underrated feminist analysis
Does anyone know any newish radfem or rad leaning books? Like 2010's to present day.
The lie that testosterone is going to harm your gorgeous body is the most sinister thing I can think to tell young men. Testosterone is not going to make you sick, harm you, or turn you into an unrecognizable monster.
Testosterone is going to make you happier than you’ve ever been in your life. Testosterone is going to make you look down at yourself and finally smile, because the yearning is over. Your skin and your bones finally fit just right, instead of feeling foreign and out of place. Testosterone is going to let you finally reach an enlightened, happier version of yourself. Why would you ever tell someone the opposite if it’s not out of hatred and wishing to see them suffer?
*hits feminist blunt*: I don't wanna ever see any praise for a man or the male sex. "There are good men out there who work hard on being good." And I'm a law abiding citizen, where is my fucking national award?
We'll be talking about the right to live as free people EVERYWHERE and you're praising a man for thinking rape is wrong? The bar is below the earth's crust. Liberation for all my sisters, not praise to some man for doing the bare fucking minimum. Decenter men from your frameworks pls.
Reducing women to objects in pornography is a precondition to make the violence they endure look acceptable. When women stop being people, acts of violence against them stop being harmful, as objects cannot be harmed. The legitimation of VAW in pornography is also supported by two latent assumptions. First is the idea that pornography is a “distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbol” (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 326) of reality and, therefore, not real. Yet, “fantasy expresses ideology” (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 327); it expresses the reality of the subordination of women entrenched in the way we understand sex, in and out of pornography. In fact, the second assumption that legitimizes VAW in pornography– that is, that “women enjoy sexual mistreatment” (Dines, 2010, p. 64), consent to their own humiliation, and never say “no” to degrading acts– shows how eroticization and women’s subordination are strictly connected, with the latter becoming “socially real” through its enactment in pornography (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 327). The illusion of consent covers the sexist nature of these acts and allows the refusal of sex not only to become indistinguishable from the desire of sex, but also normalized and eroticized. In pornography, even women’s “no” is part of the fantasy, and force is no longer seen as force “because it is inflicted on women and called sex” (MacKinnon, 1984, pp. 340–343). Under this pretense, almost everything becomes justifiable, including degrading and violent acts such as shoving a woman’s head down the toilet, gagging her, or making her ingest her own vomit. While women become powerless in pornography—as willing actors who ask to be acted upon—men become powerful and always obtain as much sex as they want, how they want it. For a short time, men “get to see what life would look like if only women unquestionably consented to men’s sexual demands” (Dines, 2010, p. 63).
— “I Don’t Hate All Women, Just Those Stuck-Up Bitches”: How Incels and Mainstream Pornography Speak the Same Extreme Language of Misogyny (Alessia Tranchese and Lisa Sugiura)
i honestly feel so bad for anyone struggling w dysphoria trying to find detrans resources on here, the tags are filled w degrading fetish content
women reacting to this all have meaningful insight into why it’s happening. meanwhile, men:
“Our brains were two million years in the making. That long, slow accretion doubled our cranial capacity. And the first thing we did with it was say thank you. We drew the megafauna and the megafemales, sculpted and carved them. The oldest known figurative sculpture is the Goddess of Hohle Fels, and 40,000 years ago someone spent hundreds of hours carving Her. There is no mystery here, not to me: the animals and the women gave us life. Of course they were our first, endless art project. Awe and thanksgiving are built into us, body and brain. Once upon a time, we knew we were alive. And it was good.
And now we leave the realm of miracles and enter hell.
Patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It comes in variations―some old, some new, some ecclesiastical, some secular. But at bottom, they are all necrophilic. Erich Fromm describes necrophilia as “the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.” In this religion, the worst sin is being alive, and the carriers of that sin are female. Under patriarchy, the female body is loathsome; its life-giving fat-cells vilified; its generative organs despised. Its natural condition is always ridiculed: normal feet must be turned into four-inch stubs; rib cages must be crushed into collapse; breasts are varyingly too big or too small or excised entirely. That this inflicts pain―if not constant agony―is not peripheral to these practices. It’s central. When she suffers, she is made obedient.”
― Lierre Keith, ‘The Girls and the Grasses’