Dissociation from the world produces dissociation from women. It restricts Gyn/affection to a separate community created by withdrawing from the world. Thus it deprives Gyn/affection of its political power and makes of it a personal matter only. Women may acquire a strength that is sustained by radically chosen dissociation. However, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, strength is not political power.

…strength and power are not the same…power arises only where people act together, but not where people grow stronger as individuals. No strength is ever great enough to replace power; wherever strength is confronted by power, strength will always succumb.

Strength is not political power. Well fucking said.

Radically chosen dissociation from the world is a temptation as women are constantly confronted with a world that men have fabricated. It is even more tempting to ignore the babel that sustains the man-made Babylon. Women do this, however, at our peril.

Boy howdy do I know this temptation.

Women who dissociate from the world either by political choice or by involuntary derivative status must put something in place of that world. Many have resorted to therapism.

This right here is why A Passion for Friends needs to be the handbook for feminism.

Therapism is what elsewhere I have called “therapy as a way of life.” The phenomenon of therapism, as it is manifested among women and in the women’s community, includes not only going into therapy and often staying there for years but making of one’s relationships with women a therapeutic context.

Go read a lesbian separatist blog if you want to know what that bullshit looks like in practice. Once done you’ll have observed that therapism has gone off the rails and now (and maybe always did?) includes the therapeutic bonds a separatist feels as she and her sisters agree on ‘the precise degree of unattractiveness’ of hetero women. Which is defensible because hey, at least they feel better afterward.

She starts out with a typical backlash maneuver; find a woman who is either 1. middle class 2. white and/or 3. hetero and admonish her publicly to establish your feminist cred. Man, do assholes love this move or what? It’s like cultural shorthand for “see, I’ve established I know what I’m talking about, you can’t criticize me”. Well, fuck off, yes I can.

Others would have agreed with Sarah Vowell’s assessment, when she wrote in a Seattle weekly, “I find it fascinating and heartbreaking that gays and lesbians must wage these ongoing legal battles to win the basic right to engage in activities (such as getting engaged) that I would cross international borders barefoot to avoid.” Perhaps this is because as a young, straight, white woman, she takes her privileges for granted.

If you’re not seeing the willfully obtuse here you yourself may be suffering from a case of it. I’m not a big Sarah Vowell fan but it’s plain as day to me that she said HEARTBREAKING and THE BASIC RIGHT. Well, whatever, doesn’t matter does it when Karla Jay herself says essentially the same thing right after but because she had the foresight to not be a woman unmodified when she says it it means something.

When did we decide that it was better to fight for the rights of the coupled rather than the rights of everyone to have decent health insurance, visit friends in the hospital, have society regard each person as a complete being—not as half of some entity? When did we buy the patriarchal logic that a single life is lonely and no life at all? [emphasis mine]

Pretty sure Sarah Vowell just said the same thing and you shat on her for it.

Many lesbian feminists feel that our heterosexual sisters have intentionally downplayed lesbian rights to parent a child in order to focus on a right to abortion that few homosexuals need to exercise…

The right to bodily autonomy is analogous to the right to parent? On what planet?

Having children could be a radical act if, as lesbian mother Jenifer Fennell so aptly put it, we choose to “parent ‘queerly’ or to ‘queer’ the job of parenting”

Ew.

Instead, we conjure up racist images of the barbaric slaughter and abandonment of girl children in countries like China…

That’s not racist, asshole.

Feminism is based on the concept of choice…

You’re wrong.

I’ve read books by Kate Bornstein and Richard Dawkins so this isn’t the worst book I’ve ever read. And that’s the nicest thing I can say.

1. Stop doing PIV
2. ????
3. PROFIT

1. Live on all woman commune
2. ????
3. PROFIT

1. Eat the right food
2. ????
3. PROFIT

One of my favorite gifts from The Spinster and Her Enemies is all the foremothers who were slipping away from our grasp that she gives back to us. She gives us back our foremothers, always on the brink of being lost to history when not more commonly outright lost, and she gives a rich, historical context to our own movement.

When I think about the social purity movement of the 1880s I get a whole new, stronger grasp on the meaninglessness of “wave” terminology. I strive more than ever to keep “wave” out of my vocabulary.

In 1880s Britain the aims of the Social Purity movement were…

the elimination of prostitution and of the sexual abuse of girls. Women and girls are the objects of prostitution and sexual abuse, and men are the exploiters.

Of course it’s depressing (we’ve been at it for centuries, the hard work, the nihilism setting in…). But it’s also moving. Because it’s my history being given back to me. When I acquaint myself with herstory, with the history of women in the world, my worldview cracks open a sliver. Because my history as I know it is Jewish history. My ancestors as I’ve known and been taught them are in shtetls, ghettos, in hiding and concentration camps.

I’ve learned my history as too painful and too grand to trifle with the petty concerns of 19th century British women. Too removed from real life. Was there prostitution in the shtetls? It never came up in discussions of pogroms, in the endless hours of shoah footage. The rabbis never taught me that. We were too pure, holy, too high-minded, too removed from Christian culture. I have no idea how, when or why Jews and the plight of women intersect in 18th, 19th and 20th century Europe.

My ironclad identity forms a crack. And yes, Leonard Cohen fans, it is how the light gets in. I can shut my mind off to what women have been agitating for for several centuries or I can suss out why exactly I find my Jewish (and native) history so much more harrowing and romantic than my women’s history.

Because, look, it is harrowing. So many tiny Jewish people I’ve loved with numbers on their arms. So many. And I’m not an old person. What I mean is, most survivors were already dead. I don’t know what to say. I love my Jews. I feel our pain. I love our languages even if Polish Yiddish makes about as much sense as P=NP to me. I was taught Jews were my people and I believed it. I still believe it, with a slight alteration. Jewish women are my people.

But now I’m here in 2012 and through my own life I know there is nothing petty about the abolition of prostitution. There was nothing petty about the right to vote. There’s nothing petty about pornography. There’s nothing petty about living in a first world country with a permanent 100% female third world population within its borders.

Genocide rages on in different parts of the world, Capitalism and wars continue their destructive path and armed with the context of women’s history I now know our experiences as compared and contrasted with genocide, war and famine aren’t petty. Our history has always been genocide+rape, Capitalism+rape, wars+rape. Poverty+rape+genocide, Capitalism+unwanted pregnancy+rape, beatings+poverty+wars.

But it’s not only what happens to women as a class combined with sentiment that drives my feminist politics, though it is a big part. Another reason I’ve come to emphasize female history over other more centralized, easily discovered histories (anything that happens to a people as a people is easily uncovered by any lazy historian or political academic) is the a priori nature of the female predicament. Patriarchy–because nothing has to be invented for it, no factory has to be built for it, no gas chamber, no cotton field, no California artichoke farm–predates genocide, non-sexual slavery, child labor, migrant work, poverty and homelessness. The subjection of women is the original blueprint. All it requires to get off the ground is men and women, something all human societies have.

Anyway enough about me, what I really wanted to talk about was the amazing women in 19th century Britain who organized and fought prostitution. The women of the social purity movement believed…

that men were responsible for prostitution and that the way to end such abuse of women was to curb the demand for prostitutes by enjoining chastity upon men, rather than by punishing those who provided the supply.

Josephine Butler on the root of prostitution:

‘the unequal standard in morality; the false idea that there is one code of morality for men and another for women…which has within the last century been publicly proclaimed as an axiom by almost all the governments of the civilised and Christian world.’

J.Ellice Hopkins:

moved to Brighton in 1866 and became involved in the preventive work of a rescue home in that town. Preventive work was concerned with keeping young women out of prostitution and could include help with finding jobs or the setting up of homes for girls considered to be in danger of falling into prostitution, to ease their passage into other ways of making a living. Rescue workers set up refuges for women working in prostitution with the aim of rehabilitating them. From her time in Brighton onwards, Hopkins dedicated herself to the task of preventive work, both directly with those women who might become prostitutes and with the potential clients, by working to transform the sexual behaviour of men.

Sorry but that’s badass. 1866 badass. Do I have a new hero? Yes, probably.

Hopkins, prostitution, poverty and a fair wage:

Hopkins saw men’s demands as the underlying cause of prostitution. She recognised that poverty and the limited opportunities allowed to women for making a decent living, were the reasons many women entered prostitution and she saw that poverty as the result of discrimination against women. She asked, ‘Is it fair for you men, who can compel a fair wage for your work, to sit in judgement on her, and say it is her fault?’

Hopkins with a good analysis of women as a class:

One indicator of the feminist current in the social purity movement is the way that the fate of individual women or groups of women who suffered male abuse was seen to be the concern of all women since all women were united by a common womanhood. Hopkins took this stance and wrote, ‘as slavery fell before the realisation of a common humanity, this deeper evil of the degradation of woman will fall before the realisation of a common womanhood.’ [emphasis mine]

Thanks to Sheila Jeffreys for being rigorous. I’ve barely even touched on the meat of the book but I wanted to sit down with some inspiration and hope today and I remembered that there was plenty in the first 16 pages of The Spinster and Her Enemies alone.

Radicals do this by interjecting that X is not only patriarchy but also capitalism. We say porn is patriarchal, they say porn is patriarchy and capitalism. We say redundancy is redundant, shut up and let us have our feminist revolution. They say no because in order to do our anti-capitalist revolution we need you so porn is patriarchy and capitalism. We say, that’s nice, we’re working for our revolution and if you care to critique afterward feel free but until then concern trolls will be noted and ignored on the basis of their concern trolling. They say BUT CAPITALISM. Rah rah rah, please be cannon fodder for our revolution, we’ve pandered to you for so so many decades now.

Hi, happy early Valentine’s Day. I found you something, I hope you like it, it’s the complete works of Andrea Dworkin.

Ok, it’s only a little hilarious and mostly sad. It’s hilarious when you’re an outsider watching Marxists nod and pat Anarchists on the head and Anarchists nod and pat Marxists on the head but when you realize that everyone is nodding and patting feminists on the head it stops being as funny.

Anarchists are Marxists’ useful idiots and Marxists are Anarchists’ useful idiots but feminists are everybody’s useful idiots. It takes almost no effort or loss to throw us a bone; rhetorically support abortion rights, give us a day of the week to discuss “women’s issues”, let us do unpaid labor for their dishes and page views, etc. And so of course a lot of leftist men have shown a willingness to do these things to build left-wing coalition cred.

But it’s also anti-feminist backlash. Ever since radical feminists declared themselves apart from SDS and the new left (U.S. feminism) leftist men have been working tirelessly to fold us back into the larger leftist movement without changing anything themselves. It comes by different names at different times but right now left-wing coalition building is the main face of left-wing anti-feminism.

A process I’m working on in the background (the background of my brain, that is) is detaching myself from things that aren’t fun but that I felt somehow responsible for. Because that’s a thing, right? Where you try something briefly but the entire time you’re trying it you don’t know it’s something you’re just trying and it quickly becomes something you’re doing and then suddenly you hear yourself talking about this thing you do. And before you know it it went from trying to doing to do to being. And you wake up on a Tuesday screaming, NO! WHEATPASTING IS NOT WHO I AM.

It’s true, wheatpasting is not who I am. It’s something I tried. It wasn’t for me. That’s okay. I don’t have to defend every political thing I tried once. Every political thing I try is not who I am.

All the things I’ve tried and will try and maybe right now there are things I’m doing that I’ll see in two months were really just things I was trying–all those things, I don’t need to be married to them. I don’t need to impale myself on the sword for them. None of those things–whether they were ideas, principles I was trying to live by, activism, tactics–are more important or more noble than the person who thinks and does them. The person in this case is me, but just as often she’s not me. We are the people who’ve tried things and decided they weren’t for us. The women. The women in feminist movement who are just human. No better. The things we try have the same failure rate as anyone else’s.

I did things in 2001 I no longer believe in and in 2011. Anyone who wants to can ask me to defend them. But I have the right to decline. I decline. My past is my past and holy hell, it’s a mess, and I will decline to defend it for as long as I want.

It’s important to be able to say that I decline. As fun as waxing nostalgic over every stupid thing I’ve tried sounds, I decline the invitation to attend. Whoever wants is welcome to proceed without me. For me, it’s important that my political time is not wasted. But I have no say in how others waste theirs.

In order to maintain forward momentum having permission to decline invitations to take ownership of every stupid thing I’ve ever done is critical. I need space to move.

The other thing about men and anti-feminists is that the motivations they will ascribe to a feminist are always the most facile, the most easily constructed by a sloppy mind so in that way too they come to plague me. I internalize not just these motivations but the level of thought at which they are reaching me. In other words, I become dumber and sloppier myself on contact with them. (Not a coincidence)

I would not be able to survive the unrelenting ambition of getting feminists to internalize male-originated and anti-feminist motivations and reasoning if I didn’t start writing down the truth for myself.

No man has ever satisfactorily articulated my beliefs or motivations. And now that it’s all written down in an easily referenced document I can see that with spectacular clarity.

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.

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.