The Dagger and The Joyless Eye

just me and my shit yaoi from a thing thats bad

personally i love it when people i know change pronouns. hell yeah you're entering a new phase of self-discovery! or maybe returning to an old familiar seasonal home!!! either way you have so much gender euphoria ahead, proud of u bitch!

does tumblr think we're all senior citizens why do the buttons need to be that big

tumblr making the urls on my dash huge is ageism

THIS TOO!!!!!!!!!!

Doechii - DENIAL IS A RIVER (Official Video)

i think they should allow everyone in the world to vote in american elections

you can only reblog this today

breaking bad spanish dialogue

In general, understanding radical feminism for what it is and why it appeals to many people requires an understanding that the greatest strength of radical feminism as a tool for understanding misogyny and sexism is also its greatest faultline.

See, radical feminism is a second wave position in feminist thought and development. It is a reaction to what we sometimes call first wave feminism, which was so focused on specific legal freedoms that we usually refer to the activists who focused on it as suffragists or suffragettes: that is, first wave feminists were thinking about explicit laws that said "women cannot do this thing, and if they try, the law of the state and of other powerful institutions will forcibly evict them." Women of that era were very focused on explicit and obvious barriers to full participation in public and civil life, because there were a lot of them: you could not vote, you could not access education, you could not be trained in certain crucial professions, you could not earn your own pay even if you decided you wanted to.

And so these activists began to try to dig into the implicit beliefs and cultural structures that served to trap women asking designated paths, even if they did wish to do other things. Why is it that woman are pressured not to go into certain high prestige fields, even if in theory no one is stopping them? How do our ideas and attitudes about sex and gender create assumptions and patterns and constrictions that leave us trapped even when the explicit chains have been removed?

The second wave of feminism, then, is what happened when the daughters of this first wave--and their opponents--looked around and said to themselves: hold on, the explicit barriers are gone. The laws that treat us as a different and lesser class of people are gone. Why doesn't it feel like I have full access to freedoms that I see the men around me enjoying? What are the unspoken laws that keep us here?

And so these activists focused on the implicit ideas that create behavioral outcomes. They looked inward to interrogate both their own beliefs and the beliefs of other people around them. They discovered many things that were real and illuminated barriers that people hadn't thought of, especially around sexual violence and rape and trauma and harassment. In particular, these activists became known for exercises like consciousness-raising, in which everyday people were encouraged to sit down and consider the ways in which their own unspoken, implicit beliefs contributed to general societal problems of sexism and misogyny.

Introspection can be so intoxicating, though, because it allows us to place ourselves at the center of the social problems that we see around us. We are all naturally a little self centered, after all. When your work is so directly tied to digging up implications and resonances from unspoken beliefs, you start getting really into drawing lines of connection from your own point of interest to other related marginalizations--and for this generation of thinkers, often people who only experienced one major marginalization got the center of attention. Compounding this is the reality that it is easier to see the impacts of marginalization when they apply directly to you, and things that apply to you seem more important.

So some of this generation of thinkers thought to themselves, hang on. Hang on. Misogyny has its fingers in so many pies that we don't see, and I can see misogyny echoing through so many other marginalizations too--homophobia especially but also racism and ableism and classism. These echoes must be because there is one central oppression that underlies all the others, and while theoretically you could have a society with no class distinctions and no race distinctions, just biologically you always have sex and gender distinctions, right? So: perhaps misogyny is the original sin of culture, the well from which all the rest of it springs. Perhaps there's really no differences in gender, only in sex, and perhaps we can reach equality if only we can figure out how to eradicate gender entirely. Perhaps misogyny is the root from which all other oppressions stem: and this group of feminists called themselves radical feminists, after that root, because radix is the Latin word for root.

Very few of this generation of thinkers, you may be unsurprised to note, actually lived under a second marginalization that was not directly entangled with sexism and gender; queerness was pretty common, but queerness is also so very hard to distinguish from gender politics anyway. It's perhaps not surprising that at this time several Black women who were interested in gender oppression became openly annoyed and frustrated by the notion that if only we can fix gender oppression, we can fix everything: they understood racism much more clearly, they were used to considering and interrogating racism and thinking deeply about it, and they thought that collapsing racism into just a facet of misogyny cheapened both things and failed to let you understand either very well. These thinkers said: no, actually, there isn't one original sin that corrupted us all, there are a host of sins humans are prone to, and hey, isn't the concept of original sin just a little bit Christianocentric anyway?

And from these thinkers we see intersectional feminists appearing. These are the third wave, and from this point much mainstream feminist throughout moves to asking: okay, so how do the intersections of misogyny make it appear differently in all these different marginalized contexts? What does misogyny do in response to racial oppression? What does it look like against this background, or that one?

But the radical feminists remained, because seeing your own problems and your own thought processes as the center of the entire world and the answer to the entire problem of justice is very seductive indeed. And they felt left behind and got quite angry about this, and cast about for ways to feel relevant without having to decenter themselves. And, well, trans women were right there, and they made such a convenient target...

That's what a TERF is.

Now you know.

i feel like it bears clarifying it’s not that trans women were a convenient target, it’s from what you said before, that they believe biological sex is the number one reality underpinning everyone, and gender expression is fake, which immediately leads to the conclusion that transgender people are misogynistic for (supposedly) reinforcing the existence of gender, which is inherently oppressive to women. this then takes a variety of forms from there on, but i just think it’s important to stress that the transphobia and transmisogyny of terfs isn’t incidental, it’s intentional

Yeah, so I wrote this a few years back with the goal of trying to get folks to understand why radfem ideology isn't actually driven purely by transmisogyny, and in fact why it's very possible to have what's called a "trans-inclusive radical feminist" (TIRF) or radfems that focus on other targets altogether, like sex workers (SWERF), intersex and asexual people, transmasculine folks anywhere along the spectrum, and anyone who can be spun as "letting the side down" against the real enemy, which is men.

So if it sounds like I'm downplaying the centrality of transmisogyny to modern, post-intersectionality radical feminism in this post, it's very much because I am. I want to teach people what radical feminism looks like in terms of its ideological roots, not in terms of common targets, because radfem groups often switch their targets based on who can be attacked without incurring too much censure right off the bat. I want people to be able to recognize what has essentially become a fascist ideological understanding of gender before it targets a community that they personally recognize as an ally who needs defending. And that means divorcing your understanding of what a community is from its targets.

That being said, you are also right that transmisogyny has never been precisely accidental, and trans women have been a favorite target within feminist and queer feminist groups for going on fifty years now. They really love that whole secretly infiltrating narrative shit.

This is because as far as radical feminism is concerned, gender relations are an ongoing zero-sum, binaristic struggle between men and women in which one side must triumph, and that side better be women. People who complicate this narrative by embracing uncertainty about the dividing line between these two eternally struggling categories become targets because they question whether men and women are actually mutually exclusive and all encompassing categories, whether you can move from one category to another, whether conflicts have to be zero-sum, whether it's not all our responsibility to ally with and support men trying to build a better world for themselves along with women. That's why sex workers are such a common target: the Pornography Wars were driven by arguments about whether it was women's sexual interaction with men that was inherently degrading or whether the actual problem was the poor worker protections and pay scales within the porn industry.

I'm a butch ace woman, okay? Radfems spent at least a decade mobilizing hatred against my community as a radicalization pipeline for feminists, especially queer feminists, in this exact space on Tumblr. I have never been shy about defending trans women when I see them under fire, but I am also not shy about defending other targets, either. So I want (collective) you to be able to see what I'm talking about in terms of a shitty ideology that is tuned to capture people like us, and that means talking about how post-intersectionality radical feminism has a distinct shape of its own that isn't purely a function of transmisogyny.

You know, I want to reblog this today because one of my reading snippets has been making the rounds through radfem spaces, and I keep getting served the most atrociously bad takes. Here's the quote that kicked it off, from feminist historian of the family Stephanie Coontz in The Way We Never Were:

That's the sum total of the post I released: that quote, Coontz's name and the date her book was last revised (2016).

The thing I find really illustrative about those responses is the sheer level of defensiveness radfems levy at that quote.

I will succeed because I'm crazy. 2025 mantra

BLOOMING, Nana Bruce, 2023

making every conversation into being about The Character with the same reliability and conviction of a youth pastor going “you know who else partied? our lord and savior”

Free my woman she did all of it but I don’t care

it really does only take one basket of laundry you procrastinate putting away before your whole life turns to shit huh

Wild that folks keep saying beekeepers abuse bees as if bees are not both venomous flying animals and fully unionized

Hubris to think you COULD abuse bees

I think that if you see a balrog in an unlocked kitty kennel then you can assume that it wants to be there

Actually, beekeepers take many precautions to keep their bees from leaving.

many clip the wings of the queen, destroy new queen cells, cull queens they don't like and use bee pheromones to prevent a hive from naturally swarming or absconding. They also try and prevent mating with the African honey bee, which makes them less docile among other things. During artificial insemination of queens, drones are crushed and „spare“ queens are killed.

and commercial beekeepers even cull their hives during winter, or when they are not producing well.

Coupled with the fact that there is evidence that insects do feel pain, this is not great.

(Not to mention that honeybees are an invasive species in most places, competing with native pollinators and spreading disease)

It is so fucking bold of you to link the exact same paywalled book thirteen times in your reblog to throw people off the fact that you're using one source from 1859.

I don't think there's ever been a funnier vegan response in the history of this hell site. This is actual gold. If you cited an argument like this in a first year undergrad intro to bio module, then your lecturer would be legally entitled to fire you out of a cannon. I think I'm dying