have this collection of books that I want to get to:

The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner
A Brief History of Misogyny by Jack Holland
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez
All About Love by bell hooks
We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They're all waiting to be read. 🥲

Do you have any women's studies books you want to read?]]>
For starters, I need to finish the last chapter of Right-Wing Women! I had started that as a bookclub on Ovarit and then I got busy and never got to the last chapter. 🥲 It's so quotable.

Then I have this collection of books that I want to get to:

The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner
A Brief History of Misogyny by Jack Holland
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez
All About Love by bell hooks
We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They're all waiting to be read. 🥲

Do you have any women's studies books you want to read?]]> <![CDATA[Can American women do 4B?]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=347 Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:05:13 +0000 Berry]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=347 https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/11/09/us/4b-movement-trump-south-korea-wellness-cec

In light of the election, I've heard some women recently talking about the 4B movement. This is a feminist movement in South Korea where some women have sworn off men in response to horrific misogyny.

4B stands for:

No sex with men (bisekseu)
No child-rearing (bichulsan)
No dating men (biyeonae)
No marriage with men (bihon)

Do you think this movement will take off in the US/the west in general? Would it benefit feminism as a whole?

Personally I think the vast majority of women are too attached to (heterosexual) romance and the perceived need for a male partner. However if even a few women join, it's a win. I'm not sure if would lead to institutional change but on a personal level more women protecting themselves, valuing their own safety and happiness over the social expectation to give our bodies/labor to men, is always beneficial.

I'm reminded of this quote by Audre Lorde:

Quote:Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

20241110_063728.jpg
Size: 56.24 KB / Downloads: 1030

]]> https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/11/09/us/4b-movement-trump-south-korea-wellness-cec

In light of the election, I've heard some women recently talking about the 4B movement. This is a feminist movement in South Korea where some women have sworn off men in response to horrific misogyny.

4B stands for:

No sex with men (bisekseu)
No child-rearing (bichulsan)
No dating men (biyeonae)
No marriage with men (bihon)

Quote:Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

20241110_063728.jpg
Size: 56.24 KB / Downloads: 1030

]]> <![CDATA[I am so dissapointed by right wing women right now]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=324 Wed, 06 Nov 2024 15:02:13 +0000 Possum]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=324
It's bleak. I hate MAGA women being anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-POC, etc etc etc and still having the audacity to call themselves radical feminists because the meaning of radical feminist has been twisted into "anyone who is against TRAs".

Sorry if this is too negative. I'm just really bummed out and I feel like female solidarity is bullshit. I cannot and will not have "solidarity" with women who hate women. Attempting to reach out to these women and include them in feminism is a horrible idea because they just steal feminist and GC talking points and use them to push their own bullshit trad agenda. I am so done with racist, homophobic women. No better than their racist, homophobic Nigels.]]>
It's bleak. I hate MAGA women being anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-POC, etc etc etc and still having the audacity to call themselves radical feminists because the meaning of radical feminist has been twisted into "anyone who is against TRAs".

Sorry if this is too negative. I'm just really bummed out and I feel like female solidarity is bullshit. I cannot and will not have "solidarity" with women who hate women. Attempting to reach out to these women and include them in feminism is a horrible idea because they just steal feminist and GC talking points and use them to push their own bullshit trad agenda. I am so done with racist, homophobic women. No better than their racist, homophobic Nigels.]]> <![CDATA[we can’t really talk about how to liberate women until we know what a society where women are free looks like]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=301 Wed, 23 Oct 2024 09:42:38 +0000 feministdragon]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=301 and this is something lacking in all feminist writing i’ve read so far. there’s an assumption that we all know what it is we’re working toward. But it’s never defined or fleshed out. I mean, most feminist writing don’t even explicitly state that we are working towards the emancipation of women, the liberation of women. And this is partly why we’ve fallen into the weaksauce concept of ‘equality’ with men.
so, to know how to get there, we’ve gotta talk about what ‘there’ is. What does the emancipation of women look like? how does that affect the social organization? the economic sphere? the organization of labor? the organizaiton of land?
if the family unit is the instrument of the oppression of women, then what is the basic economic/social unit? is it the neoliberal view of every man for himself? is it the collectivist view of small communes with shared finances? What economic/social model exactly best facilitates the freedom of women? This needs to be broadly understood, so we know what the goal is, so we know how to best work towards it.]]> and this is something lacking in all feminist writing i’ve read so far. there’s an assumption that we all know what it is we’re working toward. But it’s never defined or fleshed out. I mean, most feminist writing don’t even explicitly state that we are working towards the emancipation of women, the liberation of women. And this is partly why we’ve fallen into the weaksauce concept of ‘equality’ with men.
so, to know how to get there, we’ve gotta talk about what ‘there’ is. What does the emancipation of women look like? how does that affect the social organization? the economic sphere? the organization of labor? the organizaiton of land?
if the family unit is the instrument of the oppression of women, then what is the basic economic/social unit? is it the neoliberal view of every man for himself? is it the collectivist view of small communes with shared finances? What economic/social model exactly best facilitates the freedom of women? This needs to be broadly understood, so we know what the goal is, so we know how to best work towards it.]]> <![CDATA[37 questions to prove that systemic misandry doesn’t exist anywhere in the world]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=267 Wed, 18 Sep 2024 23:44:56 +0000 Clover]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=267
https://whatwouldjesssay.substack.com/p/37-questions-to-prove-that-systemic

Quote:I am writing this blog as a go-to list of questions for those people who claim that the world is misandrist, and that women are in power, or that women have more rights than men.

Further, I write this to challenge men who believe that systemic misandry exists on the same scale, or worse than misogyny.

]]>
https://whatwouldjesssay.substack.com/p/37-questions-to-prove-that-systemic

Quote:I am writing this blog as a go-to list of questions for those people who claim that the world is misandrist, and that women are in power, or that women have more rights than men.

Further, I write this to challenge men who believe that systemic misandry exists on the same scale, or worse than misogyny.

]]> <![CDATA[Women's Studies Online]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=183 Mon, 08 Jul 2024 05:56:48 +0000 Clover]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=183 https://wmstonline.com/

WMST Based in Canada with global reach, Women’s Studies Online (WMST) is an Indigenous- and women of colour-led platform for decolonizing radical feminist research, education, action, and movement-building.

Courses are available here: https://wmstonline.com/courses/]]> https://wmstonline.com/

WMST Based in Canada with global reach, Women’s Studies Online (WMST) is an Indigenous- and women of colour-led platform for decolonizing radical feminist research, education, action, and movement-building.

Courses are available here: https://wmstonline.com/courses/]]> <![CDATA[Is consciousness raising activism?]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=68 Thu, 20 Jun 2024 05:33:32 +0000 feministdragon]]> https://clovenhooves.org/showthread.php?tid=68