#get a stronger gravitational pull towards radical feminism

[rotationalsymmetry]

(This post is speculating about how an otherwise well-meaning person can end up with radfem politics. If it's going to be unpleasant for you to read that, well, this is your content warning. I generally hold the position that understanding where behavior might be coming from is not excusing the behavior or minimizing the harm that it causes. And this isn't going to stop me from blocking radfems.) (I probably should be posting more about specifically trans women's issues though. I tend to assume people get it but of course people don't really get it unless they're exposed to the concepts.) There's this really appalling thing about this site (not just this site) where once you take a stance you just get pushed to one extreme or the other. So where you end up is often as much to do with which dumbass take you started arguing against first as where you started initially. So I can really see how someone would start with "I want to talk about how women's pockets are too small because this is annoying" or "I want to talk about how I was in an abusive relationship/family and no one was willing to help me" or "why do I have to wear makeup to work when men just have to shower and comb their hair????" and just end up with the people who talk about this the most, who are the radfems. If the transphobia or something else doesn't push you in the opposite direction again, perhaps because you've never really thought about trans issues and your first real exposure is some people calling terfs misogynistic slurs. (Is a terf reblogging someone calling a terf misogynistic slurs. But I mean that does happen.) I do not like it. Like the frustrating thing is, basically everything that distinguishes radical feminism from other strains of feminism is something I disagree with. And yet. Also. I hate the way women's clothes are revealing and sexualized. I hate that I can't find clothes that are shaped for women but stylized like men's clothes. (I have this one t-shirt from Torrid that I love for its stripes and its colors and this incredible magic where it somehow makes my body look less curvy, and yet...it's got a fucking v-neck. It's a shirt that in every way is butch/masc friendly, except instead of a crew neck it's got a v-neck. Why. My point is every single piece of women's clothing is like that, any masculine attributes are "balanced" by some feminine attribute.) I hate the social expectation that women should shave off leg hair and armpit hair. I hate the commercialization of women's magazines. I hate how so much of women's professional wear, especially the dressier end, (heels, for instance) corresponds perfectly with what men tend to find sexually appealing. I hate bras. I hate sexual harassment. I hate the centrality of PIV sex in sex between men and women. I dislike compulsory male/female romance plotlines in stories and I don't like how queer romances are sidelined and omitted. I hate "sex sells" and butts and boobs poses in comics and the way that kid's movies have princess heroines with romance-dominated plotlines and male protagonists and rarely anything else. A lot of the building blocks that can make a foundation that radical feminism builds on top of, are very much building blocks that I have. I can very easily see how someone who was in many ways similar to me, but just without certain ideas about sex positivity and trans people, would get there. And it's just luck that when I was doing a deep dive on abuse and rape culture I got there through sex positive feminism, blogs like the Pervocracy, Shakesville, Captain Awkward, Yes Means Yes. It's basically pure coincidence. It's not coincidence that that stuff is hard to find on this site now. Pretty sure it's extremely closely related to Sesta/Fosta and NSFW blogs getting kicked off. I mean, I wasn't on here before the ban. But I'm pretty sure that dramatically altered the ecosystem. Def the pervocracy blogger moved over to Twitter and hasn't come back. I'm guessing that's a part of a much larger pattern.