Post B0wlE67sBIfHYcfYOG by PG@spinster.xyz
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 (DIR) Post #B0wlE67sBIfHYcfYOG by PG@spinster.xyz
       2025-12-05T17:45:21.267191Z
       
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       Today, I want to focus on a newer smear, which is that radical feminists are conservative, right-wing, exclusionary, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, classist and their favourite… fascist!To me, this kind of characterisation is not that surprising. It’s just the latest instalment in a very old tradition of libel against women who dare to engage in politics, philosophy, and activism. Feminists have always been smeared as man-hating, violent, wicked, cruel, cult-like, hysterical, perpetual victims, or simply “unnecessary” because “women already have all the rights.” This new rhetoric mimics witch-hunt behaviour: people (usually men) across the political spectrum, left, right, centre, hunting down and harassing women whose ideas they find threatening, and giving themselves moral permission to do it.Radical feminists are simply the latest witches.All social and political movements should be open to scrutiny. That includes feminist movements. Radical feminism is not above critique. Movements can absolutely slide into cultish behaviour. They can drift into left-wing or right-wing authoritarianism. They can become abusive, exclusionary, and cruel. Why? Because people are imperfect. People bring their biases, weaknesses, traumas, and unresolved personal issues into political spaces. People are also scared, angry, and hurt. They are often politically illiterate and yet intensely politically emotional.Feminist spaces can become vessels for bad-faith actors, for women airing out personal vendettas instead of offering political analysis, for unresolved trauma masquerading as academia. That doesn’t mean feminism itself is invalid; it means us feminists must be self-aware and open to constructive feedback. Radical feminism, at its best, demands this kind of self-reflection. It asks women to examine not only their own biases and material conditions but also those of their sisters who are less privileged by race, sexuality, class, disability, or national origin.That’s why I find the accusation that radical feminism is inherently non-intersectional or white-dominated so bizarre. Some of the most important radical feminist thinkers and activists have not been white, and many have been crystal clear about race, class, imperialism, and colonialism. Yet “radical feminist” has become an insult. It’s thrown around at random, even applied to liberal white feminists, because the right calls anything it dislikes “radical” and “extreme,” and now parts of the feminist left have happily adopted the same lazy habit. They might be ignorant and foolish, but they know exactly what they’re doing. Words like “racist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” or any other “-ism” or “-phobia” are powerful. They’re meant to scare people away from the movement and mark feminists as legitimate targets for harassment and abuse. And here’s the real irony they never seem to grasp: a feminist movement that calls itself “feminist” yet makes its entire political project about equality, rather than women’s liberation, and uses “intersectionality” to centre men, include men, and even argue that men must also be “liberated,” is a movement already working from a profoundly confused and disorganised ideological base. That confusion breeds paranoia. Because when you believe that feminism must serve men, must soothe men, must uplift men, anyone who centres women becomes, in your eyes, exclusionary, narrow-minded, right-wing, even dangerous. Why does the idea of women-centred liberation frighten you? Why does dismantling patriarchy, truly dismantling it, terrify you so much? You insist we are “abusive” toward men for refusing to organise our politics around them. You accuse us of being cruel, fanatical, or oppressive for critiquing male violence and male-defined gender roles. https://open.substack.com/pub/writesobereditsober/p/the-tall-tale-of-the-radical-feminist?r=dfyz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web