RadFem 2013

Last weekend June 8th & 9th Radical Feminists descended upon the city of London from various parts of the western hemisphere.  Our goal?  To have a public conference, highlighting OUR speakers, activists, theorists and rabble rousers.  I am proud to say this goal was achieved despite the efforts of misogynist naysayers to shut it down.  June 8th, 1913 was the day that suffragette Emily Davison died after being trampled by King George V’s horse Anmer at Epsom Derby.  She was carrying a scarf she attempted to attach to the horse demanding votes for women.  Thus it was a significant anniversary we met upon to analyze the plight of women in this modern age and to organize what must be done about that plight.

At all times at this conference I felt safe.  What was amazing was that despite the backlash and vitriol directed at radfem2013 on places like twitter none of this correlated to any actual protest of our event.  Not surprising as internet misogynists are generally cowardly little men.

Themes included supporting survivors of the sex industry in their activism, prostitution as a form of colonialism and racism, the importance of unmasking and naming male violence, building lesbian feminist community, utilizing the internet as a tool for our activism, creating and maintaining women’s spaces, letting go of our fears and biases to work in true sisterhood with women across our many differences, women’s achievements globally, elder women’s issues, transgenderism and its impacts on women’s rights and feminism, etc.

I ended up crying many times during the conference, maybe it was the prednisone I was on but I really felt connected to the women there, willing to share and bare so much of themselves and their experiences.

Rachel Moran launched her book “Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution” at the conference.  It was truly a privilege to hear what she had to say about her time and experience in prostitution.  I was very touched when she talked about people looking at her when she was trapped in prostitution and her thinking “Do you see me?  Am I human to you?”.  She also exploded the myth of happy hookers right out of the water in her talk.  She said they never can look an exited woman who is speaking the truth in the eye.

Sheila Jeffreys was on fire.  This is a woman who has never once lost her rage at what happens to women.  Her life has clearly been committed to the liberation of womankind and it is truly awesome to behold.  She took us through a harrowing tale of what its like having a legalized trade in women’s flesh in Australia, even bringing up that there are McDonald’s restaurants next to brothels.  A whole generation of men in Australia are being groomed into believing that it is acceptable to have women as sexual commodities.

Cherry Smiley spoke about the introduction of patriarchy to indigenous peoples in North America, how indigenous women in particular have been targeted for destruction by white colonialism in an effort to steal all “resources” (she does not view landbases as resources), the staggering numbers of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada, the uprooting of native children from their families and cultures creating a vacuum to which many young women wind up in prostitution, drug use and crime from a lack of self-esteem and identity.  She also urged us to support Canadian feminists with the impending Bedford decision as the decriminalization of prostitution in Canada would mean even more horror for indigenous women.  

Julia Long in her talk “Hidden in plain sight” spoke to the ways in which we are all pressured to collude in keeping male violence hidden.  The language we use to speak about what are incidents of male violence especially.  Its important for feminists to STOP using words like “domestic violence”, “intimate partner violence”, “teen dating violence” and even “violence against women”.  We need to put the focus back on the perps, who is doing what to whom. 

On Sunday we heard a talk by Femi Otitoju about women globally.  So often we’re made to think it is those of us in places like the UK and the USA that must support women elsewhere in the world, that we need to help them, educate them but its often the case that they are doing better than us in terms of material gains for women’s rights.  She urged us to let go of our biases, let go of our fears of being labelled an “ist” and to dive in to working with women across our differences.  I came away from her talk with a desire to push my levels of comfort, that it was okay to say or do the wrong things sometimes, that what really matters is not my personal ego and identity but the goal of liberating women.

Sheila Jeffreys then went on to discuss compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian feminism.  She noted that it was very strange that so many women in this modern resurgence of feminism are not becoming lesbians as they did in the second wave, despite the horrific tidal wave of male violence and creepy male sexuality that is even more visible culturally.  Some reasons she thought this might be were that mixed-space organizing was dulling women’s revolutionary impulses.  In a female-only woman’s space it can be hard to get a man out of some women’s head.  This is obviously never gonna happen if nigel is in the room with the women too.  Women cannot be honest nor vulnerable in front of their men.  We also learned the origin of the term “nigel”.  Yes!  There was an actual Nigel out there.  A man who worked with the SWP during the 70s and lived in the same building of flats as Sheila Jeffreys.

We talked more about this issue later on in a workshop I attended about lesbian feminism.  There was a lot of frustration in the room.  Many newly out women looking for guidance and support for what they were going through from older lesbians.  Lesbians talking about their demonization and ostracism in mixed activist groups.  We discussed the choice vs “born this way” concept of sexuality and how it effected us personally.  I think most of us left the workshop with a strong desire to keep fighting and building community.

It was a privilege and honor to be able to go to radfem 2013.  I learned a lot, made new connections with women, pushed myself out of my comfort zone quite a bit and came away with more than I had even set out to.  I remain a firm believer in the importance of women’s spaces and the radical feminist desire to keep them and expand them for future generations of women.

Last night I had a few thoughts I put on my tumblr:

Men use fucking and breeding as a way to pacify women.  It literally retards our ability to process reality.  The earlier they start this process the more effective it is.  Child rape is necessary to maintain the patriarchal system.  Ensuring that another generation of women will go gladly into the caste of available vagina men have deemed them best suited to.  It is not necessary for every woman to be raped in childhood for this process to work.  Just enough of us.  Everyone has several child rape and incest survivors in their day to day life.  Its more common than being left-handed.

Intercourse is about domestication.  Plain and simple.  The easiest way men have figured out to control us is through the act of fucking.  Now there’s the obvious #1 reason why this is effective.  Women become vulnerable through pregnancy and the care taking of children.  Knock a woman up and you’ve got her trapped.  Easy-peasy.  The threat of pregnancy also works in instilling the same psychological effects.  Your mind is preparing for impending doom.

But its not just the pregnancy factor that makes it so damned problematic.  The act of intercourse, as Andrea Dworkin wrote extensively on, is in itself a violation an act of possession.  This violation of women results in our capacities being utterly thwarted.  This is not an accident.  This is why men do it.  This is why men rape little girls.  They’re creating the next generation of “sexually empowered women”, the prostituted woman, the right-wing woman, the handmaiden.  The more it takes place, the easier the mind separates from the body, the easier it is to endure over and over again.  This process has the ultimate effect of separating a woman from her own truth.  The only truth she can understand is men’s.  Separated as she is from herself and thus all other women she simply cannot understand.

The dissociation one must engage in to endure the terrorism that is male sexual violence creates mental blocks.  In doing rape trauma recovery one often finds they’ve developed blocks around being able to understand and articulate experiences.  They also can see just how much of their lives have been thwarted and controlled by the fact that they went through the rapes.  In itself blocking human possibility.  The will of the individual human to express themselves fully.  All stopped because some man’s dick.

So yes, it is of utmost importance that women who can, not participate in the act of heterosexual fucking.  Each time this occurs the same physiological responses are taking place.  The mind is preparing for doom, the body stores the blocks, the self is violated.  Everything breaks down easier.  Not having intercourse is an act of self-love.  Self-preservation.  Self-actualization.

The Forgiveness Myth

A common myth leveled at survivors of rape and abuse is that we need to “forgive” our rapists in order to begin to heal ourselves.  Rape is always made about how the victim responds to it.  How we BUILD CHARACTER from trauma.  What we LEARN.

Fuck all that.

It is an act of self-respect and preservation to not forgive.  What happens when a woman decides to forgive her rapist?  She “heals” and is now able to “love” again.
What does it mean to heal and love again?  To be willing to put ourselves into situations with men where we are going to be fucked.  All this methodology is about making it so that women return to relationships with men.  It is a fundamental part of compulsory heterosexuality.  We take what we have learned about the nature of men, what they have done to our bodies and we subvert it.  We tell ourselves that it was an isolated incident.  That it was one bad man.  We ignore the reality of what the class of people known as men are actually doing to women all over the world.  You see, the rape was just an individual hardship to get through.  A curveball life threw our way.  Not the result of a sex class system that designates women as a target.

The mental strife we live with after the fact, the PTSD, flashbacks, inability to cope with certain aspects of life.  The complete shutdown of certain parts of our mind then become OUR problem.  Survivors have to live with these feelings of “If I only did ____” then I would be okay.  When we forgive men who have gone out of their way to hurt us we are betraying ourselves, leaving ourselves to be the ones to blame for what is the natural fall out of exposure to life-altering trauma.  To forgive the perpetrator is to blame the victim.  To forgive the perpetrator is to set up a system in which men who are not sorry are given a free pass to continue their crimes.  It puts the emphasis back on women’s choices.

The only people we need to forgive is ourselves.  Let go of your anger at yourself for having trusted untrustworthy people.  Let go of your anger at yourself for being naive.  Forgive yourself for not knowing what to do in a situation.  Forgive yourself for dissociating. Forgive yourself for not fighting back.  Forgive yourself for not going to the proper authorities.  Forgive yourself for going to the proper authorities.  Forgive yourself for making unwise choices.  Let go of guilt for making choices in extreme situations without all the information in the world available to you.

Because you truly deserve forgiveness in your life and those that hurt you do not.

So You Think You’re A Dyke

Are you a woman who has previously considered yourself heterosexual or perhaps maybe bisexual?  Has that come into conflict with your feminist ideals?  Are you catching yourself thinking more and more about how attractive other women are?  Do you get jealous when your female friends who ‘aren’t quite there yet’ talk about their totally boring nigels?  Do you kind of want to put your arm around another woman, play with her hair, smell her skin?  You are not alone.  You may in fact be going through what many of us already have.

Political Lesbianism.

If you’ve previously considered yourself a supporter of basic human rights for gay people you may find these feelings at odds with what you’ve previously been told about sexuality.  You see, we’re told by most gay rights activists that sexuality is an inherent trait, that its something we’re born with.  That it cannot change.  This view of sexuality makes sense if you’re fighting crypto fascists for basic human dignity.  It doesn’t make so much sense if you’re someone whose going through these feelings, yet haven’t before.  Or not to the level you currently are.

You see, the big con in all of this understanding of sexuality is that heterosexuality is actually a learned behavior.  It is not natural.  At least not in the sense it exists institutionally today.  In fact, it is the very conduit by which the global oppression of womankind is taking place.  Each man gets to own his own woman, or group of women depending on local custom and enjoy what amounts to nothing but glorified prostitution and drudgery from them for as long as he wants/is convenient to him and the preservation of his precious male seed.  

All of this is background stuff really.  I want more to talk about this phenomenon.  Yes, its a phenomenon.  Political lesbianism pisses a lot of people off for various reasons but it is a real thing happening, it is something that feminists go through as a result of the awakening that our consciousness brings.

Theres a lot to shed.  First off there’s the nigels.  Shed those things, my god knock it off with the nigels already.  They can’t and won’t ever change, you’re deluding yourself into thinking otherwise.

Secondly there’s the exposure to creepy male sexuality.  If you were lucky enough to choose the man who would *deflower* you.  I want you to think about your first sexual experiences.  They were pretty good right?  Up until he stuck his penis in you, right?  You were having all manner of intense sexual feelings that then had to be sublimated into doing what he wanted, right?  Then there’s all the porn shit men bring into sex.  If you’re a woman reading this there’s no hope for nigel to not be porn sick.  They’ve all been exposed to more porn than any generation before.  Porn is everywhere, it is the air they breathe and it is the shit they act out on your body.  That porn reel shit they have going on when they’re “making love” to you has an effect on your sexuality and psyche.  You need to work on that.  Its traumatic shit and you need to get it out of your system.  I can’t recommend anything in specific.  For some women, reading about stockholm syndrome helps, for some women mysticism helps, for others various forms of therapy, reflection, study, meditation all help to get that shit out of your body.

To do that you’re gonna need to give yourself time.  Time to heal, time to really think about what it is you want, explore your feelings.  That time should be spent in celibacy.  Do not pursue relationships with other women until you have began doing this work.  There’s enough trauma in this world, lets not inflict it on each other, ok?

So you’ve been doing all this stuff, rethinking your sexuality, reclaiming it, etc.  You’re noticing intense feelings about some women you meet.  You’re attracted to them.  You start to remember little bits and pieces of your life you’d buried.  Times before your feminism when you were attracted to women, when you had intense erotic moments with other women.  You start to realize just how much you’d been repressing just so you could make it work with nigel.

That’s what I mean when I talk about political lesbianism.  I don’t really feel the need to differentiate myself apart from other lesbians except when they’re attacking political lesbians.  Because I am one.  I chose to be a lesbian.  I was bisexual for many years.  Had relationships with other women but repressed a lot of my feelings, was scared of being a dyke.  It took feminism to break that shit down for me.  Make me realize how trauma-bonded I was to men and how it never worked with them because it could never work with them.  This choice to love women is a positive affirmation of my desire.  It wouldn’t have been possible for me without feminism.

I of course, am not the only one whose been through this. That is why the concept exists.

I also believe heterosexual relationships are inherently unequal.  So whether you love women or not, please, love yourself.  Dump your nigel.

 

Big Important Male Ideas!

The HIStory of all hitherto society is the history of male classes and male ideas jockeying and jacking each other off in the game of which group of men with the biggest dick will have their say in how female labor will be exploited.  Well, I’m generalizing maybe a TAD bit but lets put on our thinking caps and look at it through a female-centric lens.

Certainly the female sex class* has been a massive part of every political upheaval known to humanity for some pretty obvious reasons:

1) All the bad shit that happens to men happens to women*, and happens to women WORSE.

2) Men are generally cowards that need to be emasculated by women in order to prove their virility in battle/bed/what have you.

3) Women have the most to gain from things changing.  (We tend to have the attitude of ‘can it really get worse than this?’ in relation to our perception of reality since we’re at the bottom of every social class.  Even very privileged women feel the degradation of their sex on a daily basis)

Into this situation comes….BIG IMPORTANT MALE IDEAS!

Now we’ve all been exposed to these throughout our lives.  Its actually impossible not to come across them in some form.  BIG IMPORTANT MALE IDEAS! such as “freedom”, “liberty”, “egalitarianism”, “free markets”, “individuals”, “society”, “the greater good”, “reform”, “revolution”, “inclusivity”, etc.  These are common place in the “marketplace of ideas” where the jockeying of men and the ideas that turn them on happens.

But the thing about BIG IMPORTANT MALE IDEAS! is that they aren’t in any way the domain of woman.  Our job is to be the drudges of these BIG IMPORTANT MALE IDEAS!  Men with ideas need coffee, men with ideas need flyers to be passed out, men with ideas need you to raise $$$ so that men with big important ideas can do what they think they need to do to make those ideas happen.  Men with ideas need a sexual outlet, men with ideas need a nice warm home to come to after a hard day of fighting for their ideas where life is idyllic, men with ideas need females to spout their ideas so that these male ideas aren’t exposed for the same old boring male ideas that they are (see Ann Coulter, Naomi Wolf, Christina Hoff Sommers).  You see one BIG IMPORTANT MALE IDEA thats time came was “diversity” so every now and then they need a female drudge that can provide the appearance of it taking place.  Despite the fact that this is just a preventative measure by the male ruling class to appease the angry dude classes that they were more powerful than they actually are.

BIG IMPORTANT MALE IDEAS! exist in the world of men.  Women can become attracted to these ideas, especially the more obscure ones as we aren’t exactly fluent in male idea speak.  When this happens women gladly throw themselves into the fray to become drudges to these male ideas.  Workhorses for male revolutions, or counter-revolutions, whichever really doesn’t matter because at the end of the day whats happening or what we want to happen isn’t going to benefit us in any way.

So I’m thinking of this today as I pontificate on twitter.  Some dude was going on about how radical feminists are crazy, tin-foil hat wearing loonies because we don’t want males at our conferences or any of our political activities (since you know, the point of radical feminism is to get away from males and their stupid fucking ideas).  It struck me that of course this is the same BIG IMPORTANT MALE IDEA that has existed throughout time that women who don’t enjoy the degradation of our sex are just “crazy”.  Which can be conveniently thrown at any woman at any time no matter what her drudge work to the male gods has been.  It also struck me that this particular issue.  The issue of women being able to meet as a class defined apart from males is coming up against the new crop of BIG IMPORTANT MALE IDEAS! about “gender”.  You see a whole bunch of males are under the impression that they are going to liberate huMANity by their transgression of gender, which their kind has imposed upon women without stop since time immemorial.  They’re angry that there’s this group of women they thought they could hoodwink by appropriating our feminist language who still aren’t willing to go out and be the drudges to their BIG IMPORTANT MALE IDEAS!  They have recruited some women to drudge speak on behalf of them and their ideas.  But at the end of the day whats got them really in such a state is there are women now who have our own ideas, original ideas, women who have a legacy of gutsy women who’ve broken free of male ideas ahead of them.  The time of BIG IMPORTANT MALE IDEAS! is coming to and end.

* I use the terms “female sex class” and “woman/women” interchangeably, like any rational human being.

No Sons, No Masters

So my life as a feminist has taken a few turns or so.  Some of it is the craziness of living through some traumatic shit.  Some of it is just luck.  I don’t remember when I decided I didn’t want to have children but at some point during my teen years I did.

I found blogs, written by women, who called themselves feminists and talked about their decision to be childfree.  In particular I loved the green fairy and the misanthropic bitch.  Although in my more enlightened analysis now I would reject pretty much most of what these women put out, what drew me in was the simple idea that women don’t exist to have males use our bodies to pass their seed on.

There’s a million ways to express this idea, and I ate them all up.

I had an abortion about 5 years ago, really upset with myself (I KNOW!) for being so stupid to have even ever gotten pregnant.  I was also proud of making the RIGHT decision, instead of doing what I’d seen so many women do.  Settle down with the first guy that knocks them up and settle into domesticity.  I just knew I couldn’t do that.

Don’t let anyone tell you abortion is an easy option either.  Its incredibly painful, my body still hasn’t recovered from the trauma 5+ years on and it physically altered my body in very terrifying ways.

A lot of women really wrap their identity up in having children.  It seems to be this confirmation of womanhood that one either lives up to or not.  Lesbians can validate ourselves as women by giving birth to healthy sons, etc.

I guess this is what I wanna talk about.  I’ve dated several women who have pretty much freaked out at my assertion that I don’t want to have children, and I especially don’t want to have MALE children.  I have explained why, and I do think my reasoning is sound.  I don’t want to put a male child out into the world and have him possibly harming women and know that my love and acceptance for my child will always be lacking because of this fear.  I also just don’t want to put the time, energy and love (and really what is more of an energy sponge than children?) into a man.  For any reason.  I’ve also been contacted by butthurt sons of 70s feminists who tried raising their kids in alternative ways which has resulted in their sons taking on a very conservative attitude towards life and towards their treatment of women.  Then there’s sons like Tobi Hill-Meyer, well I just couldn’t handle that at all…

At first I was kind of shocked that other lesbians wouldn’t get this, but of course not everyone in the world is a radical feminist and just cause someone likes women and even likes me (I have my moments of charm) doesn’t mean they have any clue about how bad shit really is.  So I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve finally figured it out.  Here’s my hypothesis:

1) Having sons is a status giver for women.  When we give birth to male children we are validating our own womanhood and proving our value to the culture at large.  This is a way to validate ourselves as women and thus lesbians, many of whom feel like a big part of their womanhood has been denied their whole lives know having sons will validate them in the eyes of society.

2) Internalized misogyny.  This is a no brainer.  We’ve all heard women talk about how little girls are all “bitches” and “evil” and sons are so sweet and love their mothers endlessly (as if).

3) Heteronormativity.  For you see, the mother/son relationship is the foundation of the institution of heterosexuality itself.  Its a perfect analogy really.  Women pour all their love and soul into nurturing and taking care of men who are our oppressors, we are unable to escape it in most situations.  But of course its supposed to be different when its our own nigels sons.  I mean, I was even once at an anti porn conference where a woman was more freaked out about how her son felt about his penis size than the woman being humiliated in the pornography he was looking at on the computer.  We all have our anecdotes I’m sure.

I’m not really sure what I’m getting at here.  I guess its a few trains of thought trying to pull itself into some analysis of the situation.  I guess its fun breaking down compulsory heterosexuality and showing that yet again, lesbians and heterosexual women aren’t different from one another.  We’re all raised under the big P and we all have the same messages drilled into us.  I long for the day when every woman is a radical lesbian feminist.

So for now, its back to enjoying celibacy and using that sexual energy to be creative which is like, totally hot.

Who Fights Monsters

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

 - Friedrich Nietzsche

 

The past day I’ve been mulling over my thoughts about Allecto’s post Big Porn Inc at the RadFem Hub.  There were parts of it that were honestly quite triggering and got me thinking about what kind of pain and trauma we subject ourselves to as radical feminists.  To boldly look into and name the horrors that polite society just isn’t able to see (or doesn’t want to).  To carry all of this terrible knowing around with us.  Its enough some days to make a woman feel crazy.

First there’s the isolation.  Intense isolation of knowing that you’re probably going to lose a lot of people in your life because they can’t handle that you’ve taken the leap into the terrible knowing.  Also little quirks about the person that may be very common among the human race may just leave you with the sour smell of patriarchal bullshit in your nostrils.  The isolation of knowing that you just cannot be yourself or let your guard down around most people because they do NOT understand you.  This isn’t some desperate teenage feeling of not being understood, its a deep well of knowing that you’ve had your eyes opened to some cold hard truths that most people are brainwashed from birth til grave to just not see.

There is the isolation of being unabashedly pro-woman in a society that is just as unabashedly anti-woman.  The isolation of being kicked out of other political communities for daring to speak up about all the little obvious inequities.  The isolation of being the one that brings everyone else down.

The quote from Nietzsche in many ways sums up the dilemma of radical feminists as they plunge into the terrible knowing.  The abyss is staring into us.  Many of us have experienced the traumas we see enacted on the bodies of other women, many of us have been through toxic bonding with males, many of us have experienced intense violence labelled “love” or “passion”.  We take the dive in, ignoring our own safety and dare to see the truth of what male violence is and how it manifests and it fucking hurts and we want to fucking scream and we want to destroy the men who do these things.  DESTROY like Kali beating her arms in righteous rage.  This is not a world with justice for women and we are stepping off the path of what is known in the hopes of finding that we can one day make it so.  We fear we may become gruesome like the monsters we despise, that they will poison us with their wickedness and transform us into being like them and we are labelled as worse than them from the left, right, center and even other women who call themselves feminists.

But we survive.