Please keep in mind that it is not our wish to alienate any person who might one day become a genuine supporter of women’s liberation, and while this set of harmful behaviors has been named after one man who exudes these particular qualities in abundance, this letter is only intended to help all men (and the women who nurture them) become the helpful allies whom you claim to be.   (Not that we even need your help, remember paternalism is sexist too)

First, you need to know why we have a valid reason for being concerned about the behavior of self-identified feminist men within feminist spaces, and our answer is simple: We have identified the subtle mechanisms utilized by pro-feminist men to “divide and conquer”, to erase the commonality from all women within feminist spaces and whose cumulative effect results in a gross marginalization of the radical feminist position. Nor are we are the only women to notice a problem. Megan Milanese brilliantly describes most of the tactics here  – yet that list does not go far enough to analyze the extent of the problem.

So why should an erasure of the commonality inherent to all women matter to anyone besides radical feminists? Lucky Nickel makes the relevant connection for us:

Self-naming and self-identified labels mean nothing. There must be substance to the label they identify with and substance to who they claim to be. Otherwise folks can insist on calling a mouse a giraffe or claim rape is really love.

What I do think important to note is that liberals, lesbian separatists and radical feminists are all flying the radfem flag these days. The problem being, they are 3 separate and distinct political groups and ideologies, 2 of whom are inappropriately waving the radfem flag. It can get a bit tricky tho with lesbian separatists as radical feminists can also be lesbian separatists. But not all lesbians are radfems and not all radfems are lesbian separatists, or even lesbian for that matter. But in Julian Real’s case, that would be irrelevant. The dude is not a lesbian or radical feminist.

What the dude is, is liberal. And what he is attempting to do is appropriate the radical feminist label in order to inject liberal ideology. Equality politics are liberal politics, not radical feminist politics. Radical feminists seek liberation from men and their system, not equality. Liberals focus on differences between women. Radical feminists focus on the commonality of women. Needless to say, these 2 different ideologies conflict and clash. Which delights men like Julian Real to no end. Cuz if he keeps liberal women pitted against radical feminist women, it keeps women from unifying, which in turn keeps the heat off of pricks like him and men in general. Slick, no?

In talking to each other privately, we have decided to collectively communicate the following message regarding Julian Real, Hugo Schwyzer, and other men like them who claim to be feminist allies. These men do not speak for women as well as we can speak for ourselves and we ask that you give radical feminist bloggers the respect of reading our words, joining the discussion in comments on our blogs, and contributing to our own community rather than giving energy to men like Julian & Hugo who seek to divide us on points which all feminists have in common. Men exhibiting these behaviors have inserted themselves into discussions among women when their participation was insidiously harmful in nature, and we ask that you not support that behavior nor make excuses for it.

* I also have to add that Julian Real claims to be an ally to “crazy” people.  I have been open about having PTSD and am also a woman much younger than Julian Real.  When I met him in person this past year I had no idea he would be so awful as to gaslight me about us having met when we returned to our internet personas.  He put me in the situation of knowing that I, because of my “mental health” problems and young age was less credible than he in terms of complaining about his abusive sexist treatment of me.  I was very upset and could only confide in a small number of people about what had happened.  I feel he was putting me in a spot of separating me from other women whom focus on race and sex issues (of interest to me as I’ve only passed as white as an adult outside of the context of my upbringing which was ridden with racist-sexist discrimination from government institutions).  I luckily found more women complaining of his sexist behavior and realized I was not alone.  I thank all the other women participating in this open letter for the strength it has given me.  This is what sisterhood can do for women, and men like Julian fear the hell out of it.

So like many others I’m upset about the posts several bloggers have done against the trans critical radical feminists.  For one, the arguments are no different than your run of the mill liberalism and appeals to women’s desires to be liked and not be “hateful” towards our oppressors.  (Be spiritutally purer than them basically) but I also can’t help but recognize the lack of solidarity for what many of us who have chosen to speak out about the homophobia of certain trans people have gone through this week.  One of our own had her personal work and home address posted as an intimidation tactic against her by Xander Sarkisova because she dared to tell Xander in no uncertain terms that lesbians have a right to not have sex with males if they so fucking choose.  

I personally did a video responding to what happened and Xander’s whitewashing of history on his blog and had a false copyright infringement claim made against my video. (ILLEGAL BTW! but to counter it I’d have to give this asshole my personal fucking information!)

So one woman’s life is being threatened and one woman’s free speech is being infringed upon, lesbians rights to sexual autonomy from men (all women’s sexual autonomy from men) are being mocked and the problem we all need to focus on is how to sound nicer and dialogue better with people who have utter contempt for conscious women.  Are you fucking kidding me?  Seriously, am I being trolled here?  This doesn’t make sense.

All I’m seeing is that radical feminists need to make themselves more respectable if they’re going to be taken seriously.  Since when did acting like respectable ladies get women anything?  Oh yeah, NEVER!

Oh and also apparently people promoting the idea of gender as an inherent identity rather than a form of sex caste stereotyping isn’t oppressing women?  What?

Can we not throw lesbians under the bus with our talk of supporting the “lgbtBBQ” community? Their rights are consistently being violated by the trans community.  Oh and the general umbrella “queer” community as well.  Its tough times for dykes and they could use a little sisterly support.  They’ve written about this extensively.  Its as if you’d think they didn’t exist.

Change doesn’t happen because we have nice discussions and win people over to our side through our reasoning and logic.  If that were the case we’d have won this war (and this fight against patriarchy is a war and the patriarchs are winning) ages ago.  We have to force it to happen.  We win recruits by actually making their lives better, by forcing change to happen, not by stimulating their neurons and making them like us because we’re so nice.  

It feels bad because I genuinely like these women but I’m at the point where I feel like I’m actually having to defend the fact that my abuse has happened.  It feels really fucking bad.

Around the US as well, many women of color were involved in legalizing abortion alongside ending forced sterilization before Roe v. Wade.  

Another book that influenced me greatly was Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class.  She went further than Sara Evans, looking at what sparked the first wave.  Again, abolitionist women were the driving force behind the suffragist movement.  What struck me most was how involved black women were in the suffragist movement, a history pretty much ignored today.  

I’m writing this because time and time again I hear black and white liberals refer to feminism as a white supremacist movement.  I hear white women say that black men are better allies than white women (setting oneself up for failure I must say) and thats why women of color “aren’t involved” in feminism en masse.  (as if men of color don’t beat, rape and subjugate women of color just like white men do)

Its liberal, racist erasure of a huge portion of feminism from the public eye and its BULLSHIT.  I am not denying the intense racism of many reactionaries that have been elevated to public status in our movement.  Certainly the focus on liberal reforms in feminist history has meant that opportunists come in and try to stifle the revolutionary potential of women’s awakening.  But liberal bourgeois feminists are not representative of actual feminism that has transformed women’s lives.  

I don’t doubt that some say things like this out of a misguided desire to sound empathetic to the intense struggle of women of color but feeling sorry for women does not make the situation better.  Instead use the resources you have to give a hand up.  Its also important to remember that when you do say things like that you erase a huge part of feminist history.  My life as a white woman has been made infinitely better because of the sacrifices and struggles waged by non-white women in the US.  They deserve to be remembered instead of being whitewashed from our history.

Some observations:

each time I’ve suggested to women that they stop having relationships with men (Not suggesting they start dating women) the defensiveness comes to the surface immediately. The justifications for continuing to let men invade your bodies and colonize your mind are always there. “Women are just as bad” etc. Well actually NO, women are not just as bad and deep down all women know that. You are far less likely to be raped, physically abused or subjected to extreme gender shit from a woman than from a man.

Fine, not all women can be celibate or become political lesbians, thats not the expectation. But if its really so bad with men (and it is) you should have enough self respect to stop getting into those patterns.
When lesbians point this out they are scapegoated as bashing heterosexual women, etc. But that isn’t the case. The truth is a very hurtful thing to confront but it will set you free, which is the hope of lesbian feminists speaking the truth to their sisters.

There’s also another problem which I don’t think is addressed enough, that heterosexual women USE lesbians. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve seen heterosexual women fake interest in women just because they’re upset at men. The lesbian community is not a dumping ground for het women’s problems with men. If you really love other women you won’t use them that way. It continues to happen though.

I know its not always possible to just leave men, some women have children with men, some women are dependent in ways. Some women (unicorns) have good relationships with men who treat them like human beings and they don’t want to just leave them because they’ve come to a certain consciousness. Its understandable. But the defensiveness about ones sacred! sexuality has to stop.

Maybe its easier for me than some. I’ve been “bisexual” for nearly my entire life, I think I was 5 or 6 when I had my first crush on a girl. I’ve had relationships with males and females but have made a conscious decision to practice celibacy because of the trauma that relationships with males put me through. Being fucked by men definitely has resulted in physiological responses that I will not subject another woman to. If you listen to lesbians talk about this issue they talk about how deeply hurtful it is to be rejected by their female lovers.
Think about it: you want to be intimate with another person and they are rejecting you because of your sex or because of your unresolved trauma from men.
The sad thing is that this generally happens AFTER a het woman sleeps with a lesbian.

I don’t understand why so many insist silence about this issue.
I think part of this is that women know they’re making a conscious choice to continue with men despite how they’ve been treated and they don’t want to confront that within themselves. Facing/acknowledging that we’ve made conscious decisions about how we want our lives to be at times is hard, but with a feminist consciousness the excuses have to end.

I don’t know who this woman is, her death hasn’t made the news.  

This happens every day.

Every day women are killed and left on the side of the road, in forests, in parks, in bodies of water, in parking lots.  Every day they are sexually tortured and murdered.  There isn’t a day that passes where women aren’t killed for being women.  There isn’t a day that passes where the femicide stops.  This could be you or me next time and we wouldn’t even make the fucking news because its so common.  

I plan to find out who this woman was.  What happened.  I want to make a fuss.  I want the world to know a young woman no different than you or me, save circumstance was raped and murdered.  I want to raise hell upon earth.  This happens every day.

Here’s how this works in reality:

Person with privilege is blind to how the world unfairly gives them advantage. So when its pointed out to them that hey things are a lot worse down here and hey you kind of aren’t helping, its taken personally.

Then the person pointing it out is ganged up on (generally), told they are the problem because what they’re doing is creating “horizontal hostility” and they are being “divisive”.

Its rarely acknowledged that whats actually hostile and divisive is the behavior and chauvinism of the advantaged party.

You see, pointing out someone’s behavior or oversight isn’t hostility, and isn’t it great when its generally impoverished/black women who are the “hostile” ones and isn’t it great that there’s generally no recourse as the women criticized usually hold all the keys to the doors of activism anyway?

I still call myself a Marxist-Feminist. I doubt that will change but I do have some problems with the label because although I utilize the Marxist method and am a staunch communist its hard for me to reconcile that with labelling the feminist aspect of it with a man’s name.

Most of the radical feminists I know come out of it from being leftists. They usually were anarchists, some but not many communists and they grew to become disillusioned with the amount of sexism they had to deal with and the disrespect for the righteousness of the female liberation struggle. Apart from many having been raped or abused by male activists in some way.

But the initial ideas they had were of a collective world, shared labor, shared resources, a world with completely different values than that which is lauded under capitalism as being important.

I’m partially inspired to write this because of Joy who I absolutely adore. I often feel out of place in what are supposed radical feminist circles because the elitism and the academia I feel all around me is stifling as a human being. Its the opposite of why I became interested in changing the world at all. Its what I rebelled against when I became a red, etc. Its not what my lifes blood is about.

That isn’t to say that I feel comfortable in most socialist/communist circles. The condescension towards females is overbearing. Many groups only laud Rosa Luxemburg as a respectable female revolutionary. If they recognize her at all. The idea that women need to organize autonomously is often laughed at at best and autonomous women’s groups are often disrespected regardless of their politics or their orientation towards working with men on other issues. Most women to survive on the male-led left have to develop a kind of machismo attitude, capitulate to male ideas and be just as macho and sexist towards women as the men are (if not more). Its not a safe space especially when you have to have conversations with dudes about how they’re “feminists” when they then turn around a few minutes later and say “if Marxist theory is feminist then why do you need to call yourself a feminist?” Not to mention the all work is slavery unless its prostitution then its empowering SEX WORK argument that gets tossed around like idiocy flying from so many mouths. Its beyond sickening to deal with.

So I guess I don’t know what to do exactly. I don’t feel “right” anywhere exactly. Except maybe with a small group of people (almost exclusively women) that I think share a similar vision.

I’m also thinking of dumping this blog and starting a different one cause the whole “chick” thing is starting to grate on my nerves. I’m more of a dame or a broad if we’re gonna use those kind of terms…

Labels, labels, labels.

Unfortunately, youtube in its infinite wisdom has now taken away my ability to upload videos longer than 15 minutes so I opened a bliptv account to share her video with.

Please watch, give her some support, and reupload the video on youtube if you can.  Its important that dudes like this get exposed for the kind of misogynistic, fauxgressive idiots they really are.

Fuck the male ego.

 Being an activist for a couple years now without getting burnout has really put me in a lot of fucked up situations but its also given me some pretty keen insights into how privilege works in these dynamics.

INTERSECTIONALITY:

Now this term is some loaded, feel-good bullshit.  White activists with ego problems like to drone on about the importance of intersectionality in their blogs and such but the tone with which it takes belies the obvious fact that none of them have ever actually worked with any people of color who aren’t tokenized.

There is this deep desire by many people to complicate what is actually really simple to understand.  There’s also subconscious reasons for this (white guilt for example) but that may be the topic of another post…

Essentially I am criticizing “intersectionality” because I see it as being mainly used by white liberal activists to pretend they have some affinity with the depressed, downtrodden of the world when in fact their understanding manifests in them doing some pretty racist, offensive shit.  For example, when I was a younger me there was a public forum on “Gentrification and Intersectionality” held in a predominately black neighbourhood in my town.  Guess the race of most of the attendants?  Thats right, they were mostly white.  In fact the only reason there were any black people in attendance at an event that actually was about an issue of importance to them were because they were invited by some of the white attendants (me and a few friends).  Oh and those black people in attendance?  They weren’t random people, they were members of the NAACP who actually weren’t officially invited to this public forum.  Rather interesting I must say.  But it doesn’t stop there.  One white professor speaking at the event made the participants in the audience “pretend” to be another race.  He actually asked white attendants to “act like they are black” and asked the few black attendants to “act white”.  When some of us actually objected to this kind of “exercise” on the grounds that it was inherently racist and actually wasn’t teaching anyone shit.

But it wasn’t meant to actually raise anyone’s consciousness.  The term ‘intersectionality’, much like ‘kyriarchy’ is about silencing dissent from mainstream (malestream, white) ‘radical’ politics, not actually challenging people to have some fucking empathy or honestly address what marginalized people are saying about the nature of their oppression.  People get to go home after their little exercises to their privileged bubbles, detached from the lives of the people they were just appropriating so they could exorcise their white-guilt.

Now I go back to how white people (like myself) continue to make complete dicks of themselves in regards to how their anti-racist sentiments and activism manifest themselves.

ALLY/ALLIES:

You don’t get to call yourself that, and even if someone calls you that, its a rather egotistical way of looking at yourself to define yourself as such.  You also don’t get to assume then that because ONE person calls you that you suddenly are an ally to all members of said oppressed group of people.  You don’t get to boast about being a decent person who empathizes with other people’s suffering.  I mean, really, how fucking lame is that?  How pathetic do you have to be to get an ego boost from it?

THE PITY BRIGADE:

Lastly there’s the people who instead of wanting to make actual change for women experiencing racism, class oppression via capitalism, having been prostituted, women defined as “crazy” due to their experiences with male violence / survivors of male violence, choose to feel sorry for us, pity us instead.

Instead of offering support, encouraging our leadership, supporting us when we speak out about our experiences, honoring the work we are doing we’re treated as if we are PR disasters and hopeless victims that need saving, or that are too far gone to be “saved” but serve as a cautionary tale to all those women “choosing” to prostitute themselves, etc.

Yeah, intersectionality as I’ve experienced it as a person who actually faces multiple forms of oppression that INTERSECT and fuck my life up is BULLSHIT.

I know its been quite awhile since I’ve updated, part of it was trouble logging into my account when I got back from Boston in July, but most of it has been because of depression, aggravated by summer and extra work load.  That being said, lets do an update and see where it goes….

So yes, I went to the Radical Feminist Seminar in Boston this year, not only did I go, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel put together by Lierre Keith who is just a phenomenal person.  I gave a talk somewhat based on victim blaming and how third wave feminism ties in and feeds into capitalist individual blaming and of course, stigmatizing victims.  I spoke as a woman who doesn’t identify as a survivor because I want t destigmatize the term victim.  Victim isn’t a personal character flaw, its a reality of having something bad done to you that you had no control over and its god damn empowering to let it be known that I can be a victim and be strong and the two are living in me.

There also were a lot of things I was uncomfortable with at the conference and I’m still trying to figure it all out after this time.  I felt out of place, like it wasn’t a place for me because I’m rough around the edges, poor, fat, obviously living with trauma, obviously a PR disaster for any movement.  I also want to point out that this was the whitest conference I’ve ever been to in my life.  There were a few people who weren’t white there and thats a damn shame.  Especially when so many women around the world and at home fighting these fights aren’t white, and the women most impacted by male violence aren’t white.

This isn’t to criticize the conference, I met so many women I wouldn’t have met otherwise, women I will treasure my entire life.  It was an amazing thing to be out of my usual surroundings and around women who are so bright and intelligent and beautiful in their own ways.  It was a serious privilege.

This is where I talk about something related to why I’ve not been blogging, and how experiencing it firsthand at the conference made me step back and want to evaluate myself and my behavior a bit.

I think when we get so deep into an analysis of the world, little things can become mountains between us.  Things to look down on each other for, things to get snotty and sarcastic with each other for.  Things that we tear each other down with.  Is a woman’s lipstick, although we may agree on why she shouldn’t wear it, a reason to exclude her?  To bash her?  To disrespect her contributions to trying to get some justice for women?  Is it wrong to admit that women can be oppressive and idiotic?  Is a remark made by a woman that may have been offensive a reason to cut her off completely?  Instead of valuing her and thinking highly enough of her to delve deeper into what she means?  Into what she’s really saying?  I keep thinking of reading Audre Lorde’s “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” where she criticizes Mary for what she felt was an erasure of the divine power that lays in non-euro centric feminine spirituality and how much she still loves and respects her.  Here’s the thing, Audre was RIGHT.  That doesn’t mean Mary Daly is a bad person or can’t teach anyone anything or that she wasn’t a warrior committed to this struggle with her every nerve.  It just meant she was human and suffered from the ability to overlook something very, very important.

Thats why we need each other.

I’m really worried about all of this, not everyone can be at the same level of consciousness at the same time, it isn’t possible.  I worry about the tendency of people entrenched in these very deep and scary politics to harden themselves so much and respond in the same ways so often that we aren’t actually connecting.

I guess I can talk about the other stuff later, there’s a lot t0 go over, lots of notes, lots of ideas and a lot of happiness.

Of course my twitter and youtube channel have been updated a bit more, talking and tweeting is always a lot easier than sitting down and actually thinking.