fierceawakening:

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wyvernseeker:

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earthboundricochet:

isaacsapphire:

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madeofpatterns:

thirqual:

madeofpatterns:

fierceawakening:

I’ve just been thinking how glad I am to not be part of the culty feminist circles I was in back in the day (nota bene NOT ALL FEMINISM IS CULTY AND I KNOW THIS)

Not just because I don’t know if I would have felt okay making the Zamii posts I’ve made, but also because something dawned on me this morning:

We had things we would say, like, “don’t say patriarchy hurts men too, it’s a ‘derail’” and there was even a handy acronym, PHMT. I remember we said something similar about talking about women abusers, though I don’t remember that as vividly. I think it was WDIT, “women do it too,” and it was also “a derail.”

I think people were usually assuming men who trolled would say these things. The kind of MRA who is more interested in starting a fight than in actually discussing. And I do think these people exist. Whenever you’re in an extremist group you attract trolls and Argument People who just want to rile you up. I HAVE A COUNTEREXAMPLE AND I DON’T REALLY UNDERSTAND HOW TO USE IT BUT YOU YELL FUNNY WHEN I WAVE IT AT YOU WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!

But here’s the thing. Both times that I’ve been treated abusively, it’s been by other women.

And it dawned on me today, and I don’t think I’d ever even thought about it like this, that an environment where “WDIT” is “derailing” – talking about my experiences is against social norms. Semi-forbidden, because being frank would mean I just WDIT-ed. Bad move in The Discourse.

How invalidating was that?
How used to invalidation was I that I could be a part of an environment that said that, and *not even notice that that invalidation was already something hurtful to me?*

That an environment that did that was specifically not a good one for me to heal in?

Every time I’m in a feminist women’s safe space and I try to talk about abuse I’ve experienced; people tell me to shut up because I’ll encourage MRAs.

I’m still feminist but I really have to ask myself why, sometimes.

I’ve quite vocal about my criticism of specific feminists or writings from feminists, but here, like on the racism in Brownmiller’s book, I fear that it is not better outside, and that some of the best criticism of those failures comes from other feminists or progressives.

I have found that the best support on these issues comes from other people with disabilities, who may or may not identify as feminist but don’t use much if any critical theory in their analysis of these issues.

Which is not centered around criticising problems in feminism, because it’s not revolved around feminism; we’re coming from somewhere else.

I find the same thing, which is probably why I find a lot of groups oriented around various identities I have (woman, queer, bi, gender nonconforming/trans for certain values of trans, etc.) much less safe or relevant than I find the disability community and related activism.

Yup. Feminism doesn’t have space for women who’ve been abused by women; feminism is reliably pro-abuse as long as the abuser is female. And that’s the one-sentence version of why I’m not a feminist anymore.

I’m also not really sure if I believe in “derails” anymore. Because there’s things that seem pretty clearly like derails but are forbidden to call out, like, “Women ought to have access to abortion services” “Hey, some men get pregnant!” cannot be called a derail without being labeled a TERF.

But “We need to punish men who rape” may not be responded to with “Women rape too” without it being a derail.

It was very jarring to go from being (seemingly) a female victim of abuse to being a male victim of abuse. Especially when it was abuse from women.

Not only you are expected to shut up and stay quiet, but while a female victim is perceived as wounded and fragile, a male victim is perceived as even more dangerous and predatory, because so much of the male abuse narrative is about how “a lot of abusers have been abused in the past and that’s why they do it” (especially when it comes to rape). It’s like you’re a walking ticking bomb.

I am terrified of being potentially abusive in a way that I probably wouldn’t be if I was a woman. And that paranoia doesn’t come out of nowhere. I didn’t get the idea that as a male I was “inherently more dangerous” out of thin hair.

Not a derail to me 😛

Yeah, the differences in treatment of victims based on gender is really horrifying.

What you say has actually sparked me to have some interesting related ideas; that what we see as “abuse” and “victims” is often based on gender, race, class, status, that kind of thing. And part of the problem with this kind of prejudice is to see the ingroup as safer than it actually is. Women think that other women are “safe” more than they ought, Whites consider other Whites “safe” when they really shouldn’t.

Yep. I stayed with an emotionally abusive exgf longer than I should have because my community kept saying “lesbian relationships are wonderful – there aren’t power dynamics in them like there are in heterosexual ones.”

I reframed what was happening to me over and over, because the one thing it couldn’t be was a power dynamic.

When I was going through my whole gender identity thing I kind of thought a lot of the awful treatment I’d gotten pretty consistently from girls and women in my life was because they knew I wasn’t one of them, so they must have been reacting badly to me for their own safety.

And part of my gender identity crisis was caused by the idea of The Sisterhood. Because girls and women had pretty much always treated me like an outsider, I figured that I couldn’t really be a woman, because I didn’t fit in with girls at all. And because I didn’t have the “real woman” experiences of fearing all men. I generally felt safer around men.

The whole attitude about abuse and gender basically really fucked me up for a few years.

My college epiphany actually sprouted from feminism. When my last paper for the year essentially boiled down to “write about oppressed women in America”, I had simply refused to write the paper because I had just been informed we weren’t oppressed at all and then dropped out.

Up until then I had just sort of went through the motions of being a girl, which included feminism. Now I’m a dropout. I’m not necessarily content about it, but at least it’s better than being inculcated into something I simply didn’t believe in. 

They had you write a paper about how women are oppressed in America? Wow, that’s not okay in the slightest. I’d refuse to write something that’s pretty much untrue as well if put in that situation.

I think it actually *is* true, but… assigning you a paper and not even allowing you to defend your actual views in it (unless the point of the paper is expressly “argue for a view you disagree with, as an exercise in critical thinking) sounds distinctly Not Great.

If you say ‘men doing x to women is not only bad, but it’s sexist and an example of how society itself is built to oppress women’, how is going ‘wait, but actually it doesn’t seem to be a gendered thing and women do x just as often or almost as often to men, how is it sexist?’ a derail?

the thing that made me go off feminism was finding out that things that i thought were almost exclusively perpetrated by men based on what feminists were telling me were actually super not. and that bringing it up got you shouted at. (even if it isn’t 50/50, if previously i had the impression that it was 1/99 and then it turned out it was actually 35/65 that’s still a big moment of finding out you’ve been mislead).

That particular example wouldn’t be, it’d just be an argument.

I’ve seen a lot of the sorts of derails described, where someone is talking about women on/in a website/forum/group focused on women only for someone to pop up and get angry that they weren’t also talking about men. I watched over the next few years as “talking about men is a derail” moved from those narrow situations where someone actually is derailing a focused discussion to basically any situation where feminism is the topic at hand. Pattern matching is a hell of a drug.

I never really got off feminism for a number of reasons, most of which comes down to a) I never really expected it to be perfect, and b) I’m still firmly convinced it’s done more good than harm, and in particular more good than anyone else at the table. I don’t even think it’s feasible to do more good than feminism at this point, since every viable successor to it liberally lifts tools, analyses, and modes of thought from feminism.

I think it depends what “feminism” is. If it’s “you’re either one of us or a misogynist, and we’ll inform you if you adequately perform ‘one of us’ at a later date,” then fuck it sideways.

If it’s “I actually believe that studies indicating that resumes labeled with female names do get rated lower than the same resumes labeled with male names, and that this is connected to a history of limiting women’s rights which we have made strides to dismantle but is not yet totally gone,” then I am a feminist.

The second thing is why I’m leery of MRAs. I would understand a men’s rights movement if we had clear evidence we’ve overshot and the men’s resumes are widespread getting binned, say, but I… never seem to see that. The closest thing I see are some claims about girls succeeding better in early academia.

Which may be a problem, and there may be things we should be doing about it that we’re not doing, but I don’t feel like I see nearly enough to prove we’ve identified the problem correctly AND weeded out confounders.