#radfem book

[radtoken]

"Our conditioning to be ashamed of being women begins when we are barely out of babyhood (. . .) Shame is a tool men use to rule females. Men are not susceptible to it in the same way. Men don't believe that they should be ashamed of themselves as a sex for being responsible for 90 percent of the crime in the world, making wars, killing women, molesting children. They know they are men, hence they are inherently "worthy.""

— Zsuzsanna Budapest, "Grandmother Moon" (p. 214-215)

[papenathys]

**Trigger warnings for mentions of honor killing, rape and systemic oppression of marginalized peoples**

So many things in fiction and popular culture are just not funny when you are not white and more specifically live in the global south.

That astrology post by @timetravellingkitty reminded me how little Westerners are acquainted with our social realities. Astrology isn't some quirky indie holistic branch of faith for us, it has gotten academics and secularists killed, it dictates the oppression of marginalized castes, it has been a powerful weapon in dehumanizing women in our society. I have had female friends with a gold medal in postgraduate studies told to initiate wedding rituals with non-human subjects (including animals and plants) to cleanse themselves of impure astrological foundations from their birth charts. I have seen weddings called off and women being made to starve because of wrong astrological compatibility. Sorry I am not amused by your twee soulless gentrified astrology dark academia and pinterest posting.

(Brief tangent: Another thing that interests me is the almost gleeful joy invested in the marriage and forced relationship/proximity trope in recent fiction. Here, the governing fantasy revolves around a storyline where a young woman is literally being sold to or abducted by a man or woman with significantly more power in hand: for they can obtain her as a commodity. But of recent, this is being rebranded as feminism, as a young girl's sexual awakening, as freedom from the benevolently bland childhood best friend and a reawakening as a young Persephone under adversity, whereby the captive has to fix and educate their captor, and in return of emotional labor is rewarded with power and prestige. That's something so insidious to me, because all fantasies aside, what is so cute exactly about it. Women and marginalized genders are at a risk of marital rape because of forced marriages across India. Kangaroo courts and honor killings dominate when it comes to interfaith and intercaste marriages, to unions based on autonomy. Anyway let's go back.)

Dgmw, fiction is fiction etc etc. "Writing is not condoning" that age old sentence now parroted like a hivemind by white fiction authors across genres. But, in what conceivable way are we expected to react in the same way as your white audience, to your supposedly harmless fantasies grounded in ideas of very real, very uncritically romanticized social structures.

I literally don't give a fuck if you are a Libra moon, or that you seek comfort from personal rituals and escapist fan fiction. You do you!! God knows I like reading books about questionable topics and defining myself in easily relatable categories and labels too!! I'm not speaking against faith, or religion, or spiritual lifestyles of any kind, I'm speaking of the commodification and institutionalization of these spiritualities.

But I do care when white people come online on public platforms and rebrand these practices as a radical reclamation of power, or some powerful, unsanitized, "problematic and flawed queer stories" when their very nature is rooted in pseudo-science, misogyny and capitalist exploitation– in the real traumas of underprivileged people repackaged as fanfiction tropes and as aesthetic personality traits for Westerners and anti-rationalists.

And finally, coming back to astrology, in the words of Adorno (The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, 1975):

Society is made up of those whom it comprises. If the latter would fully admit their dependence on man-made conditions, they would somehow have to blame themselves, would have to recognize not only their impotence but also that they are the cause of this impotence and would have to take responsibilities which today are extremely hard to take. This may be one of the reasons why they like so much to project their dependence upon something else, be it a conspiracy of Wall Street bankers or the constellation of the stars. What drives people into the arms of the various kinds of “prophets of deceit” is not only their sense of dependence and their wish to attribute this dependence to some “higher” and ultimately more justifiable sources, but it is also their wish to reinforce their own dependence, not to have to take matters into their own hands.

Closer home, in the words of the late Narendra Dabholkar:

Yeah man. Please fucking think.

[Note: this post was written by a trans person and is inclusive of the experiences of trans folk, in India and abroad. This post is not grounds for you to segue into "gender critical" trans exclusionary bullshit.]

[balkanradfem]

religion to women: you need to be servants >:(

religion to m*n: you deserve servants :D

[fembrie]

i can't put into words how succinctly kim jiyoung, born 1982 pinpoints the experience of womanhood in the 21st century and tears a fucking hole right through it. it's people who point to laws and gender equality committees and mandatory hr sensitivity trainings who need to read this book the most - women already know that our suffering looks like realizing you've been trained to put other people first your whole life, knowing men live more freely because they do not. we know that our oppression is not just men's violent outbursts, but the slow and steady lifelong culmination of excessive responsibility, pressure and routine injustice. i used to wonder whether it's even possible to communicate experiences so familiar to one sex and alien to the other across these lines. pay gaps are easy to talk about because they're quantifiable, but how do you communicate the cruelty of making us choose between having children and our ambitions? how do you express the frustrations of toeing the line between fellow human and consumable sex object in the eyes of men? how do you explain the ways in which cycles of unassuming acceptance of our place in society, rebellion and defeat mould, contort, disfigure our beings? and is it even worth trying? fwiw, i think cho nam-joo has come as close to succeeding at this as you can

[crazycatsiren]

Please don't follow me if you're a Harry Potter fan. I'll just block you.

My trans friends mean the world to me. I simply won't stomach anything to do with that transphobic bitch.

[fluffytimearts]

Jaden from Lease bound if she bothered to research and learned about others instead of being close-minded.

[theredbloggings]

"But if the average woman has trouble meeting the demands of her sex role, the alcoholic woman is doomed to utter and outrageous failure. For when a woman is chronically drunk, she loses a large measure of the control that is absolutely necessary to the performance of her rigidly defined functions. And because the effects of alcohol are at once so overpowering and so unpredictable, there is no telling what taboo she will break next, what tactic agreement between the sexes she might expose and reject. the possibilities are frightening in precise proportion to the threat they pose to the sexual status quo. The most threatening of her potential acts of defiance--and thus those she is most frequently and bitterly accused of--are first, that she will become indiscriminately sexual and second, that she will no longer be able to take care of men and children."

-Marian Sandmaier, The Invisible Alcoholics: Women and Alcohol Abuse in America (1980)

[sweetstarcollector]

Just watched a video of someone reading that “My Shadow is Purple” book. The basic premise is there’s a kid, and the kid has a mom with a pink shadow, a dad with a blue shadow, and the kid has a purple shadow. Why is this kid’s shadow purple? The book explains that this kid enjoys playing with girl toys and boy toys, enjoys dancing (with the pink shadows) and playing sports (with the blue shadows), so therefore the kid can’t be just pink or just blue. There’s one page where I think the author realized what they were implying and threw in a “also pink shadows can be strong and blue shadows can have emotions”, but the very next page is the kid saying that they must not be pink or blue because they like “sports, dancing, trains, ponies, glitter, and engines”. Not a single comment on this video was even slightly critical. Tons of people saying it described them as a non-binary person, that they wanted to read it to their kids. It’s so bizarre, it’s gender roles 2.0 being packaged as progressive. I remember when the push was for there to be no “boy toys” or “girl toys”, to the point some stores stopped separating them like that. Now, we’re telling kids that not only do “boy toys/activities/interests” and “girl toys/activities/interests” exist, but that the separation is so important that which ones you partake in literally determine your identity. It’s not just this book that does this either (Hello, “Jack not Jackie”). It’s just so strange.

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“Yet some would say, why women's history at all? Surely men and women have always shared a world, and suffered together all its rights and wrongs? It is a common belief that whatever the situation, both sexes faced it alike. But the male peasant, however cruelly oppressed, always had the right to beat his wife. The black slave had to labor for the white master by day, but he did not have to service him by night as well. This grim pattern continues to this day, with women bearing an extra ration of pain and misery whatever the circumstances, as the sufferings of the women of war-torn Eastern Europe will testify. While their men fought and died, wholesale and systematic rape-often accompanied by the same torture and death that the men suffered — was a fate only women had to endure. Women's history springs from moments of recognition such as this, and the awareness of the difference is still very new. Only in our time have historians begun to look at the historical experience of men and women separately, and to acknowledge that for most of our human past, women's interests have been opposed to those of men. Women's interests have been opposed by them, too: men have not willingly extended to women the rights and freedoms they have claimed for themselves. As a result, historical advances have tended to be "men only" affairs. When history concentrates solely on one half of the human race, any alternative truth or reality is lost. Men dominate history because they write it, and their accounts of active, brave, clever or aggressive females constantly tend to sentimentalize, to mythologize or to pull women back to some perceived "norm." As a result, much of the so-called historical record is simply untrue. For example, Joan of Arc was burned not for heresy but for wearing men's clothes, as were other women right up to the eighteenth century. Florence Nightingale was never called "the Lady with the Lamp," but "the Lady with the Hammer," an image deftly readjusted by the war reporter of the Times since it was far too coarse for the folks back home. Far from gliding about the hospital with her lamp aloft, Nightingale earned her nickname through a ferocious attack on a locked storeroom when a military commander refused to give her the medical supplies she needed.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

[balkanradfem]

Do you ever think about how sad and messed up it is to grow up in this world as a little girl who likes to read. Because you are a child, and you don't get that there's a difference in who writes the books, you read everything you like, you read the adventures and the fantasy and the mysteries and the traumatic stuff and if you're also very isolated and lonely, these books build your worldview. Because why wouldn't they? They're written by humans, so they have the attitudes, opinions, perceptions, morals and spirits of human beings in them, they're telling you what humans think and feel about things, how they go about situations, what they imagine, what they desire. What your role in all this is, or what it could potentially be.

But, since you are not capable of differentiating the material, and you just read what is available to you, you end up reading a lot of books written by m*n. You also have to go thru the required reading at school - 90% written by m*n. And so slowly, since young age, without even socializing or learning it thru interaction, you find yourself in a world shaped by minds who do not have empathy for women, especially not for little girls. You find yourself relating to the male protagonists, but you also find out that girls only play a passive role in their stories. You find that m*n problems are centered, made important, their suffering and violence critical points in the story, while women are cast aside as helpers, servants, givers, caretakers, and generally just exist in the background, not a thought given to what they are going thru.

You learn thru books written by m*n, that your experience is secondary. Even if you cast yourself as the adventuring, immensely important and struggling protagonist, even then the other women in your mind end up being just background characters, caregivers who do not need a thought spared for their suffering.

Books written by m*n, even for children, will trivialize female suffering to the point where they shape the child's mind into one that looks at the world from a male perspective. Where women either don't matter, or are capable only of giving and aiding, to be cast aside for more important matters, such as male aspirations for their own lives.

Thinking back, I understand why I felt myself unimportant and trivial in any social setting - I understood my role from the written word, and I knew adults found me trivial, secondary, only a background figure to someone else's adventure or mission. As much as I could fight it in my fantasies, and make myself the main character, it felt like a pipe dream, like something that was incredible self-indulged and selfish and would never translate to reality.

I wish it had been different. I wish I had been introduced specifically and only to books written by women, for women. I wish I had found empathy for myself in those books. I wish I had found myself standing on high ground, equal ground, with other women, our desires centered, our lives translated into tales of epic importance - because that's what they are. I wish I had been born into a world where female perspective is available from the start, not after years of growing up and finding feminist literature and having to re-write my own role in my brain, from all of those years of reading male perspective as the default.

I don't think any little girl should be exposed to literature that shape her world as a place where she doesn't matter. I don't think books written by males and shaped by their worldview should be allowed into children's literature, or teenage or for young adults. Girls should not be learning from fiction that their most important value is empathy and understanding for male problems, and their second, to be desired and/or helpful to them, all while being treated as nothing but service and background noise until you're desired for something. We need to open books and find out that we matter too. That our lives can be the center of our existence, rather than being in the service of someone else's life.

[femalethink]

Intercourse is commonly written about and comprehended as a form of possession or an act of possession in which, during which, because of which, a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her and overwhelming her and at the same time penetrating her; and this physical relation to her—over her and inside her—is his possession of her. He has her, or, when he is done, he has had her. By thrusting into her, he takes her over. His thrusting into her is taken to be her capitulation to him as a conqueror; it is a physical surrender of herself to him; he occupies and rules her, expresses his elemental dominance over her, by his possession of her in the fuck.

The act itself, without more, is the possession. There need not be a social relationship in which the woman is subordinate to the man, a chattel in spirit or deed, decorative or hardworking. There need not be an ongoing sexual relationship in which she is chronically, demonstrably, submissive or masochistic. The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation: colonializing, forceful (manly) or nearly violent; the sexual act that by its nature makes her his. God made it so, or nature did, according to the faith of the explainer of events and values. Both conceptual systems—the theological and the biological—are loyal to the creed of male dominance and maintain that intercourse is the elemental (not socialized) expression of male and female, which in turn are the elemental (not socialized) essences of men and women.

—Andrea Dworkin, "Intercourse."

[disillusionedmonster]

I read Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" for @letters-from-x reading challenge and I loved it. I loved the way it felt like Plath was musing through her character but also like she was speaking to me. I loved listening to her reflect on childbirth and the nature of men. She had so many good things to say. And I felt so gripped by her exploration of her mental health and I felt rage at how she was treated. Plath completely sucked me in with her writing and how natural the progression of the book felt. I seriously enjoyed it. Some of my favourite lines in no particular order:

There was also this part where she had this metaphor about a fig tree and her life being wasted, which she commented on a couple pages later saying that musing was caused by her hunger which made me laugh.

[mm-society-women]

Radfems if you're reading this then you're obligated to tell me about a book that made you really happy!!

[batteryacidlesbian]

Anyone have any book recommendations about radical feminism and/or lesbian feminism? Talked to a friend about possible book bannings that could happen so I want to physically buy some books that would likely be considered "bannable." I've always enjoyed reading banned books, so this is just a good step into reading books particularly about it!

[daremna]

"As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women. It is a chilly thought. The heart is dead since infancy. Unwept for let the body go."

- The Glass Essay, Anne Carson

[grison-in-space]

The obvious question—why do women organize against their own freedom—is thorny.4 In her 1983 book Right-Wing Women, radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin tried to answer it. She described three types of antifeminism. “Man dominant” was the crudest form, resting on the principle that men should subjugate women because male dominance is natural, necessary, and rooted in love. “Woman superior” held that female power resided in women’s lofty moral sensibility and sexual desirability—not to be confused with their sexual desire. Women’s authority was innate yet limited, physical yet passive. (“She’s ethereal,” Dworkin wrote, “she floats.”) The last type, “separate but equal,” emphasized that the sexes were destined for different spheres of existence, neither of which was better than the other. Women bearing and nurturing children was just as important as men providing for them financially or fighting wars to protect them. Dworkin theorized that some women embraced antifeminism, in one form or a combination, as a means of self-preservation in the face of male oppression. “Feminists, from a base of powerlessness, want to destroy that power,” she said. “Right-wing women, from a base of powerlessness, the same base, accommodate to that power because quite simply they see no way out from under.” Dworkin also argued that any disdain antifeminist women felt toward an “other” on the basis of race or another identity marker was really displaced rage they felt toward men. “They are easily controlled and manipulated haters,” she said of these women. “Having good reason to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of danger that justify their fear.”5 Dworkin’s interpretation was compelling, but it contained two monolithic assumptions: that the patriarchy is an absolute negative for all women, and that women act largely on the basis of their womanhood. In fact, the overlapping lines of race, class, and culture complicate both ideas. What about women who benefit—or want to benefit—from existing structures of dominance? We risk stripping them of responsibility when we suggest that the harm they do is merely a way of coping with their own oppression, whether real or presumed. As Adrienne Rich wrote in Of Woman Born, “Theories of female power and female ascendancy must reckon fully with the ambiguities of our being, with the continuum of our consciousness, the potentialities for both creative and destructive energy in each of us.”6