Shorter Debs: “I want to be Natalia’s scratching post”

What’s up with the snark lately? Maybe I’m not getting enough love and/or proteins. Or, actually, maybe I’m just freaking tired of trans bigots.

Take Debs. Hey, a lot of the posts on her blog are actually quite useful andinformative, especially if she provides links. Alas, she also has this thing against trans people. Even if she didn’t, I suspect we couldn’t be friends, since Debs wuvs Germaine Greer (and glamorous GG, as you might recall, hates me).

I could give you an in-depth look into the things that I find objectionable about Deb’s brand of feminism. I could point out the many similarities between her rhetoric and the rhetoric of Soviet youth culture, for example, which makes me plain uncomfortable. I could further discuss Debs’ feminism as Original-Sin-turned-on-its-head. I could mention the severe moral and ethical repercussions of exlcuding and even battling trans people, some of the most marginalized folks in modern society.

Or… I could just take the piss.

Mainstream feminism, feminist blogging, feminism on the internet is becoming more and more bland the further it spreads and the more generalised it becomes.

Bilbo: “I feel… thin. Sort of stretched, like… butter scraped over too much bread.”

Debs: “Mainstream feminism is turning into Bilbo!”

Actually, I don’t necessarily disagree. The only mainstream feminist blog I read is Feministe. But then again, I am willing to bet that Debs’ problems with mainstream feminism have nothing to do with my problems with mainstream feminism to begin with.

This watered-down, means-nothing, achieves-nothing feminism that is trotted out by the most popular feminist sites, and the sex-positives, and the celebs, is what your average common-or-garden person thinks feminism is these days. And what’s worrying is these clueless women are taken seriously, and believed, and all their patriarchy-endorsed bullshit is swallowed by other gullible women who just want feminism to be easy. They don’t mind being a feminist, as long as they’re not expected to actually do anything, or have any strong convictions or opinions, or – worst of all – to have to actually do any work.

My grandmother doesn’t even talk like that, and she’s a bigger feminist than half of Debs’ blogroll combined. And would totally take Debs in a cage-fight.

I have actually had it now, and I’m tired. When women start attacking from within the ranks of ‘allies’, then that is when I lose patience, and I have had it. Totally fucking had it with radical feminism being attacked.

Damn those women! Thinking for themselves, are they?

Most often, though not always, this happens in the context of some young, invariably pro-p(or)n woman making statements about radical feminism that show she has only the flimsiest grasp of what it even is. One sure-fire way to piss me off is to slag Andrea Dworkin off.

Andrea Dworkin ate babies. In eel soup. The babies thing I can sort of forgive her for, but eel soup?

These people speak about radical feminism as though it is some old-fashioned relic of the seventies, which is no longer, or never was, relevant.

Well, I’m here to tell you that radical feminism is relevant, it matters, and it will get things done.

Personally, I try to refrain from talking this way about radical feminism. It’s the people who claim the label nowadays that inevitably attempt to purge their ranks from various undesirables. It’s all a bit to Old Testament for me, thanks. You guys are en route to Mount Moriah, and I’d much rather be selling you cold Pepsi at a pit-stop than get on that particular bus, air-conditioning or no.

…I’m not going to take credit for the Radical Feminist Conference idea, because it is something many women have wanted for a long time, but now it is Out There, and it is going to happen, and, if we have our way, it will happen every year, and we will grow in numbers and get louder and louder, and stronger and more demanding until we drown out any ‘what about the men’ or ‘but I like my p(or)n’ bullshit people throw at us. These things will happen regardless of what anybody outside of radical feminism thinks about it, these things will happen even if the patriarchy and the ridiculous patriarchy-pleasing “feminists” ignore us and belittle us, and speak about us as though we should be extinct.

How does one please the patriarchy, exactly? Do you have to touch it in funny places, or can you just get it some discounted Broadway tickets? And is there excessive groaning and flapping about to signal one’s success? In the words of the Good Son, “I’m just trying to be scientific.”

These things will happen, somehow, despite the world-changing presence of that MRA’s wet dream the “sex-positive feminist”, and despite the women-murdering men, and despite the 95% of rapists who get away with it.

Ooh! I never realized that I was an MRA’s wet dream (despite not explicitly identifying as sex positive, as I often find it to be an unhelpful term, I do get the outside characterization)! Why… it sounds like the plot to a p(or)n movie. Debs, you naughty thing!

We are not going to shut up and go away. We are not going to be distracted into self-indulgent discussions of our ‘privilege’ and examining our navels.

I always thought that copping to privilege was actually not so much self-indulgent as painfully sincere. That’s why I so rarely do it.

We are not going to be distracted by the stones thrown every time a woman says, “Yeah, I’m a feminist, but, like, prostitution is just a job like any other, you know?”

Does the woman in this scenario also smack her gum and flip her hair?

Seriously, prostitution is not a job like any other. Neither is working down in the Donbas mines, or teaching at a girls’ school in rural Afghanistan. Yet prostitutes, on top of everything else, lack basic legal protection in most countries.

So.

If you are a radical feminist. If you are a woman-born-woman.

I.e., if you’re not some trannie colonizer! Pantie-checks at all entrances!

If you like the idea of getting together and talking to other radical feminists, and discussing actions to take, and strategies and tactics for winning this WAR we are in (yes, it’s a war. I wish it wasn’t, but unfortunately I’m not in charge, you’ll have to see someone with a penis about that). If you are totally and utterly fucking sick to the back teeth of radical feminism being attacked, even by women who call themselves radical feminists, then you belong with us on this journey, and at our conference!…

Can I see anyone in possession male genitals on the subject of this whole “war” thing? My cab driver? The dude across the landing who watches bad action movies at 2 a.m.? Do they know something I don’t? *dum dum dum*

…In a similar way, this is the last post I will write about sex-positive “feminists”, or any others who simply don’t fucking get it, as there are more important things to write about than them. We have work to do.

Oh, but Debs! You made me feel important with that stuff! I could almost pretend that I was part of some sort of patriarchy-advancing syndicate, with secret handshakes, assumed identities, international conferences in stuffy five-star hotels, and patriarchy-themed parlour games: Patriarchopoly (hottest property – the wimminly juices of Janice Raymond, much coveted by trans stealth agents), Patriarchal Pursuit, Pin the Tail on the Patriarchy…

I wake up from my daydreams to discover that I am just ordinary Natalia, with a barrage of ordinary problems ranging from funny-looking little toes to unfunny student debt to the utterly grim limitations of my own messy, twitchy humanity.

Gee thanks, Debs.