'Anarchism and sex' article

Fair enough James. But in what way is any of this "anarcha-feminism"? Sounds just like radical feminism to me.

Radical feminism and Anarcha-feminism have an awful lot in common, imo. It's just a question of emphasis, and how people personally identify. I know radical feminists that also identify as anarchists, or as socialists. I know socialists and anarchists who also identify as radical feminists. People tend to carry several 'labels' with them, not just one, it's just that maybe they wear one more obviously than others. Radical feminists tend to be anti hierarchy, anti authority, and anti capitalist, as well as anti patriarchy and anti racist. It's all seen as being different sides of the same evil, really. It's just that they feel that their primary 'label' is as a Radical Feminist - it's not that everything else is necessarily secondary to them but it's the label they choose to wear most obviously. Just like some of you here id as Libertarian Communist first, although you may also be feminist, and anti racist, etc.

There are an awful lot of myths around feminism and the various strains of it. Anarcha-feminists can be radical, or liberal, or 3rd wave - the important thing to them is that they want to note that some part of their anarchist identity is also feminist.

It can be confusing, but that's why starting from a point that says "radical feminists are all fucking bonkers" is not particularly useful, especially if one doesnt know any radical feminists. The most important thing to note is that very few people are "single issue", so don't write them off before you understand their politics.

It's almost like you didn't hear a word i said :?

Firstly, i don't know any women who think like that, so at the least you're making a bad generalisation from your experience. Secondly, as i said before, possessing a dick in britain today is not analogous to owning a factory (or call centre ...). Men do not have some class interest over women, and patriarchy shapes and limits male gender roles too, in ways that are probably on average be less oppressive but there's certainly overlap between individuals in a way which contradicts the nice simple 'women = good oppressed, men = bad oppressors' narrative you seem to want to weave. it really beggars belief that you can come out with "this is feminism", whilst simultaneously dismissing female posters who disagree, who by your reasoning surely know better than you? :?

one of the most patronising things i've read, which takes male supremacy as it's antecedent and runs with it ... I mean i'm an anarchist, everyone should be able to make their own decisions, but if a friend who happens to have a vagina asks me for advice i'm not gonna say 'no dear if i say anything i'll overwhelm your evidently fragile ability to think for yourself, my mere speech act is coercive'.

don't get me wrong, your passion for womens' liberation is admirable, i just have quite a different analyisis it seems ...

That really seems slightly hysterical thing to say on a libertarian communist baord. What women are you currently oppressing, out of interest? You must have some kind of crucifixtion complex going on there, I mean, how do you sleep knowing that there is nothing you can do to stop you hurting and defiling and opressing women. What are you doing trying to convince us of this anyway, your words can't help.

So I won't help then. But I draw then line at people popping up to try and make me feel excluded! I have enough problems in my life, thanks for asking.

PS you are also oppressing me by being, raltively, sane. So will you fuck off, as I don't need any advice from you.

Eta: That probably wasn't very productive. But I think your probably wrong.

Lol.

I don;t think thats a ad hominem, for the reason that youy cannot actually be the person you are trying to come across as. I mean, are you, James, wracked with guilt every step you take? *Insert rant here*

Its like a capitalist with a sudden pang on conscience, but he/she can't shut their factory down. He/she is forced every day to go into work and fuck with the employees miserable lives, all the while believing that what he/she is doing and what he/whe is is terrible and secretly praying for the workers, eventhough he/she knows that he/she will have to take to the other side of the barricades when the day comes.

HOW DO YOU SLEEP JAMES!

I've just read the first two pages and I've lost the will to live. I hereby renounce all pretence at engaging with radical feminism and all attempts to try and pull something decent out of the swamp because clearly I'm running the risk of my brains turning to absolute shit.

There is an awful lot to take away from radical feminism and a lot of it is pretty uncomfortable and doesn't readily lead to a coherent politics. It's difficult but potentially very useful and needs to be worked with. But we do not need the kind of dogmatic crap being spouted on here.

I got to redtwister's post on page 4. Thank fuck for something sensible.

I dunno, a power balance solely in favour of women seems to me just as bad as a power balance solely in favour of men. Reversing roles won't solve the problem.

well James that's clearer, thanks.

i don't have a blanket rejection of women-only organising, i think there are times when it's appropriate and necessary. However, i still think such autonomous organising should network with other emancipatory organising, including men, as part of 'the real movement to abolish human domination' (i.e. my slightly anarchicised definition of communism from). However, i don't think feminism - the emancipation of women - can be reduced to "womens' issues", incidentally a point which was emphasised by some (female) anarcha-feminists on the thread on the new RAG magazine recently. This is because womens' emancipation is bound up with that of mens', since who would want to be the equal of unfree men?

Do you not think that women rejecting and excluding men in the same way that men themselves have historically done would result in something of a backlash? Anti-women's-autonomy if you will? Thus exacerbating the current gender divide, potentially undoing what good has been done by the feminist movement thus far?

While we're on the subject of sex work:

:?

That assumes that women are starting from point zero, but radical feminists don't believe that they are.

Women are in a man's world. Everything is default male, language, religion, politics, family, history, philosophy, medicine, law, education, science, psychology, biology, economics, work, every part of our culture and our lives is defined from the male perspective. Women have yet to get to zero - which I guess would be the point where women are at least equal with unequal men. Until that point, women need to organise seperately in order to try and understand how all the above might be if they were focused on from women's perspective. I realise I'm not explaining this very well and I apologise, but I hope you can sort of see what I mean.

It's interesting to me that leftist men put up such a fight with feminists, when the feminists themselves would in most cases be more than happy to work, live and fight alongside (not behind or indeed under) the men. Who is really being divisive?

There's a thread here on white supremacy and red twister has written some extremely good posts there, and I think they are relevant also to this discussion. There is a lot of focus here on individual positions and they miss the big picture.

I don't think it does really, women wouldn't have to be at zero to try and exclude men in the ways suggested, and one doesn't have to be at zero to be driven back further into negatives.

Well, yes I suppose so. I still don't see why this necessitates excluding men though. Perhaps I'm just never going to understand this.

just imagine that men can't spell. there you go, easy.

Shut up, I hate you.

i've found a scab

except that's clearly reductionist shit, I mean what fucking century are you talking about?

Marie Curie was a trannie? Maggie Thatcher? Emma Goldman? Rosa Luxemburg? Louise Michelle? Rosa Parks? And that's just to pick some names out of the kings list approach to history.

Seriously you should get past your big book of victimhood history to maybe look at the various ways women have actually shaped the world, how the "fairer sex" have imposed their subjectivity on history and how various forces have sought to erase this, constrain it.

I don't know if you've grown up in a sandbox but you might have noticed that even if we were to accept the masculine dominance of science, psychology, biology , history and language, you wouldn't need to look to hard to realise that it isn't a singular "maleness" but a particular embodiment of it, white and propertied, it's not like the vast majority of men are actually haunting histories corridors of power.

Your argument is soo blunt, so completely inept for any sort of critical insight that you just fall into sloganeering, unthinking idiocy. It's the flipside of the most reactionary sexism, because so much does it want to affirm womens degradation and oppression that it actually robs women of any subjectivity at all. It's no suprise that MacKinnon's theory of consent under patriarchy is soo close to Lenins trade union conciousness, both women and the proletariat are so indoctrinated, so debased and defiled that they can't actually escape the logic of their oppressers, they are just vassels of the dominant ideology even when they claim to speak for themselves they are incapable of escaping the totality of their oppression, as such it is up to the party or sisterhood vanguard to speak for them.

Utter pish! You start with women as nothing more than an empty fucking victim, not so much a hole for violating as Dworkin would have put it, but rather women as the nothing more than a confessional box, an empty category fought over by various ideologists. Whether Jack Straw, a Mullah, Priest or anyother would be patriarch, it's a matter of protecting the poor defenseless souls from the nasty, brutish affairs of men. Women are the Nazerene, the transcendental that must become flesh, but whose corpeality is utterly defined by it's suffering, not a subject but an object.

I don't know whether to laugh or guffaw. Your grasp on this issue would have to improve by 1000% to even be considered basic.

"Pish"? Sort it out, your privilege (note spelling) is showing.

cue 8 pages of vitriol ...

"duck and cover kids!"

James: I don't think that its a problem that rad fems spread guilt. It was an attack on your character, and that you seem to have missed tha point of your own argument.

How can you say that the rad fem movement to men is equivalnt to the working class movement to capitalists, but that you are not oppressing women? Simple question. I think your desire to make the point, you chose the wrong analogy

Perhpas you meant to say this

I would imagine that the alternative won't annoy many people as much as it annoys me. I don't understand what this has got to do with communism. I was lead to believe, that socialization happens because the workers are a universal class, acting together world wide. You sem to believe that this is nonsense, and that communism occurs through lots of isolated groups acting against one-another.

Ime, all the issues that are talked about on libcom are pretty basic. Otherwise how do you expect massive chunks of the population to agree, witout just lecturing them.

As a part-Irish spack, I have to wonder exactly what this privilege is.

Am I high enough on the hiearchy of oppression to get an answer?