Dua

reminds me of arguments with hotd twitter freaks on child marriages in the mediaeval era and them repeatedly protecting their precious ships by claiming it was normal at the time!! for grown men to marry 14 yos. can u imagine ANY other form of oppression being justified this way

"Women are not patriarchal agents who can 'possess' each other. Only men can 'possess' women."

I know that to be a core tenet of patriarchy, of course, but have never heard it stated so clearly and concisely.

Not only do they want to insist that women are not oppressed now, they want to retcon women’s historical oppression to make it even easier to dismiss and vilify feminists as narcissistic miserable fear-mongering man-haters. And they do so on the basis of Game of Thrones.

I also love how a good chunk of apologia for patriarchal oppression (and frankly all oppression) rests on the notion of “what if they liked it? You ever thought of that?” as if it’s some deep and cutting critique.

Would a late medieval noble or royal woman be likely to think of her arranged marriage as degrading? In ASOIAF Cersei Lannister compares herself with Jaime, bemoaning that while his lot in life is to rule, "to fight with a sword and lance and mace," she was taught "to smile and sing and please." While he was heir to Casterly Rock, her lot was to be "sold to some stranger like a horse, to be ridden whenever my new owner liked, beaten whenever he liked, and cast aside in time for a younger filly." Having read some about the actual lives of medieval and early modern noble and royal women, this sentiment doesn't seem to be likely, and feels like projecting modern sensibilities onto a society that while not real, isn't anything like modern western culture and thus unlikely for someone raised in that society and culture. Real medieval and early modern noble and royal women were patrons of the arts, played important roles as ambassadors to their families and took an active part in the ruling of their domains, so it's hard for me to believe that they would likely feel degraded by being arranged to marry a stranger, rather than see marriage to a wealthy and powerful man as an opportunity for advancement of themselves and their families. Setting aside Cersei's personal reasons for feeling that way, is seeing being arranged to marry as something degrading and compared to "being sold like a horse" an opinion a noble-woman in late medieval Western Europe would be likely to hold? I'm aware of the "early feminist" writer Christine de Pizan who wrote several works that defended women from misogynistic rhetoric and questioned the mainstream view of women's inferiority, did she or any elite female writer comment anything on arranged marriages, criticizing them as degrading?

I fucking hate academiabrain. This post blathers on about Western sensibilities and posits that dutiful pre-feminist women would leap at the chance to be sold off to a random man as though societies where this is still the norm don't exist.

Spoiler: Women hate it, even without feminism!

Yeah like i said you don't really know what you're talking about when you refer to things like "decolonial feminism"

that's pretty much it. you don't know much about what you're talking about

Lmao you're the one who wrote out a bunch of emotional bs because you can't admit that you don't actually know much about the theory you're supporting. you've heard of a lot of feminist thought being smeared as white and colonial and you've heard of a branch of feminism called "decolonial", and

*whistling innocently*

Here ye, one and all, for we are gathered today to put feminism on trial, and at last hold it accountable for its many white, affluent, imperialist sins ...

dismissing really excellent feminist analysis on gender, sex, and sexuality that were made before decolonial feminism was even a thing. so you should apply that "there are bad people in every field" to feminism, because you are dismissing a lot of excellent feminist theory

Well decolonial feminists give these problematic people centre stage. And like I said, a central theory of decolonial feminism is that misogyny is just the result of white supremacy, which is false. And btw when you say stuff like "not white feminism, but decolonial feminism", you're also

genuinely curious, how are you getting that from this quote?

It’s incredibly gendered, many “working class” jobs are held by women now but they aren’t seen as blue collar work. A barista is more working class than Union autoworkers.

And actual decolonial feminists within academia like mohanty and spivak have written books and papers downplaying practices like fgm and widow burning, claiming that opposition to them is privileged feminists denying woc their "choice" or wtv. you have it backwards

You don't really know what you are talking about, sorry. People regularly levy accusations of white/ colonial feminism when women criticise misogynistic practices in the third world, bc women's rights have sometimes been used as an excuse for imperialism and colonization.

even disguises itself as feminism. you should be ashamed of promoting it in a conversation about how the severity of misogyny is ignored by the left

This is the kind of shit that encourages anti feminism lmao. decolonial feminism has repeatedly justified misogynistic practices against women in the third world by men of colour and taken the (false) stance that misogyny is downstream of white supremacy. it is left-wing antifeminism that barely

Obviously you have access to bigger platforms. But write this essay at Liberal Currents and you'd have unlimited space (word limits are oppression). I really think it's not broadly understood that misogyny is central to fascism, and thus feminism has to be central to its response.

as moira donegan put it: you have to understand rape as absolutely central to modern reactionary ideology

I would like to read an essay about how anti Me Too backlash is central to understanding what Democratic elites and journalists mean when they talk about the party becoming “too left.” They will never say it out loud, but it’s 100% there.

This has been empirically demonstrated many times! You can’t expect men to have a place of domination and superiority over women in the home and treat women as equals outside of it.

One of my more niche grievances is that sometimes you'll read someone calling feminism "bourgeois" and then later find out that they went to like Dalton, Harvard-Westlake, or St Anne's.

The divorce memoir genre tried to make the most feeble and elementary feminist case—that marriage is asymmetrical in ways that hurt and exploit women, and need not be so central to their sense of self—and is mocked and hated with a vitriol that frankly creeps me out.

One thing you notice as a feminist is that feminism gets linked to, and implicitly blamed, for every malignant political force or failure. Feminism becomes a collaborator with empire, a driver of neoliberalism, a motivator for the carceral state. Malignant and all powerful, yet never defined.

Title of a Google Document: "Intersectional Antifeminism, or: What is a white feminist, anyway?"

... so guess which draft I just sat down to work on, Moira.

Poor Kimberlé Crenshaw, doing all that vital and hard work to illustrate how civil rights law didn’t adequately account for how racism and sexism are mutually constitutive and reinforcing, only to have illiterate antifeminists be like “actually intersectionality means that sexism doesn’t count.”

It's genuinely astounding how Trump's main thing is that evil foreigners are coming to the United States to rape white women and yet they pressured Romania to release a serial rapist so he could go to the US and rape women there

An almost atavistic hatred of an ur woman figure who is their ex wife and that bitch in hr and possibly their first grade teacher