nobody ACTUALLY believes in women’s liberation, silly.

How I feel when I try to join online feminist communities.

 

Me: “This is good. This is all fun. but there’s also other stuff we might show an interest in, as a feminist group.”

Them: “Like what?”

Me: “Well, there’s the wacky notion of women’s liberation. You know, fighting the sexual enslavement of women and girls, actively resisting male domination.”

Them: “Oh, yea–then we could all stop fucking men and walk around not fucking men.”

Them: “You know, certain stereotypes are not very empowering.”

Them: “MEN GET RAPED, TOO. WE CARE ABOUT MEN.”

Budding RadFem: “Well, maybe we could–”

Them: “What are you, a fucking TERF?  That’s what I thought.”

or something like that. except they don’t have woman power shrines or talk about menstrual life force power thingies. that’s transphobic.

 

the first generation

the first generation:
an oral history of the end times

1.
Things had been falling to pieces for centuries, our mothers said. They said not one of them could remember from the tales of their grandmother’s grandmother, a time when the world was not a shambles. Our mothers came of age in a time when we had been lulled into a great sleep, trapped within an illusion of freedom. The world was a shambles, but that was the way of things, and they were forbidden from thinking of a better world. They had the best things in life, they were told. And anything that seemed unjust or cruel, well, that was The Way of Things.

Women had been fighting for time untold, they said. Nothing came of it. They lived and they died, flowers bloomed, women were raped, and children were born. And it continued, this twisted game, women waking up and fighting, only to die and be forgotten. The Curse of the Womyn, they called it.

But during the Last Great War, when men lived openly as animals, and there was not a single woman allowed to speak, even in defense of them, the Avenging Goddess brought the women together. It was not the war that brought them together, but the aftermath, the Burning Times. They rose up and reclaimed the Earth.

Male Feelings, the Most Precious Material in the Universe

I read this post, which I have re-titled for clarity’s sake, Dear Feminists: Male-Bashing Hurts Male Feelings. In this post, a man lets feminists know we are doing feminism wrong because it makes dudes feel icky, tells us how to do it right, and gently, as a sweet, supportive femme would, explains why we should do it.

 

I see a lot of people male bashing, like making hostile or sweeping negative generalizations about cis men, here on Tumblr and elsewhere, in “feminist” circles. I don’t think this is okay, I care about all people, including cis males. And I would hope people care about cis males too, but I want to explain why even if you don’t care at all about cis males, bashing them is likely to hurt trans and non-binary people far more than cis males.

Male-bashing is when a person makes hostile or sweeping generalizations about cismales. This male, here, cares deeply about other males, and hopes that feminists care about all males, as well. And, even if they don’t care about cismales, they ought to care about other kinds of males, and therefore, need to tone-down the male-bashing because it hurts male feelings.

In our society, where transphobia, binarism, and strict enforcement of gender roles can still be common, there are a large number of people who do not realize that they are trans or nonbinary until much later in life.  These people live much of their life accepting their assigned birth sex without questioning.  They may struggle intensely with social relationships, depression, and all sorts of other problems, which might be caused in large part by their gender identity and mismatch to the gender roles forced on them, yet they may not realize this because the society around them continually tells them that they’re “just men” or “just women” and “that’s just the way it is”.