Something we come across frequently is the idea that some women internalise and then reproduce or reinforce our own oppression. That we participate more or less out of choice (or ungratefulness towards second wavers) in making ourselves more oppressed, in losing the few rights we have gained, in betraying and failing other women and especially in making life more difficult for lesbians, radical feminists and women’s liberation…
Men are the problem, but not the only problem. Women are also the problem according to this view, and I can’t help but notice that a fair amount of energy is and has been spent reacting to libfem women (liberal feminists) in order to rant about them, mostly about how they throw women under the bus, betray radical lesbian feminists, and seem to be taken for the biggest threat to radical feminism and women’s liberation today.
The first thing I’d like to say is, as radical feminists, I don’t see why we should get so tired or impatient over this group of women more than any other. Yes, libfeminism is very strategically posted at the gate of feminism to prevent women from getting near liberation, and these patriarchal reprisals are those we are most exposed to once we’ve stepped into the feminist movement. But active libfems represent only a small portion of the female population and this “brand” of backlash is only one facet of men’s repression tactics overall.
Mental and physical alienation and destruction of relationships of solidarity between women isn’t specific to liberal feminist enclaves. It’s the normal consequence of being invaded and colonised by men — which is the case everywhere and liberal groups are just one group in which men hold power over women, collectively and individually. The same is true for women attached to right-wing, religious, atheist, conservative or activist men, at whatever age, from whichever country, etc. The workings of colonisation by men and compliance to their rules in a situation of captivity are always the same, except men’s methods differ slightly from one group to another. Similarly, to every breach opened by women to escape men, whether it be lesbianism, spinsterism, feminism, running away from an abusive family or husband, men respond with the specific kind of repression that go with it.
More importantly, no woman or group of women are responsible for men’s organised anti-feminist repression, whether actively or passively (ie lack of resistance). It’s materially, concretely impossible for an oppressed to be the one responsible for her condition of oppressed.
Whichever group of women we’re looking at, women aren’t the problem, or responsible for the situation we’re in. As the oppressed group we can’t reinforce our own oppression, we can’t have both the agency to maintain this oppression and at the same time, because of this oppression be so stripped of our agency as to be incapable of escaping patriarchy or doing much about it. Only the oppressors are in a position to oppress and maintain this oppression, which they do with the use of force. Their violence is unilateral, and violence in a context of oppression is always unilateral.
By definition, oppressors, abusers, slave-masters, tyrants or whatever we call them, enforce their oppression whether we like it or not. They force us into being useful to them. They resort to violence, to methods that destroy our will and turn us against ourselves and other women so to keep us useful and subservient to them. Only chronic violence and long-term captivity (to the owner-father, owner-husband, owner-pimp) can obtain such extreme results of adaptation and submission to abusers. Submission doesn’t ever equal active, willing participation. We participate into our annihilation only as victims.
The more a group behaves submissively to another, and in ways that appear contradictory to its own interests, the higher the level of occupation and repression this group is subjected to: this is a universal law. Not only the level of submission is always proportional to the level of terror, but the kind of submissive, traumatic responses of the oppressed group also directly mirror the various methods of torture used against them.
The level to which women in the left or libfem women are terrified of radical feminism (or of lesbianism) and fearfully obey to men’s demands, reflects the violence with which men infiltrate, invade and destroy the feminist movement from the inside. It reflects their controlling and abusive attitudes towards women, the way they’ll threaten, intimidate, harass and verbally assault women merely because they refused to submit to men’s fabrication of reality (ie demanding us to call men “she”). It’s also an effect of their sexual sadism towards the women they vampirise, as these men are usually supporters and active practitioners of pornographic and prostitutional violence. Liberal women are misdirected by the false hopes that not all men are bad and that equality is the solution, because liberal men constantly lure them into these myths and exploit women’s desires by posturing as allies and mimicking feminist discourse. More often than not these men manage to control women by becoming the boyfriend-owners (or “best friends”) of liberal women, and impose their interests in women’s groups simply by infiltrating her thoughts and actions in the “privacy” of her/his home, and in her bed, where he enforces PIV and sexually humiliates her, while calling this liberating.
Women don’t “let” men in feminism. Forced proximity to abusive men is simply THE central aspect to all women’s condition in patriarchy and so it is that women continue to struggle with it once they step into feminism. It doesn’t disappear because we say it should, especially if the women are already bound to an individual man. And the time it takes to become a separatist, that is to gradually be in a position to reject proximity to men, depends on the opportunities we have to free ourselves from our individual oppressors. Anyway.
Men are the ones who damage the movement, who cause trouble amongst women.
When we talk about women betraying women, this is something organised politically, beyond ourselves. Men are the only agents of this betrayal, they are the ones organising it, they very literally stand between us and the women that are important to us, attempt to control, limit and sabotage our contact in every possible way. The list of ways in which they break our bonds with women — whether within the patriarchal family (mother, aunt, sister, cousin, in-laws etc), within our friend-circle, our political groups or on a larger scale — is endless, literally endless. What’s more, men are in fact the ones who betray us constantly, constantly! Quite contrary to women, who mostly act in good faith, who are expected to be transparent and honest at all times — planned deception is how men proceed by default. The contrast between men and women in this respect is so stark that it takes years to even imagine how men can be so calculating. They’re capable of betraying our trust for decades onwards, stealing everything we have, tricking and manipulating us at every turn and opportunity. The backbones of all their institutions, from marriage to capitalism to the democratic state to medicine to religion (etc) are built on lies, myths and reversals.
So. If we encounter a woman acting in accordance to what men have demanded of her, I don’t see any point in telling her off, being angry with her, or even accusing her of betrayal. I think that’s being abusive to women, unjustly holding them responsible for the effects of men’s actions on them. It’s getting the enemy wrong, hitting on the co-victim instead of the oppressor; we remain caught in men’s endless cycle of hijacking our (real or potential) relationships of solidarity with other women. We may be that person, and certainly have been before, and would have expected empathy rather than scorn. She necessarily has very little control over the abuse that makes her act in this way so to avoid further punishment. The reasons and cause for her actions do not lie in herself but in the men who are taking her mind and body as hostage, one way or another. As feminists, it’s with these real men, and their real control over her we have to deal with first, not with the intellectual debates, or debates about who has the right to call herself radical feminist. The problem isn’t an intellectual one here, but a material problem of violence.
radical wind 
I really hope this post won’t be understood as minimising men’s violence against feminists or as a critique of all our efforts to denounce the invasion and destruction of feminism by men.
Because it isn’t!
A friend of mine pointed out to me the other day that “after all this time we’ve spent on our blogs reminding women to name the agent, saying it again and again, ‘name the agent’, criticising women’s actions, campaigns and writings for failing to name men as the enemy: it’s like starting everything from scratch again, having to remind ourselves that women aren’t the enemy, men are”.
Well yes, I agree.
I think there are many reasons in radical feminism for mistaking women for agents of patriarchal oppression. On top of all the structural reasons (women are the only people we can attack with impunity and have a sense of power over, we ourselves tend to deny, blank out many aspects of women’s oppression, we aren’t immune to male-centred definitions of oppression and subjectivity, women mean more to us and thus division between women and isolation from women hurts far more, etc)
– one factor is that as separatists, men’s violence becomes more invisible to us and our only exposure to male violence and repression is mostly through women. So we might more easily lose sight of women’s reality and how men maintain control in their everyday lives, outside of our separatist enclave.
We also project our own relative freedom of action on other women and become impatient and frustrated when other women can’t commit to feminist thought and action with the same level of freedom. What especially contributes to this misogynist miss-focus of the enemy is separatism from women outside of the radical feminist sphere, on top of separatism from men.
I’m more and more convinced now that separatism from women as well as from men is misogynist, and puts men and women at the same level of responsibility when it isn’t right. We should obviously protect ourselves from abusive women but that’s a different thing from refusing to interact with women in general on the basis that they’re not feminist enough and reacting to them as if they were our oppressors even when they fail minor feminist principles of self-protection from men.
I don’t think we do that deliberately, because I myself have gone through a long phase whereby I just wasn’t capable of talking to non-radical feminist women without feeling intense pain and anger, but now this isn’t so much the case. I feel less in danger, I know my world won’t crumble down if I don’t say everything now at this very moment, I have far more confidence in the potential of our relationship and in the insights that the woman can share too. I think I’ll write a post on this specifically as it really deserves to be addressed.
By the way, I’m not saying we actually think or say women are oppressors, although some do theorise this explicitly (ie radical lesbian ideology treating “het” women as oppressors and traitors), but that our reactions to women are completely disproportionate and inappropriate given their lack of control of their situation, and we respond to these women as if they were the agents of it, responsible for it, or partly responsible. As if they were responsible for the fact men invade feminist spaces. As if they were the ones letting men in, and not men invading with the use of force.
“I don’t think we do that deliberately, because I myself have gone through a long phase whereby I just wasn’t capable of talking to non-radical feminist women without feeling intense pain and anger, but now this isn’t so much the case.”
I can relate to that so much. I have such a hard time talking to non-feminist women because I feel so triggered, i want to shake the male-possession out of them!
Please write that post! Because I agree that we need to connect to women, but I feel like I’m putting myself in danger whenever I have to be around non radfem women. Because I can’t just come out and say that men are evil and that piv is rape and that men are destroying the earth with their rapism. I have to censor myself and that feels so humiliating! Yes, I get angry at women for that, because hey, I have managed to see the truth, so why the FUCK can’t they listen to an argument that makes SENSE ffs???
You are right though, it’s not their fault, they are under the influence. but this scares me even more, because that means I’m not even interacting with authentic women, but with fembots. Remote-controlled shells that look like women, but don’t act in their own or women’s collective best interest – so they’re no safe to be around. And after being spiritually, emotionally, psychologically battered by men for so long i just don’t WANT to feel the same way when I’m around women!
Even musical instruments are made with male ideals, I think. Which is sad because I love music.
I’ll address that in the next post, definitely. There are so many things to say about it. But the way we react to women who fail to communicate at our level of understanding immediately, here and now, or at least appear to fail, is a traumatic reaction, a reaction which is normal to anyone who has survived and undergone torture.
In a situation of cognitive isolation, where the social erasure of our reality means the erasure of our existence, where we have just woken up to the reality of men’s invasion of our psyches (and body), we have just awoken from the realisation that we were psychically colonised and alienated our entire lives, our natural reaction is to want to close our minds, prevent ourselves from being psychically violated once again.
In my experience, this appeared as experiencing any denial, even slight, to the condition of my and women’s reality, as a threat to my existence. It was as literal as that, I very literally feared that my thoughts, and thus myself, would disappear if my experience, my reality as a woman wasn’t validated in its entirety here and now. Once our mind has been “opened” and broken into, we naturally do everything possible to close our mind again, to become one with our mind, to protect ourselves from external invasion. Desperately seeking validation, feeling threatened whenever our thoughts and reality are denied, bombarding the other women with radical words about our reality (even though they are true, are often inaudible for the woman in front of us), are traumatic ways of protecting ourselves from psychic annihilation. And the threat of invasion is constant and imminent when we just enter feminism, because of our extreme isolation, and our extreme desperateness and vulnerability.
We create these walls around our minds to prevent further invasion, and it means setting up a fixed definition of radical feminism we need to cling on to, and rejecting in block everything the other woman has to say if it doesn’t correspond exactly to reassuring image. This is what psychic torture does, it breaks the mind by breaking the normal filtering process by which we filter information: keep what is useful for our purpose and throw what isn’t. In a context of violence where we were broken into, we either absorb information as it is, but then it remains fixed and can often only be removed with a new psychic invasion, or we reject everything in one block.
I hope this doesn’t seem too abstract to you, but learning about the effects of torture on the mind has helped me a lot to understand my own reactions and those of other women. It made me realise the depth to which we are psychically tortured, and that our reactions are normal reactions of a tortured, genocided people, whose social reality is almost completely erased out of social existence in patriarchy.
This phase of rejecting everything that doesn’t conform to our reassuring mind-pillars, the first stones and bricks that reconstitute our subjectivity, is completely normal and necessary to repair our mind. To seal it, to reintegrate, to heal. We first need to protect ourselves from danger as re-exposure to misogyny is a real danger.
However this process has a toll on our relationships with women, since we relate to women always in a situation of emergency, and of experiencing the other women as a threat to our psychic integrity.
What is your opinion on the violin?
We react as if everything, our survival, the survival of feminism, is played out in this single conversation, at this single moment. It suffocates us, and it suffocates the woman who’s in front of us. She naturally feels assaulted by our aggressiveness, defensiveness, sense of emergency.
Also, this reaction of self-defense actively prevents us from relating to women in a calm, serene way, which prevents our bonding. Since our instinctive reaction is to shield ourselves from what she might say, because the possibility of her denying us is too unbearable, we shield ourselves from her. We prevent ourselves from listening to what she has to say, to her experience. We’re focused on emotionally surviving the conversation, and can’t be focused on what her needs are, her own capacity to listen to what we’re saying right now.
Does this make sense?
I have never been full separatist due to depending on living with my family bc of disability but at least I have the power to refuse sex and that is more empowerful than any funfem ideal. I have seen lots of radical women rage at unawakened women and I understand it but I have never dealt with it personally, probably because I have never been a full separatist (yet). Going to see my pro-life Catholic grandma and the other one who judges me for not being able to work tomorrow. Wish me luck sisters.
The obsession with “purity” in our separatism, in our radicalism, the obsession to create an elite, exclusive group of radicals, is part of this self-protection mechanism I think.
Imposing our thoughts on women in a unilateral way is aggressive, and can even put women in danger when they are heavily controlled by men as they don’t control access to their own mind, and he is likely to use this newly found information against her, and lock this newly found avenue for escape. I think we all have the experience of women making violent U-turns against ourselves
There are many related factors which blow up our bonds to women. Trauma-bonding to feminists in a context of relational deprivation and extreme, excruciating isolation. Followed by extreme disillusionment when they don’t meet our expectations of providing complete safety and hope for the future. Because they have their own flaws.
However, after some time, some months and years actually, we realise that our world doesn’t crumble down when we listen to women and pay attention. Only recently have I been able to focus more on my bonds with women and genuinely enjoy time spent together without this sense of emergency, because I no longer fear that everything will disappear if at some point, a woman isn’t capable of following the radical thoughts being displayed. And I realise all the potential when I trust her ability to understand and awaken to her reality when the time is right for her.
And I realise how important our bonds are. They are the basis for our liberation. Nothing can happen without these bonds. Nothing. There’s no solidarity, not even a beginning of organisation and capacity to align our consciousness if there isn’t this bond, this commitment to joy and being together for ourselves, first.
Lol about the violin, Black metal! There are many things to say about music, but this post isn’t the space and time for it. Music is a very vast subject of discussion in itself.
No woman is ever a full separatist though. No woman can fully avoid either the presence of men, and especially, the influence of men’s society on her. We can’t isolate ourselves from patriarchy, in other words. The idea that we can cut ourselves from our political world and its social impact on us through individual action such as isolationism, are a product of liberal individualist ideology.
This doesn’t that differences in degrees aren’t important because they are. Not being individually owned and controlled by one man makes all the difference.
*doesn’t mean
I am really scared of dying and there being nothing and when my mom dies she will have worked so hard with her husband leeching off her.
I just had one of those oppressive experiences with a well-known radical lesbian on Facebook. I avoid most self proclaimed radical feminists on Facebook because they are some of the most abusive women I know. This woman, ********, was calling me a Nazi anti-Semite because I said supporting patriarchal institutions like religion is not a radical feminist thing to do. Hideous gaslighting and reversals. I did a good job not blaming her even though she twisted everything around.
Everyone cross your fingers for Cherry and Skulldrix to become involved in this thread.
Thank you for that elaboration, it makes perfect sense.
I am in the situation right now, staying at my mom’s place with my sister, both of them not radicals and the feeling of having to censor myself all the time because they can’t handle my radicalness and especially my mom will deny deny deny anything that suggests men are the problem (she calls that an “overgeneralisation” and me “dogmatic”) is so suffocating that I don’t really know how to handle it. I want to discuss it, to see eye to eye, to be heard and to gain respect for each other’s perspectives. But they are so scared of conflict (“ruining christmas”) that they will literally tell me to shut up and then run away and leave the room. It is the most infuriating feeling. The fact that it is torture to me to be around mainstream women for a few days in a row, having to watch TV with them, *without being able to make snarky remarks about the blatant lies and reversals in EVERY SINGLE program*, having to endure them bonding over fluff and fairies because actual real conversation scares them too much (It might end in conflict, oh noooes)…never occurs to them of course.
I don’t know how to handle it. I want to bond with them, of course, but I feel like I hve to negate myself, censor myself and fake-bond with them because its the only way of bonding they are capable of.
While i long for real truthful bonding that is based on a mututal recognition of REALITY, and not talks about iphones5 and cute dog picture and baby videos. KWIM?
I’ve noticed that they bond not at all over *what* they talk about but over *how* they talk (tone of voice). They will coo soflty to one another and laugh at one another’s stupid jokes etc. It seems to inane to me. I can’t do it. I can’t even use my voice like that anymore (i used to be able to do it with men of course when I was still brainwashed). So i feel cold to them and as if I don’t want to bond with them. In fact I want to scream everytime I look at my sister’s painted face or her red nails or her new iphone5 which was given to her by her current owner/boyfriend/rapist of course.
Sorry if this is not really on topic, but i’m really feeling like I’m in an emergency situation right now and i wish I could talk to them in a calm and serene way, but I feel so betrayed and humiliated by them, because they want me to silence myself in order for them to “have happy familiy holidays.” It makes me sick.
Also, i don’t think it’s cool to name names of women on here. Witchwind, I suggest you remove ******’s name from blackmetal’s comments as well as mine.
Blackmetal, not cool.
Hi, sorry yes it is an emergency situation and I don’t want to make it seem like it’s possible to snap out of it with positive thoughts or something. I think it is important to avoid prolonged contact with non-feminist women so long as we experience it as extremely violent, to avoid painful breakups and confrontations. Can you just arrange to spend no more than a day or so with them? Or spend christmas with friends, or on your own, as christmas is usually when family pressures are stronger. Infringing the taboo of not spending christmas with family also helps making it less emotionally charged if we go back to it, I think. Also the family gets the message that we need some distance. I really identify to what you say though. I remember the rows I had with my family when I was staying with them, about almost everything. Food, TV, conversations… Everything was unbearable. But my mum has become much more feminist over time.
If right now, they’re very defensive, I think it’s fine to let time pass and things decant for a bit. They also need to know that you’re not trying to force-feed them with ideas. It’s important to respect women’s own thinking filter, to let them sort things out in their own time. When I’m more careful to do this, women are much more receptive to what we’re saying because they don’t feel like we’re trying to force something into their minds, monopolising conversations, etc. Which is very logical. The reasons they can’t listen isn’t because they don’t understand, but because mechanisms of violence prevent them from it. If we disregard this we vent out our anger on them and it’s abusive to them too.
One thing that made it possible for me to be able to relate to women without feeling so much in danger was simply creating a solid network of feminist friends, that I spend time with and work with in real life. It’s a very concrete condition, and it’s also one of the conditions for healing from torture and genocide – ie reintegrating a social world, becoming part of the world again – obviously not men’s world which is the one that oppresses and annihilates us, but a world in which we have a place and social existence, which is biophilic. I think it’s really important to focus on creating a network and life around us. Once radical feminism gradually became the norm in my social life, and once I realised I could form stable, trusting friendships with women based on radical feminist awareness, I felt more solid inside, and felt less threatened from the outside. I’m now much more confident that my thoughts won’t disappear and that I won’t lose my political and psychic integrity if I slow things down and respect the situation and awareness level of the woman in front of me.
I’m more able to focus on women’s material condition instead of making it a battle of ideas or a question of gaining intellectual validation. Consciousness can’t be separated from the condition we’re in, both have to be addressed at the same time. I’m more capable of identifying the external constraints in women’s life that prevent them from freeing themselves, and addressing these directly, acting in consideration of this. I don’t have the same sense of emergency to impose radical feminist awareness on women right NOW.. Even for me, it makes things much more relaxed and enjoyable.
Thank you witchwind. I just came back form a walk in the woods and a visit to a friends (not a radical fem, but much more open to my perspectives than mother) and I feel more grounded now.
Yes, having solid real life friendships and a social network based on feminist awareness are sorely needed in my life, but they are hard to come by. There seems to be a dearth of radical women or women open to it around where i live (even though its a big city).
This is my project for next year. Starting a red tent in my area and hopefully finding women who I can be real with this way.
In my experience networks are slow to build and there are hard lessons to learn on the way, but it’s worth it, and the personal and collective growth that comes through it is exponential. It really gives lots of strength and this strength is shared. When our meetings, gatherings and reunions are joyful and positive, women join easily and stay.
i haven’t got anything original to add but this is a wonderful post, as usual. if you ever wrote a post on music i would be totally and utterly thrilled to read it (and black metal, musical instruments are def made with men in mind. one must get their body to fit the instrument, not the other way around. that’s why i sing, because it’s free and it doesn’t hurt you when done right).
witch i wanted you to know i have been thinking of your utopia post and am much more open-minded to a more natural living environment for women.
Hmm … you said in part one that men know about the oppression, while women don’t. Do you mean on a subconscious level? Because I don’t think men know on a conscious level. There are enough men dumb enough to openly talk about what they do to women/ want to do to women. They don’t withhold that information, and I am convinced most men don’t know what is going on, consciously – most of them are just plainly too dumb to keep a secret. Sure, most of them won’t talk about certain topics in mixed company, but there are always those who don’t get those rules. So, I think most of them uphold patriarchy unconsciously. That would mean women are even more unaware according to what you write – but are we? After all, we are hurt by it, so we notice there is something amiss, at least I have noticed that even as a child.
(On the other hand, there certainly are women who don’t notice that there might be a reason why all their ex-boyfriends never respected them, etc.)
Hi, as said in my previous article, men know how to oppress, they receive the manual of oppression from day one at birth. Everything in culture, media, religion, male social behaviours etc teaches them how to treat women. They know what to do in order to obtain what they want and expect from women. This doesn’t require knowing about the whole system of oppression, so most of them don’t know about the system of oppression, and don’t have to, as all they need to do is apply the protocol. Men are very much conscious of what they’re doing, they just think it’s the right order of things to treat women in this way. Just as with how parents / fathers think children should be beaten to be “taught respect”, and that animals should be domesticated and beaten too. They’re perfectly aware of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it (to obtain obedience and authority over) and don’t see anything wrong in it.
Women aren’t the recipients of this knowledge of how to dominate, and we are manipulated, tricked and lied to about men’s intentions. Men make great efforts in masking their strategies of violence, and blaming women. So yes, we may notice that we’re hurt, but not know why, and believe that something’s wrong with us instead. Most women don’t in fact notice why all their exes never respected them, why there’s this ongoing pattern of being rejected by men once she “slept” with them and then trauma-bonded, etc.