Well, it doesn’t work.

This page is still live. I encourage those with facebook to report it.

If you are an uncompromising feminist, men will hate you and convey this hate via various platforms.

If you are a capitulating feminist, men will still hate you and convey this hate via various platforms.

So. There’s no point in capitulating. It just doesn’t work.

This false labor is often referred to as “Braxton Hicks contractions”, named after the man who is considered to be the first person to describe the phenomenon.

We can bet that women have been aware of false labour for as long as we have been getting pregnant and birthing. And we can bet that women have described this phenomena to other women (and any men who would care to listen) for just as long.

John Braxton Hicks. Sorry dude, you weren't the first to describe anything.

Mary Daly writes about how the power of naming has been stolen from women. Since women are the only people who will ever experience “Braxton Hicks contractions” we should be the ones to name them. And maybe women are happier calling it “flase labour”. Or “Wow, pregnancy is fascinating in so many ways and women’s bodies are amazing Contractions”. Or “Pink Elephant Contractions”

The bottom line – our bodies, our names.

However, men are free to keep naming prostate-related phenomena. I’m sure it will bring them lots of pleasure and satisfaction.

Cherry writes about bdsm, and the reason why women often report bdsm as being the most intense sex they ever experience, and how it is a patriarchal set-up.

This got me thinking in general terms why women may prefer bdsm.

Bdsmers appear to place a lot of importance on sexual ethics. There is a consensus in the community that “ethical bdsm”  requires a lot of safety nets.  It requires constant negotiation of boundaries and consent, the use of safewords,  aftercare, lots of discussion with your partner, no assumptions that any particular activity will occur during any particular encounter etc.  Something like half of everything ever written by bdsmers covers these topics and How! Important! They! Are!

I have no idea if bdsm as practised by individuals involves such an emphasis on these safety nets.  But this is the public image that bdsmers cultivate.  These safety nets are considered necessary, because bdsm is recognized as being emotionally and physically risky sex.

Vanilla PIV is risky sex too. For women. But we’re not entitled to safewords or constant negotiation. On the contrary, rape laws are written in a way that assumes women are in a constant state of sexual consent. And sex = PIV.

This is all very convenient for men of course. What we have here is a devil’s baragin.

If you want sex with negotiable terms, that’s cool. But the sex must be explicitly dom/sub.

If you don’t want explicitly dom/sub sex, then sorry! You don’t get to negotiate your terms. It’s mandatory PIV. And don’t even think about safewording halfway through. It’ll only take me a minute to finish, babe!

In the supposedly “sexually liberated” 21st century, these are the options available to heterosexual women.

The phenomenon of women who experience sexual abuse and who then later engage in bdsm as submissives is interesting to think about here.

Very often women with these narratives describe enjoying bdsm because it allows them to work through their sexual trauma in a controlled situation. I’ve always assumed that the “working through the sexual trauma” part is the significant bit. But what if it is the “controlled situation” part instead?

Vanilla sex is not a controlled situation for women, culturally or legally. It’s therefore quite logical that women with a history of sexual trauma might prefer bdsm, which (IN THEORY) gives them greater control over the situation, because it has negotiable terms. Compared to vanilla sex, where the negotiable terms often amount to little more than “lights on, or off?”

Women who are more disadvantaged under the patriarchy are more vulnerable to its harms (especially male violence/rape), and relatively advantaged women leverage this in order to exercise power over them.

Not too long ago I witnessed something that illustrates this point.

I was waiting for a bus in a seedy area of town where it is not uncommon to see people having altercations on the street. Near the bus stop there was a black woman and a white woman arguing about something. At first the black woman and the white woman seemed to be equally involved in the argument. But after a short while, the fight became worse, and it was the white woman who was escalating it at every turn, getting all up in the black woman’s face, becoming louder, more aggressive. She started pushing the black woman. The black woman held her ground, but she was NOT fighting back. She was trying to diffuse the situation as much as possible, without giving in.

Just say someone called the police and the two women were arrested for brawling in public. As a woman, one of the worst places I can imagine being is in (white male) police custody. But even worse would be being a black woman in police custody.  If both women were hauled down to the police station, since police are racist, right off the bat the black woman will be treated worse by individual police. If they both give statements, the police are more likely to favor the white woman’s account. Since it’s a racist city, any witnesses are more likely to inflate the role of the black woman in the altercation, and minimize the role of the white woman.

Statistically, also, the black woman is more likely to have a prior record than the white woman, which means she has a higher risk of receiving a custodial sentence if charged with anything. Statistically, she is more likely than the white woman to have already been imprisoned  (and therefore more likely to have already suffered abuse within the penal system, and have related PTSD). She is more likely to have a familial history of incarceration and thus be aware of the ramifications it has on black families. Statistically she is more likely to have children than the white woman, and more of them. And if she does have children, hers are statistically more at risk of being taken into state care than any children the white woman may have.  It is just a fact that a black woman has more to fear about being taken into police custody than a white woman.

This alone would be enough to explain why the black woman was so intent on diffusing the situation. The social reality means that the white woman had the upper hand within their altercation, because the black woman has more to fear and more at stake.

One could easily imagine the same dynamic at play in other areas, like employment. There could be a case where a white woman and a black woman have a disagreement at work, but the white woman will have the upper hand in this situation because they both know that if management gets involved, it is more likely to favor the white woman’s side.

The most important thing to note is that managers (or the police in the first example) dont even have to get involved for the white woman to have the upper hand in the situation between them, because just the (always present) implicit threat of it is enough. The white woman can leverage this threat without even directly invoking it, to intimidate, bully and otherwise impose her will on the black woman. That IS power. Limited, conditional power, yes. But that doesnt make it insignificant, or any less oppressive for women who are subjected to it.

This is one of the most interesting feminist concepts I’ve come across lately. Cherryblossom describes how the background is invisible and unreachable to men:

Men can’t fathom the Background; they could never enter its portals because they don’t realise it exists, and even if they did they wouldn’t be welcome there. In fact, if a man did inadvertantly stumble upon it, a secret shift of energy would take place and all of a sudden the same space would become the foreground. Only the women would notice.

All men see of women is their own projections, which of course, must take place in public, when women are in spaces that men can see them.

This, I think, is undeniably true.

Men like to pretend that they’re experts on women, that they understand us better than we understand ourselves. But deep down they know this is not actually true.

Go to any writer’s group online, and you will see countless men asking for advice on how to write female characters. It comes up constantly in writerly circles. Men’s understanding of women amounts to their own projection, but on some level they sense that this projection is false. For day-to-day purposes men are mostly satisfied with the projection (indeed, maintaining the projection, this false image of women, is one of things that ensures the continuation of the patriarchy). But occasionally they are forced to confront its hollowness. Hence cases where men have enough integrity and take writing seriously enough that they will seek advice on how to craft an authentic female character.

Witness also, all the men who just roll with the projection and churn out junk (and most books and movies are junk, from a female perspective). False female characters, false female experiences. It’s all foreground. Men give us female heroes (note, not heroines) like Lisbeth Salander.

The reverse is not true. Women can write male characters. We understand male struggles, desires, insecurities and hopes. We understand the male experience. We have been made to understand the male experience. It has been held up to us as the only experience, and imposed on us from the day we were born.

Every woman who grows up in the patriarchy has been socialized to hold three perspectives, or points of view in her head. The first is the male projection of us, which governs our behavior in the foreground. We live up to this projection when we are visible to men, and indeed often when we are not visible to men too. The second is the male perspective, which in turn governs the first. It also allows us to identify with men and their struggles. Empathize with them. Understand them.

The last perspective is the female perspective, and it is the most interesting. A lot of the time it is squashed down and deprioritized.  For a woman to survive and navigate the patriarchy, the first two perspectives must take precedence, and we must think, act, speak and behave in accordance with them. The female perspective remains in the background, even in our own minds.

It is also the key to The Background.  The place that remains completely out of men’s comprehension and grasp.

As women, we have access to the foreground and the background. Men only have the foreground. This is something I believe we can use to great feminist advantage.

People, or more specifically funfems, are horrified to learn that a porn company hired a bunch of homeless men and filmed them being beaten up for the masturbatory pleasure of other men. The homeless men came away with serious injuries, and two of them are suing the porn company.

In this case, the funfems have decided it was exploitative for the pornographers to use financially desperate men in their vids.

paying a domme to grind her boot into your balls is a lot different than being paid to get whipped and kicked when you have no other source of income. The former is a choice to indulge in a certain sexual behavior — the latter … is exploitation.

Yes. But Jezebel, what about the womenz? Because paying to fuck someone is a lot different from being paid to let someone ram their dick in and out of your reproductive orifice, is it not? The majority of women in porn/prostitution also have no other source of income. Many of them are homeless, or near homeless. Many of them also come away with serious injuries (not to mention STDs, pregnancies and PTSD).

But, according to funfems, women have this magical thing called Choice, which men in these sorts of situations apparently lack. Because seriously, when was the last time Jezebel (or any funfem site) wrote about women being exploited by pornstitution?

She wrote about her first real exposure to feminism and feminist activism, and it was really fascinating. At her uni, the campus paper published something sexist (wow, that’s a new one!), and a group of female students arranged a protest of sorts. It involved many of them wearing provocative clothing and proudly affirming their sluthood and whoredom and blah blah, amongst other things … similar in concept to the recent Slut Walk event (which is what prompted me to finally finish and post this). The blogger mentioned how it was nice that a lot of male students showed up to support the protest. But then she wrote about her discomfort at how the men were kind of jokingly jeering and wolf-whistling at them all. It made her feel self conscious, even though the wolf whistles were supportive, y’all. Then she felt dumb for feeling self conscious, because all the other protesters were having a blast, and obviously didnt feel conflicted about the male attention they were receiving that would have been construed as humiliating and degrading under any other circumstances. She couldnt shake the dissonance, and she was at least a little relieved when the protest ended.

She finished up by saying that she while supports the feminist cause and believes in it, it’s not really her thing. Even though she believes in it. It’s just not for her.

Basically, she was unconvinced.

That. Right there. That is what’s wrong with funfeminism.

It’s not convincing.

Young women see the malestream, and see that it forces them into the role of porn bots, piv-providers and kinky sluts.

So they may turn to funfeminism, and they see that it offers women the “right” to be porn bots, piv-providers and kinky sluts.

What the malestream and funfeminism offer women is the same, only the funfem version is more nervous and complicated.

If she chooses to roll with the malestream, in return she will get male approval. If she chooses to roll with funfeminism she will get some (more limited and highly conditional) male approval, quite a bit of male ridicule, and … ?

Not much else.

Young women aren’t stupid. Faced with the above options, they know which one offers them a better deal under the patriarchy.

Funfeminism is so intent on proving that it is SEXY!!! and FUN!!! that funfems twist themselves into all sorts of ideological knots, trying to integrate the idea that women are human beings with the idea that porn, piv, prostitution, bdsm, are all fine too! Really.

But those two ideas do not play nicely together and those ideological knots are not convincing. Women can see right through them, they know something’s off, even if they dont have the language or booksmarts to articulate exactly what it is. So instead they simply figure that “feminism just isn’t their thing”, and continue on their merry way.

That alone is bad enough. But then, there’s also the issue that funfeminism will never be able to compete with the malestream at being SexyFun anyway. SexyFun is defined by the malestream, and the malestream will keep moving the goalposts. Based on current trends, those goalposts are being moved into more blatantly misogynist territory with every porn vid that comes out. If funfeminism insists on trying to compete with the malestream for the SexyFun gold medal, or even just insists on trying to keep up with it, the road ahead is paved with failure and even more humiliation for women.

Here’s the thing, in order for feminism to be meaningful to women, it must offer some kind of meaningful alternative to the malestream. At the moment, it does not, which is why it is so ineffective.

The blogger I wrote about above is not the first young woman I’ve come across who has expressed something akin to disappointment at what modern feminism has to offer. For every woman who was dazzled by the prospect of taking part in something called Slut Walk, there was at least another woman or two who saw it and wondered what difference there is between men and feminists anyway, when both keep calling women sluts, and neither will shut up about how great porn is.

In order for feminism to be anything other than the internet exercise it mostly is now, it needs numbers. The only way feminism can get numbers is by getting more women on board.

The only way feminism will get more women on board is if it can offer something to women that isnt already being shoved down their throats by men.

What with the dramatic trans-related events in the radical feminist internet of late, it’s about time for another trans post.

Here’s the thing about trans – on the wider feminist internet, the basic tenets of trans activism are taken for granted. They are sacrosanct. Cis privilege is real! Gender identity matters! Blah blah.

I have written about gender identity before. In short, I dont have one. And out there, in the real world away from the feminist internet, I argue that most people dont have one, or find the concept to be of any use. Let me illustrate my point with an anecdote for your reading pleasure.

A couple of years ago I had a job at an NGO. The workers there were all progressive social justice types. One morning we were all getting organised to start the day, logging in to our computers, reading the morning’s emails, making coffee and what not. Suddenly we were interrupted by a shriek from across the room:

OH MY GOD! A MAN IS PREGNANT!

And within a second or two the whole office was crammed around the shrieker’s computer, urging him to “click the link!”, and “hurry!” and “tell us about this pregnant man!”

Of course, the story ended up being about Thomas Beattie. The transman who made headlines in ’08 for using a uterus to gestate a fetus (fancy that!)

And let me tell you, after a few moments when that became apparent, and the workers realised what the headline referred to, the disappointment was palpable.

“Oh … It’s a trans man”.

And everyone slunk back to their own desks and the coffee machine and “the pregnant man” was never mentioned again.

Why the disappointment?

Well, that’s fucking obvious. To most people (ie. everyone who is not invested in internet fun-feminsm, and even the funfems most of the time) man means adult human male. Nothing more, nothing less. When told that “ZOMG a man is pregnant!” everyone expect the man in question to be male. With XY chromosomes and a penis and shit. Man = male. Gender identity is completely irrelevant UNLESS you’re specifically talking about a trans person.

If gender identity was as important as the transactivists say it is, if it were really the ultimate definer of who is a man, and who is a woman, there would have been no disappointment in the office that day. I’ll remind everyone that it was a progressive workplace. The people there were all activist types themselves, probably roughly half were queer-identified.

No one contradicted the idea that Thomas Beattie was really a man. Everyone there respected his gender identity. But you know, they still didnt really believe in it, hence the very obvious disappointment.

When it comes down to it, the concept of ‘gender identity’ is not actually meaningful to most people. On a experiential level most people have no use for the concept. Even for those who understand what ‘gender identity’ means, and who pride themselves on respecting the gender identities of others – it’s a formality. Nothing more. It’s apparent that even those who try really hard to be good allies to trans do not actually experience a gender identity themselves on a visceral level, this is made apparent by their frequent (and hilarious) TRANSPHOBIC! fuck ups.

If gender identity was indeed an inherent and universal part of the human experience, the concept would not be so difficult for most people to understand (and frankly, we would expect that it would have been described earlier, instead of arising out of queer academia in the 20th century). In short, it would be a lot more convincing to non-trans people than it actually is.

There’s a big problem in defining a supposed human rights movement around such a concept. Transactivism is hinged on the idea that everyone experiences and has a gender identity. It cannot be any other way, because then transactivists could not argue that “gender identity” is a legitimate human rights issue, and not just a trans special snowflake issue.

It will be more image driven and hopefully more frequently updated than this one.

I hate to disappoint internet transwomen, but I wont be abandoning this place either.

Also, happy new year!