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joan-of-feminism · 1 year

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Gender Is A Hierarchy, Not A Spectrum or Identity

Within the last decade, I’m sure that we have all seen something like this in a sociology class or just from scrolling through social media…

Queer theory is a postmodernist theory that has put forth the idea that gender exists on a spectrum as opposed to a binary. Important queer theorist, Judith Butler, says that gender is something fluid, always changing. Not only that, gender is also a performance. We do gender by how we act, what clothes we wear, what hobbies we enjoy. Queer theory says that gender is not tied to biology, it is socially constructed, and that, in theory, there can be an infinite amount of genders (Brown, 2019). While, I can definitely agree that gender is socially constructed, everything else that queer theory says about gender is a no from me. Here’s why I disagree and why I think all people need to think critically about what queer theory is really saying.

For thousands of years, femininity has been thrust upon females and masculinity has been thrust upon males. While some aspects of masculinity and femininity have changed throughout time and culture, some things have remained inherent about those constructs. Femininity enforces submission and weakness onto women. It puts women into the caretaking and child-rearing role based on their biological capacity to give birth. This keeps women dependent on men and prevents us from attaining social, political, and financial power. Femininity also sexualizes women, and causes us to become physically weak (foot binding, high heels, avoidance of gaining muscle mass, dresses and skirts which restrict movement). All of this because we are born female. We are put into the feminine gender because of our sex. As for males, they are put into the masculine gender. Masculinity enforces domination, leadership, and control. Due to those qualities, the masculine gender gives males social, political, and financial power, not just over themselves, but specifically over women. In essence, gender is the the imposed masculinity and femininity according to our sex, and one gender is put above the other. Society has created a hierarchy of gender where people who are given the masculine gender (males) are given power over those with the feminine gender (females).

Now of course, as a feminist, I am very against this gender binary/hierarchy, and many feminists in the 90s and early 2000s pushed back against this which is how queer theory started. The issue is that queer theory ignores the hierarchy part of gender. Gender is a social hierarchy just like race and class. In our white supremacist, capitalist society, white people unfortunately still hold power over other races, and the rich hold power over the poor. This same line of thinking applies to gender, because gender is a system that gives men power over women. Queer theory ignores/dismisses gender being a system that oppresses women based on our sex. Which leads to my next disagreement. Queer theory posits that gender is not actually tied to sex at all. This is a blatant lie. How have we decided for thousands of years who is put into the fem gender and who is put into the masc gender? We use sex. Females are put into the lower class of the gender hierarchy and males are put into the upper class of the hierarchy. So actually, sex and gender are intimately tied together. This is not to say that sex = gender. Gender, again, is a social construct of femininity and masculinity, but more than that, it’s a system of oppression that is based on sex. Now you could say, “well wouldn’t queer theory actually be good for women? It gets rid of the strict gender roles forced upon them?” Not true. It actually is dependent on gender roles and it implies that in order to get rid of oppressive gender, women can simply choose not to perform femininity. The issue with that is there is an abundance of research out there (and personal experiences of GNC women) to show that choosing to not be feminine doesn’t get rid of the social hierarchy that is attached to something we can’t change. Our sex. Queer theory of course says that sex is also a social construct.

“For Butler, the linguistic (discursive) norms we apply to talk about sex, sex organs and the body themselves create the idea of bodily sex (ibid.). Some theorists thus argue that the idea of male and female bodies with definitively different organs, hormones and chromosomes is an understanding that we have created through language and through the social meanings we inscribe on the body” (Brown, 2019).

Queer theorists like to argue that the only reason a body with testes, a penis, and flat chest is male, is because we as a society have all agreed that those characteristics make up a male body, that there is nothing innately male about that body. The same applies to the female body. The thing is, that just because us humans have the ability to categorize and name things found in nature, does not mean we constructed it. If it can be naturally observed, untouched by cultural ideas, then it is a natural phenomenon, not a social one. Humans were being born as males and females long before we had language or culture. Male and female are sexes found in many species, with or without understandings of gender.

Conclusion

So gender as a performance just doesn’t hold up. It reduces gender down to our actions, our clothing, etc… It is also dangerous, since it says that gender is not a hierarchy, but a spectrum of identities and outward expression. This causes feminists to ignore or dismiss the power struggle and oppressive systems at play between the sexes. The gender spectrum also relies heavily on oppressive gender roles and even perpetuates them. Take another look at the first two images from above. The first image shows gender as being a spectrum between traditional femininity and traditional masculinity. You are either a “Barbie” or a “GI Joe”. In fact, gender as a spectrum doesn’t get rid of gender at all. It doesn’t push back against gender norms or stereotypes at all. It simply says that there is a spectrum of gender between highly feminine and highly masculine. It is dependent on the two genders. It relies on the two genders to create gender identities that are a mix of the two. Queer theory’s gender identity relies on keeping this hierarchy alive, while simultaneously ignoring how this hierarchy puts men above women. Here is a quote and image I found that really sums up this entire post if some of you are still confused or if I just didn’t explain things that well.

“Gender is a hierarchy that enables men to be dominant and conditions women into subservience. As gender is a fundamental element of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1984) it is particularly disconcerting to see elements of queer discourse argue that gender is not only innately held but sacrosanct. Far from being a radical alternative to the status quo, the project of “queering” gender only serves to replicate the standards set by patriarchy through its essentialism. A queer understanding of gender does not challenge patriarchy in any meaningful way – rather than encouraging people to resist the standards set by patriarchy, it offers them a way to embrace it. Queer politics have not challenged traditional gender roles so much as breathed fresh life into them – therein lies the danger.To argue that gender could or should be “queered” is to lose sight of how gender functions as a system of oppression. Hierarchies cannot, by definition, be assimilated into the politics of liberation. Structural power imbalances cannot be subverted out of existence – reducing gender to a matter of performativity or personal identification denies its practical function as a hierarchy” (sisteroutrider.Wordpress.com).

Sources:

Extra Readings that I think are helpful in understanding this topic:

Gender heriarchy and the social construction of femininity; the imposed mask by Kouadio Germain N’ Guessan

It’s not about the gender binary, it’s about the gender hierarchy: a reply to “letting go of the gender binary” by Jeanne Ward (especially page 291-294)

#gender abolition #gender hierarchy #gender critical #queer theory #gender is a performance #gender is a social construct #radfem ideology #radfem #radblr

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philosophicalconservatism · 9 months

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Female Ambition.

From the era of Betty Friedman and Vivian Gornick during the 1970’s until the present, we have heard Feminists compare the exalted attributes of the accomplished career woman to those of the lowly housewife, by referring to the attributes of the former as ambition. The professional woman is a woman whose life is uniquely driven by ambition. But the very notion that the word “ambition” is unconnected to the task of child rearing is an utterly perverse one. What task is more ambitious than the cultivation of a human mind and heart from scratch? What task deserves greater reverence and respect?

#feminism #ambition

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shadycomputerpolice · 7 months

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This whole motherhood debate has been eye-opening to say the least. This has really been a covert direct observation to identify women's knowledge and attitudes towards feminism.Again, feminism is not a sisterhood circle or babysitters club.

While feminism is about improving the wellbeing of women and girls, there are different thematic areas and individual feminists are going to focus on certain thematic areas.

Why are you people expecting random women to contribute more to the existence and welfare of your would be child(ren) than the fathers of said would be child(ren)?

Maternity rights (leave, workplace creches, etc) is the perfect opportunity for mothers/ intending mothers to collaborate with fathers/intending fathers to advocate for a system that would be better for children's wellbeing. But let me guess, the men are unreliable, right? But not unreliable enough for you to decide not to procreate with them, though.

This whole debacle on Tumblr is an extension of female family members contributing more to childcare than children's fathers. Feminsts are now demanding labour from women to create an environment that is more accommodating of childbearing and child rearing under the guise of sisterhood and solidarity.

When childfree women start infringing on mothers' and children's human rights then we can talk. Unless you are trying to insinuate that childfree women not participating in motherhood focused feminism is in itself a human rights violation (in which case, I have nothing to say to you).

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no-where-new-hero · 10 months

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One thing that’s been lurking about in the back of my brain for a little while but has really kind of hit home as I read Woolf again and see all these L. M. Montgomery posts is how deep a feminist streak runs through Montgomery despite how little her work is talked about as such. And I think the locus of this female self-determination rests on her obsession with place. Woolf talks about the creative woman needing a room of her own, and Montgomery extends that to a house of her own. EVERY heroine has an almost pathological closeness or identification with either her childhood home (Green Gables, New Moon, and Silver Bush) or the home that represents adulthood and building an independent life (the Disappointed House and the Muskoka cottage). Nature and connection to the natural world obviously plays into these connections and contrasts with actual patriarchal ownership of these properties. In addition, despite how much of a “romantic” writer LMM seems, she also expressly links marriage to property ownership and personal empowerment through being mistress of a house. She mentions this everywhere (the condition of being an old maid always means dependency too but often on relatives and less sympathetic people) but I think of this particularly with Emily and Pat: Emily loves that Dean will let her live in the Disappointed House more than Dean himself, and that Emily will rescue it from disappointment is side by side on the page with her wedding to Teddy. Pat makes Silver Bush into her world and can only make a change in her life once the house is gone (the fact that her childhood lover comes back to her literally at the ruins of the burned house always stayed with me. It feels like a very obvious exchange of loves).

A last thing on the subject of feminism though is in Tangled Web, when Margaret Penhallow’s (most unusual for LMM but also in some ways the most on theme) choice of using her money is to buy a house and adopt a son. House-keeping and child-rearing are both traditional feminine tasks yet the fact that Margaret does them alone and independently shows LMM’s priorities and desires to shake off the natural connection between having a husband and being able to have a place of your own.

I’m almost 100% sure LMM and Virginia Woolf would never have read each other’s works and probably wouldn’t have liked them if they did, though considering they were contemporaries, I enjoyed teasing out similar resonances in how they describe the female condition of their time.

#lm montgomery #pat of silver bush #anne of green gables #emily of new moon #a tangled web #the blue castle #virginia woolf #a room of one’s own #immortal poets society #blake’s last braincell #lmm lockdown

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olderthannetfic · 1 year

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I’m this anon who asked about radical feminist/trans debates. I appreciate your response and those of your commenters, particularly @elfwreck who described a long evolution of discourse that I’ve missed. I’ve not been intentionally dense…just a woman and working mother who’s been busy as hell for about the last 15 years and focused on getting through the day. I’ve always supported gay rights, never gave it a second thought. With my kids older and more time on my hands, I started exploring fanfic and have been drawn in. One thing led to another and I find myself down tumblr rabbit holes with women raising questions about girls sports and the dangers of HRT for teens and whether lesbians are allowed to not like dicks, with responses that generally amount to “die terf”. I start researching online and find academic papers and news articles, but find essentially a similar message to you and your commenters: “radical feminists are obviously wrong and not to be taken seriously”. No addressing the questions I’ve seen raised. I get the point—one side is indefensible and I missed the boat on seeing the discussion play out many years ago. I suppose I was looking for a short cut through social media which feels silly in retrospect. Regardless, the radical feminists are out there making intellectual arguments across social media on a range of topics, including men in general, misogyny, porn, prostitution. In all likelihood the post that first pulled me in to their viewpoints related to the imbalance between women and their husbands with respect to child raising, housework, and expressing anger over daily aggravations, which rang completely true to my personal experience and that of other women I know. Likely why I now find myself caught up in fanfic escapism. Anyhow, I’ll dig in deeper to academic literature on the intersection of women’s rights, gay rights, and trans rights because I finding myself caring to know this history now.

It happens.

A lot of the roots of current feminist debate are in the Feminist Sex Wars of the 80s. Those were about differing ideas around protecting women and the implications of pornography.

(TBH, part of how very old arguments are able to rear their ugly heads again is that this shit is old enough that the youth weren't born yet during those debates.)

While not about trans stuff per se, some of the ideas about embattled women whose territory is being encroached on link back to there. The "argument", to the extent that the anti-trans side has one, tends to be about defending women's spaces. Many of these arguments are coming from a place of genuine fear. (Maybe not realistic fear, but I believe them that they're traumatized and reacting accordingly.) Some, however, are malicious indoctrination.

There have been efforts (sometimes admitted to publicly, often not) to literally infiltrate young lefty spaces with this kind of rhetoric. It's the queer and female youth version of gamer boys getting indoctrinated by the alt right. So people on my blog have very limited patience for anything that gives this shit the time of day.

I don't think there's a particularly good shortcut since it's the culmination of decades of fighting.

But where I'd start would be by saying that a lot of the arguments sound good on the surface but boil down to "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" traps.

If someone on social media is still hung up on "But BDSM is abuse! A woman cannot meaningfully consent because [bullshit we fought about in the 80s]", we have nothing to say to each other.

The anti-kink and anti-trusting people when they say they consent attitudes tend to go hand-in-hand with suspicion of trans people and refusal to let people define their own identities.

Misogyny and unfair work distributions are absolutely real, but there's a certain "war on women" rhetoric that's about as legit as the "war on Christmas".

The "other" side agrees about a lot of the basics, like the fact that a lot of dudes really need to hold up their end of relationships better when both partners work and nobody should be solely in charge of the house.

But some feminist classic like the comic You should've asked is not on "The Feminist Side" as opposed to "The Trans Side". Regular feminism doesn't take issue with trans people. Lots of regular feminism accepts that women are kinky and horny and like impure things.

These feminist basics are often used as a strawman ("Our opponents disagree with this basic idea they clearly do not actually disagree with!") and as camouflage for much stupider ideas, like the notion that trans women would choose to be a demographic that gets murdered in bathrooms a lot. It's not cis women who are in danger from trans women! That's complete horseshit.

A lot of the talk of embattled lesbian space actually means "Oh no, some butches came out as trans men eventually, and we have to acknowledge bisexual women now".

Re the HRT thing... Yes, there are dangers to prescribing kids and teens hormones. A family should go into the process with a clear understanding of the effects on bone density and such. These risks can be managed the same as menopausal women manage bone density risks. These are not horrific and unknown problems: they're commonplace medical issues we've dealt with before in other contexts. They don't have to be a big deal unless a kid has some pre-existing bone disorder or something.

The part the transphobes don't tell you is that the biggest danger to trans teens is suicide.

Depending on which study you look at, something like 80% of trans youth have serious suicidal thoughts and maybe half make an actual attempt. Lots of teens have issues, but these rates are staggeringly higher than for cis peers, even cis gay peers who also tend to have higher rates than cis het teens.

Forcing someone to go through the body horror of the wrong puberty is... well... not great for their mental health. So a lot of medical professionals are understandably eager to treat kids and teens early because of the huge lasting mental toll. Taking hormones early can also result in an adult body that passes better. And perhaps people shouldn't have to pass as cis to be treated how they want to be treated, but we live in the real world.

Some people do start treatment and then regret it. That's reality. But it's a small percentage, and the issue is often that they're nonbinary and weren't presented with any options other than cis of their assigned sex at birth or transsexual in the 90s sense where you want the full top and bottom surgeries and you're still very binary. I know people who've detransitioned to a degree, but they're not like "Ah yes, I was 100% cis and a fool!" There was generally something going on, just something harder to pin down.

(In fact, most of the "evidence" of people regretting transition are from contexts where the only way to socially transition and get your government ID changed and so on was to do the full medical transition. The regretters would most likely have preferred something in the middle but were not allowed access to what they needed by punitive laws.)

A bunch of alarmist dickheads want to tell you that trans youth don't know their own minds and that everything will be safer and healthier if they just wait to get treatment. In most cases, this is completely untrue.

There used to be far more psychiatric roadblocks to getting physical medical treatment. What the haters want is for these to return. But they didn't deter trans people back then, and they're not going to now.

Re the dicks thing... People roll their eyes because it's such an old canard. Nobody thinks lesbians should be required to like dicks. Nobody thinks lesbians should be required to date trans women either.

But lots of trans women get bottom surgery and don't even have a penis. In any case, whether they get surgery or not, reducing them to a body part is the kind of bio-essentialist nonsense feminism normally strives to debunk.

These arguments boil down to "Have penis, will rape".

Re sports... Trans women don't end up being the issue. In practice, when there's a lot of scrutiny, what happens is that black cis women are seen as literally not female enough and racist shitheads demand that their hormone levels be tested and they be branded Not Female for testosterone levels or something.

Whatever this kind of regulation is intended to do, in practice, it establishes a correct way to be female, and that way is to have a body that conforms to a particular "feminine", white beauty standard.

The athletes who end up being attacked are sometimes intersex, which they may not even have known. Sometimes, they're just taller and stronger than other women. Often, they don't look normative enough to a bunch of creeps because they're too black.

The assholes cover it up with a good line of patter, but that's where this ends: treating black women like freaks.

The bottom line is that anti-trans supposed feminists try to pretend they speak for feminists in general and that there are two major sides locked in conflict.

In fact, they're fringe weirdos who've gained new prominence, particularly in the UK with the backing of JKR, and the rest of the feminists are over here going "This shit again? Jesus!"

I don't waste time debating their "intellectual" arguments on social media for the same reason I don't debate eugenics-preaching racists or fundie religious nuts.

Hence the lack of good resources on "both sides".

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ultramaga · 3 months

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4B (or "Four No's") is a radical feminist movement originating in South Korea in 2019.[1][2] Its members renounce four activities:

sex (Korean: 비섹스; Hanja: 非sex; RR: bisekseu),

child-rearing (Korean: 비출산; Hanja: 非出産; RR: bichulsan),

dating (Korean: 비연애; Hanja: 非戀愛; RR: biyeonae), and

marriage with men (Korean: 비혼; Hanja: 非婚; RR: bihon).[1][3]

This is the sort of thing I see from feminists, and this is why I say it is a suicide cult. Without children, how do you get more Feminists? The people who hate you are having kids like mad. The huge population growth from the most extreme Islamists in the world - those who genuinely unironically have a rape culture and a Patriarchy - will inevitably replace a Feminist culture, because Feminists choose to sabotage reproduction. Without new humans, any Feminist culture is automatically doomed. And they cannot convert Islamists - if anything, Feminists don hijab and fall on their knees at the sight of a violent and patriarchal man.

I suspect it's a kink for them.

#misandry #feminism #antifeminism #intersectional feminism #leftism

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old-school-butch · 8 months

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Children and unpaid labor

I'm hearing more concern about the potential for global population to peak and fall by 2080. All of the analysis points to:

a. medical management of fertility becoming increasingly available, so women/families can make choices about how many kids to have.

b. better medical care and life expectancy, so women don't need to have 5 kids just for 2 to reach adulthood.

b. industrialization leading to high cost of living, so it's harder to afford the cost of raising children.

And then there's a ton of hand-wringing about the coming economic meltdown.

What's unspoken (why? we know why...)

a. When women have a choice to not have kids, we often have fewer.

b. When women have no financial incentive to have kids, we often have fewer

c. When women have to work in the paid labour force to make ends meet, we don't have time to do the unpaid labour of raising the next generation.

How this gets resolved, by patriarchal viewpoints, is to remove the access to abortion and contraception and give families cash payments for having a lot of kids.

How this gets resolved, by feminist perspective, is to recognize that raising the next generation involves work and resources. Women have known for eons (it's literally viewed as the reason we are such social creatures) that cooperation in child-rearing is massively productive. One woman will be exhausted caring for 3-4 young children, but 10 women working together can care for 100 children. Free public schooling removed a big chunk of that cost for families, but in commercialized societies it's still to costly for most families. For once, we need to discuss socializing the real costs of child-rearing rather than acting like it's a private, vanity project that women need to interrupt their careers to take a ten year break to create the next generation. We drive on publicly funded roads to get to a workplace that has no childcare. Women drop out of the labor force to care for children, but that loss of productivity and increase in costs affects only them. That transportation is not more fundamental to society than raising children, it's time women demanded more from society for our work.

We already see this commercialization happening with surrogacy, public schooling, private childcare, domestic servants and prepared food. These things are not necessarily bad, but these changes are happening in a capitalist setting, however, not a feminist one and has no guardrails on exploitation.

Investing in children, for real, means freeing women from the last gendered role that still burdens us. The future of motherhood is about nurturing and guiding our children in a socialized system that supports our role and 'women's work' as thoroughly as it supports fatherhood. We must guard against privatized and commercialized 'solutions' based on economic perspectives that ignore the financial burdens of the 'second shift' that mothers are already working.

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1yyyyyy1 · 7 months

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How short-sighted must someone be to believe that motherhood is so difficult and painful that mothers absolutely must be the center of feminism, that mothers are so uncared for that they need to be supported by all true good feminist women on earth without admitting how stupid it is to know that and then still choose to have children with a man. Why do I need to coddle you? Get the man who impregnated you to do it! What is this bizarre, one-sided parasitic relationship where you choose to give birth and then depend on women who have chosen not to to support you?

I understand your frustrations... See, this is another thing that gets me — I have a suspicion there is such a push in support for motherhood because mothers-to-be are aware that the men they plan on getting children with are useless when it comes to child-rearing, hence all the talk about needing a village (childless women) to help raise said children. It would be a valid concern if it did not imply that women like that care so little about their offspring they will knowingly reproduce with someone who is unstable and unreliable. And again, if the man who the woman is with and who very much benefits from the system cannot provide for his partner properly, how can a woman, who is crushed by that very same system, make up for that?

#ask

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halleehalfgallon · 1 year

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so i'm curious what you think a Trad wife is.. because literally I feel like it's anyone who has a child with their husband. there is nothing anti feminist about that, simply put as a tradwife myself I feel like we should have it in common that when someone doesn't want to claim being a feminist it's because of extreme people who are NOT for true equality. it's been used so much to hurt men now, and in some cases even biological women.

oof, that last bit has terf energy so I’m probably not going to get anywhere here.

first, that definition is really lacking. that’s not what the word means. tradwives are a whole lot more than that.

no, there’s nothing anti-feminist about having children with your husband. of course not. feminism is about choice. getting married, keeping a home, having children, staying at that home with those children, those are all choices. and if you look at my blog, they are clearly choices that I’ve made!

choice is key. show me that the majority of tradwives are for choice and we‘re golden. I have yet to see one who does not actively advocate for the oppression of their own sex and for the oppression of LGBTQIA+ folks.

time and time again my content is being reblogged alongside nauseating statements about the way women ought to behave toward men, commanding women’s obedience to men solely based on biology.

I don��t care if you have 5 kids and your husband works a 9-5 and comes home to dinner on the table. if that’s the dynamic that genuinely works for both of you and that’s a life you are actively choosing and getting fulfillment from, I’m glad for you. side note: housework, child rearing, homemaking is valid work.

if you have 5 kids and your husband works a 9-5 and comes home to dinner on the table and you tell me it’s my duty to do the same out of respect for my husband, and that my husband is weak for not asserting himself as the head of our household, and that all of this is what is wrong with society, and on and on and on… you see where I’m going with this?

the feminism I subscribe to doesn’t hurt men, it holds them accountable. it advocates for them, even! and of course there are shitty feminists out there who cast judgment toward those of us who do choose to get married and have children, but that is also wrong. it’s an over-correction. it’s a shame. it’s something I feel strongly about and you’ll see that I talk about that plenty here too.

but let’s not act like tradwives are just married mothers. that’s a gross oversimplification. if you really don’t know what I’m talking about, tumblr is riddled with the slime I’m referring to. it’s often thinly veiled and romanticized as cottagecore and over glamorization of rural living.

#tradwife #tradfem #feminist homemaking #feminism #feminist parents #parenting #gender roles #ask #anon #sahm #stay at home mom #cottagecore #apronstyle #rural living #rural life

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haggishlyhagging · 1 year

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Children, then, are not freer than adults. They are burdened by a wish fantasy in direct proportion to the restraints of their narrow lives; with an unpleasant sense of their own physical inadequacy and ridiculousness; with constant shame about their dependence, economic and otherwise ("Mother, may I?"); and humiliation concerning their natural ignorance of practical affairs. Children are repressed at every waking minute. Childhood is hell.

The result is the insecure, and therefore aggressive/defensive, often obnoxious little person we call a child. Economic, sexual, and general psychological oppressions reveal themselves in coyness, dishonesty, spite, these unpleasant characteristics in turn reinforcing the isolation of children from the rest of society. Thus their rearing, particularly in its most difficult personality phases, is gladly relinquished to women—who tend, for the same reason, to exhibit these personality characteristics themselves. Except for the ego rewards involved in having children of one's own, few men show any interest in children. And certainly not enough to include them in any books on revolution.

So it is up to feminist (ex-child and still oppressed child-women) revolutionaries to do so. We must include the oppression of children in any program for feminist revolution or we will be subject to the same failing of which we have so often accused men: of not having gone deep enough in our analysis, of having missed an important substratum of oppression merely because it didn't directly concern us. I say this knowing full well that many women are sick and tired of being lumped together with children: that they are no more our charge and responsibility than anyone else's will be an assumption crucial to our revolutionary demands. It is only that we have developed, in our long period of related sufferings, a certain compassion and understanding for them that there is no reason to lose now; we know where they're at, what they're experiencing, because we, too, are still undergoing the same kind of oppressions. The mother who wants to kill her child for what she has had to sacrifice for it (a common desire) learns to love that same child only when she understands that it is as helpless, as oppressed as she is, and by the same oppressor: then her hatred is directed outward, and "motherlove" is born. But we will go further: our final step must be the elimination of the very conditions of femininity and childhood themselves that are now conducive to this alliance of the oppressed, clearing the way for a fully "human" condition. There are no children yet able to write their own books, tell their own story. We will have to, one last time, do it for them.

-Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

#shulamith firestone #female oppression #child oppression #reluctant motherhood #patriarchy

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kirnet · 27 days

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like i know im in my feminist bubble here on tumblr dot com and within my own family but work sometimes genuinely makes me feel like im on another planet. a coworker in her mid thirties, who was a senior admin of a department, just left the job and retired early because her husband is making incredible money. another one praised my andrew tate listening coworker bc he wanted to “make enough money so his future wife could stay at home and focus on homeschooling the kids.” like. ok. maybe it’s just the fact that women could not get their own credit cards until a year after my parents were born or maybe it’s the fact that i know so many women who are trapped in horrifically abusive relationships and cannot escape because they have no access to their own finances. but like there’s a reason labor and feminism are tied together. lmao.

*take coming from a white person. women of color especially black women have been in the labor force the entire damn time and largely don’t have the privilege to leave when they feel like it. also things like pay gaps across gender and race lines, and child rearing costs, complicate things for sure. but i simply cannot understand being in a privileged position at a well paying white collar job and throwing that security away

#just… the majority of my mothers friends have disabled children and cannot leave their husbands. they cannot get their own income bc they #are not allowed to. some have valid real fears that they and their child would be killed if they tried to leave #like. these are the people i grew up with. these are my aunts and close family friends.#never in my life could i place my financial independence in the hands of someone who could use that power over me #not if i have a clear chance not to #anyway it is a complicated issue work sucks i get it but you’re also making 6 figs as the hr head. you’re life ain’t that damn hard #ramblings #abuse mention

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unionize-aromantically · 7 days

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It seems like a weird choice the norwegian government made to call extra paternal leave for men "men's rights". It's a feminist issue, this is a policy that will lead to more gender equality in the home, it will lead to less of the child rearing work going to the mother.

(includes some stuff about money as well, but the details are unclear to me so I won't try to explain that)

**this is currently only a suggestion

nrk news about it (in Norwegian)

#ink.post #txt #ink.journalism #source: nrk

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dragoneyes618 · 1 year

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Alexandra DeSanctis makes an acute observation in "Why Big Business Loves Abortion," in the October 3 National Review. Many corporations have announced that they will cover any costs incurred by female employees who travel out of state to obtain an abortion. But that solicitude should not be construed as any generalized concern for their female employees' well-being or even job satisfaction. "Companies have pledged money for abortion without offering any comparable increases in maternity leave, child benefits, or assistance to couples seeking to complete an adoption," DeSanctis notes. Rather, the corporations' support of abortion is in furtherance of their desire to create the ideal employee: one unencumbered by familial relationships and child-rearing responsibilities. Corporate heads lamented that the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision endangered "gender parity and equal opportunity in the workplace" and placed at risk "gains that women have made in the workplace and broader society." In other words, a woman's worth is reflected almost exclusively by how well she imitates men. Men are the standard to which women are supposed to aspire. To be successful in the workplace, women must be just like men: "never pregnant, never home with children, always available." But the male standard did not originate in corporate boardrooms. It is, according to Abigail Favale, in The Genesis of Gender, a staple of second-wave feminists writers like Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamit Firestone. They cast femaleness and female biology as undesirable compared with the "unencumbered male" standards: "Too often, freedom for women is cast as freedom from femaleness. Female equality was redefined as sameness with men."

Mishpacha Magazine, Issue 94, February 2023, pages 52-53

#pro life #toxic feminism

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aronarchy · 2 years

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When Gays Wanted to Liberate Children

Seventies activists wanted to emancipate kids and destroy the nuclear family—so how did we end up with gay marriage instead?

Michael Bronski

In 1972 members of Boston’s Gay Men’s Liberation, one of the most significant Gay Liberation groups formed after the 1969 Stonewall riots, drove to Miami to hand out a ten-point list of demands at the Democratic National Convention. Emerging from a crucible of new queer political consciousness, feminism, and rage, the manifesto (reproduced at the bottom of this article) articulated a utopian political vision that was broad—today, we might say intersectional—extending far beyond what we would now conceptualize as LGBT politics. Its first demand, for example, was for “an end to any discrimination based on biology. Neither skin color, age nor gender should be recorded by any government agency. Biology should never be the basis for any special legal handicap or privilege.”

Gay Liberation repudiated child paternalism, the idea that children need the protection of adults and, in exchange, are eligible for fewer basic rights.

If many of Gay Men’s Liberation’s demands remain controversial forty-five years later, most are also still legible in today’s political discourse: the group sought to end U.S. imperialism, prevent discrimination based on sexual identity, and abolish the police. These all remain live demands of many radicals on the left. Demand six, however, is likely to strike even many of today’s activists as irresponsible, bizarre, and dangerous:

Rearing children should be the common responsibility of the whole community. Any legal rights parents have over “their” children should be dissolved and each child should be free to choose its own destiny. Free twenty-four hour child care centers should be established where faggots and lesbians can share the responsibility of child rearing.

Collective child rearing? Legally emancipated children? Queers helping to raise other people’s children and, by extension, serving as role models and moral exemplars? Isn’t this exactly what conservatives fear when they warn of the red flag of liberal “social engineering,” a queer version of Soviet indoctrination daycares?

Or is it a utopia that would finally liberate women from the burdens of reproduction, while also creating a social structure in which children could safely function as independent beings who are not frightened or shamed out of exploring their sexuality?

• • •

Radical feminists argued that men had invented the idea of childhood innocence to bolster the oppression of women, which was also the function of the nuclear family.

Since at least the eighteenth century, there has been robust debate about the nature of childhood. While questions of whether or not children are innately good, suitable for the open labor market, or in need of standardized education have elicited polarized opinions over the centuries, most reformers have assumed, to varying degrees, a starting point of child paternalism, the idea that children need the protection of adults and, in exchange, are eligible for fewer basic rights.

The children’s liberation movement of the late 1960s was a dramatic break from all of this, no matter how progressive many prior reforms may have been, because it repudiated child paternalism. Set against the backdrop of a cultural moment when adults—from hippies and radical feminists to civil rights to early gay rights—were seeking greater personal freedoms, it was perhaps only a matter of time before young people identified themselves as—or were identified as—an oppressed minority deserving of legal equality and, in effect, manumission.

Even recalling what we know about the radical nature of the 1960s, it can be difficult to appreciate that child liberation was not a fringe idea. Paul Goodman’s bestselling 1960 Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System proposed that children were among the first casualties of capitalism run amok, while A. S. Neill’s progressive education treatise of the same year, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, proposed not only that children could function as democratic actors and make sensible social and sexual choices, but that his school had already been facilitating this for years, to no ill effect. When it appeared in English in 1962, medievalist Phillippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life caused a similar sensation, tracing a detailed history of childhood in the West to demonstrate that our modern notion of “childhood”—of a child who must be sheltered from the world—was a social construct of only recent vintage, as was the nuclear family. For much of history, Ariès showed, all except the youngest children had functioned in the world much as adults do.

Summerhill sold over two million copies between 1960 and 1970, and Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd sold over one hundred thousand copies in the first few years of publication. The political language of liberation quickly replaced theory and conjecture. During the 1970s, at least fifteen mass-market books promoted ideas of children’s rights and children’s liberation, including David Gottleib’s Children’s Liberation (1973) and Beatrice and Ronald Gross’s The Children’s Rights Movement: Overcoming the Oppression of Young People (1977).

These ideas took an even more radical turn when they were combined with the newly emerging discourse of Women’s Liberation. Shulamith Firestone, for example, in her groundbreaking The Dialectic of Sex (1970) argued that physical reproduction itself was at the core of women’s oppression and called for new technologies to replace childbirth. In addition, she contended that children were an oppressed class who suffered under the regime of the patriarchal family. In her chapter “Down with Childhood,” Firestone argues that the very creation of the category “childhood” and the idea of “childhood innocence” were adult male constructions invented to bolster the oppression of women, which was also the function of the nuclear family. Kate Millett went further in her 1984 essay “Beyond Politics: Children and Sexuality,” contending that the oppression of children is explicitly rooted in denying them sexual knowledge: “Sex itself is presented as a crime to children. It is how adults control children, how they forbid them sexuality. This has been going on for ages and is infinitely important to adults.”

Gay activists risked being labeled as pedophiles simply for admitting that there were gay kids.

Gay Liberationists were inspired by Women’s Liberation and many wished in their activism to engage the topics of childhood and pedagogy. However, they faced the risk of being labeled pedophiles simply for expressing theoretical interest in children; gay men at the time were still, after all, assumed by most of Middle America to be perverts. Some gay writers took a stand by simply admitting what most gay people knew and most heterosexuals desperately tried to deny: there were gay kids. Confronting the myth that adult women and men “chose” homosexuality, or had been seduced into it by degenerate adults, gay liberationists told their own stories of being gay children, and theorized—along the lines of Kate Millett—that sexual repressions and lack of sexual knowledge were far more dangerous than same-sex activity for youth. In his foundational “The Gay Manifesto,” published a month before the Stonewall riots, Carl Wittman wrote:

A note on the exploitation of children: kids can take care of themselves, and are sexual beings way earlier than we’d like to admit. Those of us who began cruising in early adolescence know this, and we were doing the cruising, not being debauched by dirty old men. … And as for child molesting, the overwhelming amount is done by straight guys to little girls: it is not particularly a gay problem, and is caused by the frustrations resulting from anti-sex puritanism.

Simply speaking of the existence of gay children struck at the heart of much homophobia. Testaments from gay adults that they had had queer sexual desires as kids was a new development in the public conversation about homosexuality and a bold political strategy. Indeed, the naming of the existence of gay teens and children—in the context of an emerging children’s liberation movement—had an immediate effect on political organizing. Soon after the Stonewall riots, as Gay Liberation groups spread across the country, queer youth began to organize. In The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: “An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail” (2008), Stephan L. Cohen documents at least thirty U.S.-based groups formed, and run, by LGBT youth during the decade.

More radical theorists felt that once one accepted the idea that the bourgeois family suppresses children’s sexuality, the logical next step was to demand both an end to the nuclear family and the involvement of gay men and lesbians in the raising of children. Although its ideological purity may have made it somewhat extreme, the basic idea of a political movement inserting itself into the raising of children was not a stretch at the time. Other political movements were already dealing with issues of how they conceptualized children and their political place in the world. The Black Panthers, for example, began their own schools and after-school programs, and, with their free breakfast program, injected themselves into existing public school systems. Mainstream and radical feminists started feminist daycare centers. They also published non-sexist children’s books. The most famous included Marlo Thomas’s 1972 illustrated book and record Free to Be… You and Me, which touted gender equality; and Charlotte Zolotow’s 1972 picture book, William’s Doll, in which a boy wants a present of a doll to play with, much to his father’s gender-normative chagrin.

Queer adults had been raising other people’s turned-out queer children for years. But they did not want their families to be seen as second-rate any longer.

To insist that lesbians and gay men should be able to help raise children was a radical vision of how the traditional family might change, but its aim was not only to shape children but also to shape adults: many activists felt that only when they were able to participate in the raising of society’s next generation would they fully enjoy the rights of citizenship.

But it also would be to formally acknowledge that queer adults had been raising other people’s turned-out and runaway queer children for years, particular in gay ghettos such as New York’s West Village and San Francisco’s Castro. Queer kids who were homeless, either by choice or circumstance, tended to flock to these neighborhoods, where they would often find themselves taken in by a sympathetic adult. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, for example, started Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970 to set up shelters in Manhattan for homeless trans youth. In the gay slang of the 1950s and ’60s, an older gay man would be called “mother” if he took on the task of guiding or advising newly-out young gay men.

This dovetailed with an idea prevalent in the early 1970s of “gay family”: extended, often intergenerational groups of friends who supported one another as a biological family might. Making family in community was vital—literally lifesaving—to the daily lives of many LGBT people at the time. The vibrancy of this idea of chosen family was evident at the end of the decade when Sister Sledge’s hit “We Are Family” became an instant favorite in gay bars and often was played as the final song at LGBT community dances and Gay Pride marches. Gay family became even more urgent during the AIDS epidemic, as many biological families abandoned their sick sons and traditional care communities crumbled.

In other words, gay people had been creating and nurturing families for years—families that offered many advantages—notably physical and emotional safety—over nuclear families. But they did not want their families to be seen as second-rate any longer, and they wanted to free everyone from what they saw as a tyrannical imposition of patriarchal, bourgeois values.

• • •

The radical aim of upending the nuclear family was replaced by a gay rights agenda that gave renewed life to the nuclear family by reinvesting in its symbolic and practical necessity.

Gay Men’s Liberation’s demands never came to fruition, and the authors of the ten-point demands often had only nascent ideas of what practically it would look like to implement their prescriptions. Similarly, some male members of New York’s Gay Liberation Front left the organization, which they felt was insufficiently feminist, and formed the Revolutionary Effeminists. Historian Martin Duberman, in his 2018 analysis of the LGBT Rights movement Did The Gay Movement Fail?, writes that the Effeminists “argued that gay men should virtually place themselves in the service of women, taking on their traditional household tasks, including the raising of children, to order to foster women’s rise to power.” However, it seems that the Effeminists also did not get much past theory, and the group never expanded from its founding members and soon died out.

That said, the actual practice of queer child rearing was happening in less radical ways on the local level. Besides the example of de facto gay adoption noted above, in 1975 some gay and straight men in Boston—not connected to Gay Men’s Liberation, but perhaps inspired by its demands—formed the Men’s Child Care Collective. Although the group was consciously created as a straight/gay alliance, the few published accounts of the group always identify it as “the gay men’s child care collective”—a slip of the tongue that perhaps speaks truth to the fact that the group was overwhelmingly composed of gay men. The organization met at the Bromfield Street Educational Foundation at 22 Bromfield Street in downtown Boston, where the publications Gay Community News and Fag Rag (an offshoot of Gay Men’s Liberation) had their offices. Most meetings were consciousness-raising sessions about how gay and straight men might be friends, work together, and—as a progressive men’s movement that enacted feminist ideas—help women by sharing the work of caring for children.

One concrete project they conducted was having a daycare group for women attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Cambridge. They also volunteered daycare services at LGBT and progressive political conferences. A focus of the group was offering childcare to women who were, in various ways, marginalized or at risk. Their feminist analysis, reflecting some of the Gay Men’s Liberation demands, reflected concerns over class, economics, and race. Like many political groups, the Men’s Child Care Collective lasted a few years until, as members moved out of Boston or became more involved in other projects, the group folded.

Similar groups formed in cities across the country, including San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and New York. The aims of these groups were threefold. As feminists, the members had a commitment to easing some of women’s burden for caring for children. They were also consciously rebelling against restrictive gender roles that excluded men from being seen as caring and nurturing to children. Perhaps most important, they were determined to confront—through word and deed—the deeply rooted myth that gay men were child molesters.

Replacing the traditional heterosexual family with its same-sex analogue will not eliminate the profoundly damaging structural problems of the institution.

Nonetheless, while these groups, Boston’s Men’s Child Care Collective included, were radical in their conception, they were also curiously traditional, as they tended to place gay men in the role of temporary caretakers for children of heterosexual relationships. While there were lesbians with children in the early 1970s, most of them were women who had left marriages. The idea of the lesbians or gay men together having children who were, in some meaningful sense, their “own” did not fully emerge for at least another decade—and when it did, it often took a shape that mirrored rather than challenged the heterosexual, nuclear family. With this came the near-fetishistic prioritizing, in gay rights activism, of gay marriage over all other causes. The radical Gay Liberation aim of upending the nuclear family was replaced by a gay rights agenda that gave renewed life to the nuclear family by reinvesting in its symbolic and practical necessity.

By 1977 the country saw the rise of a national conservative movement that would put Ronald Reagan in the White House. It also heralded the emergence of the highly organized Moral Majority movement that injected a discourse of right-wing evangelical Protestantism into politics. Consequently, Anita Bryant’s attack on a LGBT antidiscrimination bill that would have protected homosexual teachers in Miami-Dade County, Florida, was explicitly articulated in terms of protecting children. Leading a national “Save Our Children” crusade, Bryant drew on the longstanding tropes of molestation, abuse, and indoctrination that had plagued homosexuals throughout modern U.S. history.

Rather than confront these lies with facts or, better yet, the testimony of queer young people, the gay rights movement backed away from any connections to children and teens. Gay community centers were hesitant to sponsor gay youth groups. There was a chilling effect on discussions of gay men or lesbians legally adopting children. Any discussions of introducing LGBT materials into the classroom were put on hold. Over the next decades political discussions moved from collective care of children, and extended gay families, to the privatized same-sex nuclear family of marriage equality. In the larger political context, discussions of children’s liberation also vanished, replaced by talk of protecting children from sex, from “dangerous” music and video cultures, and lurking predators.

The fight for marriage equality has been crucial to the success of gay rights in recent decades. It, however, is a decidedly mixed victory for those of us who recall the visionary political exuberance, and potential of radical change, of earlier days. Replacing the traditional heterosexual family with its same-sex analogue will not necessarily eliminate any of the profoundly damaging structural problems of the institution. The strategies, and theoretical approaches, of Gay Liberation concerning children were complex and politically complicated. They ranged from the practical to the impossible. They were driven by earnest care for children as well as a desire to radically break from the gridlock of oppressive family structures. At heart, all of these diverse moves—from identifying the existence of gay kids, to caring for children, to destroying the legal framework that allowed parents to “own” children—were not only attempts by Gay Liberationists to remake the world, but to heal decades of wounds inflicted by society and in particular by queer people’s biological families.

In many ways this healing has, over half a century, been slowing occurring. Amazing numbers of young people are coming out earlier and earlier. Discussions of queer youth sexuality—and gender roles—are increasingly sophisticated and vibrant. In ways that Gay Liberation began to imagine in 1972, the kids are all right; they are taking care of themselves.

Boston Gay Liberation Front’s Ten-Point Demands

Sidebar 2: Boston GLF’s 10-Point Demands

Presented to the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami

Boston GLF urges that the following principles be incorporated in the 1972 Democratic Party Platform:

We demand an end to any discrimination based on biology. Neither skin color, age nor gender should be recorded by any government agency. Biology should never be the basis for any special legal handicap or privilege.

We demand an end to any discrimination based on sexual preference. Everyone should be free to pursue sexual gratification without fear of rape. Governments should neither legalize nor illegalize these forms of gratification. And no one should be restrained in movement (either immigration or emigration), in employment, in housing or in any other way for being a faggot or lesbian.

The United States government should not only end discrimination based on dressing habits but should positively encourage more imaginative clothing. No member of the armed forces or other government agency should be forced to wear a “uniform” to conform to either biological gender or hierarchical position. For instance, if they prefer, women should be allowed to wear short hair and pants; males, to wear long hair and dresses.

All economic discrimination against faggots and lesbians should be ended. We should not be denied either employment nor promotion because of our sexual preference or dress habits. We should have the same tax advantages as heterosexuals living in nuclear families. And like all people, we should have free access to sufficient food, housing, medical service and transportation in order to lead a full and rewarding life. We specifically support a guaranteed annual income of $5,500 for every individual, and we call for a redistribution of the national wealth. Resources and power must be taken from straight, white heterosexual men and redistributed among all the people.

We call for an end to all government (or other) research on “homosexuality.” Our preference is no disease; all chemical, electric or hypnotic “treatments” to “cure” us should be outlawed. Government funds now being used for “mental health” should be given to groups of lesbians, faggots and other “mental patients” so that they may organize themselves in counseling and community centers to administer to their own needs.

All lesbians or faggots now imprisoned for any “sex crime” (except rape) should be released immediately from brigs, mental hospitals or prisons. They should be compensated at $2.50 an hour for each hour of their confinement and all records of their incarceration should be destroyed. Lesbians and faggots imprisoned on other charges should be protected from beatings and rape at the hands of their jailors or inmates, and no one should be denied quick release or parole for engaging in “homosexual acts” while confined.

We call for an end to all aggressive armed forces. We support the Vietnamese people’s Seven Point Peace Program and call for the total withdrawal of all United States and United States-supported air, land or naval forces from Vietnam. Moreover, we call for the return of all United States troops to within the United States borders as the most effective way to end American imperialism.

Within the United States, we call for a disbanding of all armed forces, secret police (FBI, CIA, IRS, Narcotics squads, etc.) and uniformed police. Arms should be used only to protect the people and to prevent rape. For this purpose, we call for the formation of a people’s police to be organized by those now most subject to police brutality: third world groups, women, lesbians, faggots and poor people generally.

We call for the self-government and self-determination of all peoples irrespective of national, sexual, party, race, age or other artificially imposed categories. Our liberation cannot be complete as long as any person is the property or the slave of another in any way. All coercion and dominance must end, equality must be established and we must search together for new forms of cooperation.

Extra links added by me.

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