"all these achilleans putting women dni in their posts are so cringe and misogynistic!! 😂😒😒"

meanwhile sapphics:

Most recently today i've run into a self-described gc gay man insisting that imposing any barriers or limits to gay sex is in itself homophobic, stigmatising and repressive. in this worldview, any criticism or hang-ups people might have about gay orgies, cruising, sex dungeons and gay spas is therefore equal to conservative gaybashing and the mark of an oppressive, joyless politics. This idea that these practices go hand in hand with being gay and that their limitation or criticism amounts to persecution is in fact very compatible with the diluted "gender-criticism" that gay men can adopt. In fact, by making the step away from mainstream queer/TRA ideology, many gay men are confronted with the fact of just how many forms homophobia can take, and their response is to double down on their sense of persecution.

Now that they see it's not only open reactionaries who hate them, but also many liberals/covert reactionaries, they've begun reasoning that maybe they really are the ultimate victims, and just as male homosexuality itself is unjustly persecuted, so everything associated with it must also be just as beyond reproach, and this includes all the greatest hits of gay male (self)destructiveness: orgies, cruising, drag, sex dungeons, sex spas, hookup culture, gay-flavoured misogyny, etc. This is incidentally something they share with queer ideologists - the conflation of sexual practices with sexual orientation - but the slight step away from the queer mainstream allows them the moral high ground slightly different from the queer ideologists claiming to be at the forefront of societal progress.

In the next step, radical feminists also become possible perpetrators of homophobia if they so much as dare that these men may in fact be in the position of oppressor and benefit socially from being male. And fellow homosexuals who want to critique them become "self-hating" and "joyless" like yours truly has been described. To me, this shows how this "soft gc" tendency among gay men has reinforced their male entitlement. Their joy, in particular their libido, is the litmus test against which all real progressive politics must be measured, because real male homosexuality, cleaned of queer nonsense, is now reinvented as something virtuous and radical all on its own and all those products of "gay culture" are by extension signals of this same radical and virtuous nature of a vulnerable group so despised by all sides of the political spectrum.

But this also reveals another, keenly machistic and bourgeois-libertarian streak in the "soft gc" gays - the struggle against both right and liberal homophobia begins and ends with the personal freedom to do as you like sexually. They've learned the anti-TRA language from radical feminists, but they've decided all this "male reform" stuff isn't for them and they just want to be left alone to freely pursue their appetites. What this in fact amounts to is the freedom to be the man, with all the privileges patriarchal society provides to men and without this totally unjust sidelining in the sharing of male domination's spoils that has been imposed on them via homophobia old and new. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with a male-dominated world, except it has these blips, ranging from gaybashing to sodomy laws to TIFs on grindr and in gay bars, to marriage laws to these pesky anti-surrogacy spoilsports, but everything could be solved if you'd just leave everyone to do as they like. All the slogans of the bourgeois-individualist male "sexual liberation" project of the 70s are revived, except the enemies have slightly changed, and surely we won't screw it up this time around, and we don't care about going after women anyway, so what would they have to complain about.

With this framing of "liberation" as uncritical unfettered appetite fulfillment and "joy" as something that ends where self-criticism begins, the "soft gc" gay tendency cements the male homosexual firmly in the camp of the male oppressor with a righteous conviction that not a single criticism from a feminist could possibly be leveled at them - they're gender-critical, after all! - and in fact succeeds in recreating, at the level of a (mostly online) subculture, the early days of the Western GayLib Movement: lip service to solidarity with lesbians and the women's movement simultaneous with a determination to finally get one's own piece of that Male Domination Pie and get eat it in peace.

The ask about radfems being right made me want to rant. The sheer vitriol against TERFs (including graphic rape threats which automatically makes them look sympathetic) made people forget some important points

1) radfems, and people who believe in radical ideologies, are very good at presenting the milder points of their philosophy. No radfem is dumb enough to go to someone like "men should be castrated before puberty for the safety of women", they'd start with something much milder like "I hate how teen boys get sex ed from porn at a young age" or something like that

2) the same line can have different meanings depending on the person. "We must protect vulnerable ethnicities at risk of genocide": a normal person might mean, I don't know, indigenous people being erased, and you might agree. But what if it's a white supremacist saying that, and he meant white people being replaced by mixed race people and immigrants? Very different context. Radfems employ similar strategies: "a dress doesn't make you a woman" can mean "gender is not tied to gender expression" or "trans women aren't women"

3) a broken clock is right twice a day. Just because a radfem says that the sky is blue, doesn't mean it's actually green. Just because she denounces Jessica Yaniv (because no one else does), doesn't mean you have to defend that person. Just because she says that the number of AFAB enbies who say "I'm nonbinary because I hate common women experiences like pregnancies" is worrying and might hint at internalized misogyny, doesn't mean she isn't right about that. Again, it's the entire context that makes radfeminism repugnant, but you can agree on some points for very different reasons.

And besides, we all know the woke left loves almost every radfeminist points except "trans bad" and "queer is a slur", so they don't get to complain :V

Mad agree (also I want to clarify that the ask wasn’t about radfems being right—it was about their base level claims often being right and easy to agree with, as well as easy to understand where those claims come from. And that’s how people go down the road of getting into the radical stuff, and ending up being batshit crazy radical feminists/terfs).

Your point about starting with milder takes is exactly what I was trying to get at with my response to the ask—and you gave a great example. On the surface, the take “I hate that teen boys get sex ed from porn” is an overall agreeable one. Porn is a terrible place to get sex education, in the same way medical shows are terrible places to learn what it’s like to be a surgeon, and cop shows are terrible places to learn what it’s like to be a cop. It’s all incredibly unrealistic.

So arguably, radfems are right when they make that surface basic claim, as it’s not a radical feminist exclusive claim. But then they manage to twist “teen boys are getting sex ed from porn and that’s bad” into “we should just castrate teen boys because men are inherently rapists and porn makes you a rapist”. And I would hope most rational people would go “holy shit wtf” to that claim.

And with the flexibility of lines, I see that a lot. I mean… it even happens with far right vs far left. Remember that post that said “white people shouldn’t adopt non white kids”, and a bunch of far leftists were agreeing because they believed white people adopting non white kids was racist… and it turned out the post had actually been made by a far right white supremacist, who believed that non whites were inferior to whites.

Terfs definitely take that into consideration. To myself, “a dress doesn’t make you a woman” means that dresses aren’t necessary to womanhood, and the lack of dresses isn’t necessary to manhood. To a terf, “a dress doesn’t make you a woman” means “trans women are men in dresses”.

And yes, thank you for pointing out the broken clock thing. Because obviously a radfem can say something sensical. Not everything that comes out of a radfem is necessarily radfem beliefs… so trying to act like anything a radfem ever says must be terf rhetoric is ridiculous. It’s just that most of the stuff radfems are “right” about are those surface level claims (again, like “a dress doesn’t make you a woman”) that aren’t actually radfem belief. It’s when you put that statement into the context they see it in, when it becomes radfem belief. That still doesn’t make the base claim wrong or radfem, though. Just the context radical feminism gives it.

Even “queer is a slur”… that’s not radfem belief. Do a lot of radfems believe queer is a slur? Yes. But something tells me that’s less about them being radfems, and more about many radfems being wlw (or at least claim to be wlw). The ones who aren’t claim to be allies (despite likely supporting political lesbianism). So is it really that surprising that a group largely filled with wlw, people who think they’re wlw, and people who think they support wlw, is against a homophobic slur being treated as if it’s not a homophobic slur???

I also agree that terfs are able to rack up a lot of sympathy from the constant hatred thrown their way. I know we all dislike terfs. But aggressively hating them is exactly what they want!!! Because then they can say things like “they’re silencing us because they don’t want to hear the truth”, or claim victimhood because clearly everyone hates them because something something patriarchy misogyny sexism. I’ve seen so many terfs take pride in the hatred they get, and it only solidifies their beliefs and turns others towards them. So no, constant “fuck terfs” posts don’t do any good. They just fuel the fire of the radfem oppression complex.

And it’s completely true that a lot of progressives actually would agree with radfem beliefs in full context, as long as it didn’t have “radfem/terf” attached onto it. And as long as it had nothing to do with trans people. Mainly anything talking about how evil men are.

Anyways, great points!!