gurliexchic said: tha fuck? whats going on?
What’s going on with what? My recent personal post informing my followers that I no longer have any interest overtly identifying with “feminism”? I’m assuming it would be that one, since it was the last thing I posted prior to receiving this message, but I will answer you (and others reading this, as I’ll be making this post public) honestly and clearly.
The current state of feminism, particularly in the Western world as is my experience living in it, is going through its “third wave” of activism, assuming of course, that feminism can even be presented as a movement (as something collective), which is difficult to confidently propose considering that all initial feminist theories have been bogged down by choice politics and identity politics which prioritizes the feelings, preferences, biases and comfortable social positions of the individual without any structural, analytical framework.
It’s through choice politics, supported by the (neo)liberal notions of the individual navigating the society as an agent of free will and free choice without influence or culturally contextualized impact, that primarily drives modern Western feminism. It is this individualism that has completely depoliticized feminism, removing it of its legitimacy as an actual movement and not just another label used to validate every feeling and every choice, which was not feminism’s purpose but has become its selling point and seemingly core intent in the third wave.
Feminism’s purpose was to liberate primarily women and girls from male dominance, to liberate women and girls from male violence against us and to liberate us from being subjected to male sadism as a whole and anything else structurally and institutionally, in politics and in the distribution of wealth and goods and access to services and opportunities (economics) that has gendered disparities, due to the gender wage gap and the glass ceiling to gender biases that even limit employment opportunities on the most base level. Of course, it’s easy to throw away concerns of structural, collective inequality, when the modern vocabulary of feminism is about “Self” empowerment and the focus is “I”-woman, not “We,”-women. What makes a movement a movement - i.e.: collectivism, in advocacy/action and in analysis, has been replaced by a model of analysis that is individualistic and capitalist.
Capitalist because entire male-run, male-controlled, male-dominated industries, whether it be the sex industries or other powerful industry forces that drive either cheap labor, unpaid labor/slavery, the commodification of [female] bodies, and/or have poor, unsafe, primary, secondary and tertiary working conditions, etc are being defended by “feminists” on an individual basis, on a basis of individual preference.
Class analysis is not relevant anymore in modern mainstream feminism (third wave liberal feminism), it’s not relevant in terms of an application to economics and an application to looking at women as a class of oppressed individuals dominated by the male sex class. Once you remove that, looking at trends and patterns of behavioral inequality, socio-cultural inequality and political and economic inequality is rendered obsolete.
I also will not be the first person who has experience in feminism to point out how “Orwellian” it has become due to this individualistic model. Author Ariel Levy (who developed the concept of raunch culture, similar to the sociological concept of a porn culture) even pointed out that what feminists are advocating for today is the opposite of what feminists were fighting for in relation to the issue of pornographic depictions of male physical and sexual violence against women (and actually, the existence and prevalence of pornography in general, as the typical content is a visual ode to male domination of women), the pimping of women and girls into prostitution, the normalization of the commodification of female persons through both the legal and illegal sex industries (An example of this would be feminists attempting to not just de-stigmatize sex industry survivors, which I am supportive of, but also de-stigmatize the men who pimped them into prostitution and the ones who buy them).
Other feminists who are also critics of feminism have pointed to other patterns of “Orwellianism”, in which women embrace submission to men as feminist empowerment, once again, using feminism’s liberalized, individualistic model of analysis - or more accurately, lack thereof, to falsely politicize their submission. In fact, it is actually now controversial within feminism to state that male domination over women is anti-feminist. Why? Because it is about individual preference, individual choice and willful ignorance, in which female socialization, internalized misogyny, patriarchal gendering/gender roles and other significant social factors are marginalized, undermined or actually completely dismissed in analysis in order to reassure men that feminism does not threaten their power and to reassure the women who do not want to come across as threatening to them that the “movement” they align themselves with is about individual freedom, which includes the freedom to submit and the freedom to perform for the heterosexual male gaze.
Another arguable example of this acceptance of oppressive aspects that cage in women’s existence is the widespread acceptance of slur claiming. Which I have addressed repeatedly on this blog as something counterproductive to liberating women, as a class within a male-dominated culture, from misogynistic concepts and dichotomies, such as the virgin/whore dichotomy and others. Experiment with tags, such as: slut-shaming, slur claiming and others similar to that in order to find more elaborate reasoning behind my intense dislike of this trend in current feminism.
I could go on for ages in more detail with actual references and links if I wanted to make an essay out of this, but I would recommend researching the points many other feminist critics of feminism have brought up, from how orgasm politics has hijacked the feminist movement, to how liberalism was and is the death of feminism or the defanging of it, how queer theory has and is degendering discussions on socialization, conditioning and how its post-modern and post-structuralist basis makes invisible the point that gender is not just a binary but also a hierarchy with a sex-basis, an anatomical one that cannot be identified out of (This is also a controversial stance, to believe that human beings evolved to be a sex dimorphic, reproductive species with male and female as the results. As one critic plainly put it, as observed on my dashboard sometime ago: “(paraphrasing) Debating with queer theorists, especially on tumblr, is like debating with Creationists.”)
I could also delve into the issue of the acceptance of not just porn culture or raunch culture (as their conceptualists, Ariel Levy and Gail Dines, would have it and who both articulate the danger of these two cultures as mainstream forces shaping the lives of both sexes in disturbingly hyper-sexualized, anti-feminist ways quite well in their books, lectures and/or interviews), but also the acceptance of kink culture. To paraphrase Catharine Mackinnon, I do not want to be involved in a movement that has rapist preserves: The fetishization of rape and abuse and torture and slavery is wrong and anti-feminist. I will not be debating that.
Until feminism regains the powerful, imposing collectivism and harsh, scathing, scholarly critique of male dominance that acknowledges socialization as a factor, gendering as oppressive, sexualization and sexual objectification as psychologically destructive to the well-being of women and girls (as the American Psychology Association has proved. Also watch Caroline Heldman's TEDTalk for a summary of the results of those studies), until feminism stops making space for sadistic men and pornographers (which are pimps, by the way, they just film the transaction), and the dominant discourse resumes being at least porn critical and kink critical and we stop attempting to address the issue of internalized misogyny and colonized minds by resorting to emotional biases and individualism, then I will proudly and openly and happily refer to myself as feminist, but I cannot because it goes against nearly all of my political and moral convictions (Oops, I just used the dreaded “M”-word! Feminism is also currently heavily morally relativist or outright amoralist in an attempt to avoid offending people despite the fact every movement and ideology has a moral lining. For example: The stance that rape is wrong and abuse is wrong, as well as sexual harassment, and formerly sexual objectification and initially, the eroticizing of all of those things, whether internally or pornographically).
I cannot call myself a feminist knowing what that entails in the minds of most people who consider themselves informed on feminist “politics”. I am not referring to the stereotype that feminists are non-gender conforming, sex critical, aggressively-assertive, lesbian women with a bone to pick with every man. In fact, I don’t mind that stereotype and unlike many of today’s third wave feminists who go out of their way to reassure men that they are not any of those things by putting their claims of “sex positivity”, “kink positivity”, slur claiming and idolizing of femininity to tactical use (to avoid coming across as undesirable to men, offensive to men or extremists), I do not care for those things and it is actually, those very same approaches to feminist stereotypes that is replacing the traditional stereotype of the “feminist”. And it is that mentality that makes me cringe the most.