This essay is an alternative draft of an essay first published in The Post Millennial in 2020.
In the age of 24-hour social media, it’s hard to keep abreast of news, fake or otherwise. Stories burst forth in a moment only to quickly become placeholders for the next beat of the drum. It’s often said that we are in danger of forgetting the past. Sometimes it seems we’re in just as much danger as forgetting the present.
But before Trump got Covid, before he nominated Amy Coney Barrett, he took the first decisive action any administration has yet taken against one of the most pervasive ideological poisons ever to invade the West. He struck the first real counterblow in the culture war, to curb an insidious and novel iteration of racism known as critical race theory, which, in 2020, spread like a Californian bushfire across the English speaking world on the meme of “Black Lives Matter”.
But how did we get here? How did this post-modern fluke infect the West and threaten its cultural implosion so quickly? The fact is, while things seem to be moving very quickly today, this has been a long and drawn-out process that is as old as the women’s liberation movement, aka, feminism, itself.
At a feminist conference in 2014, the iconic radical feminist Germaine Greer declared, “We’ve gone as far as we can with this equality nonsense. It was always a fraud!” She then encouraged women to work together to “institutionalise the values that unite us”, and lock arms with other women to “put pressure on the system”.
Just a year later, Greer was booked to give a speech at Cardiff University entitled Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century. Rather than locking arms in solidarity however, the university’s women’s officer decided to lock ideological horns, launching a petition urging the University to cancel Greer’s lecture because she had, “demonstrated misogynistic views towards trans women.” Note: “trans women” are biological men who adopt a female gender.
It is, as of yet, scientifically impossible to change one’s sex.
The auspices of this sea change in feminism were evident even a year before. Lurking under multiple triumphant radical feminist retweets of Greer’s equality swindle tweet, was this prescient taste of the great feminist turf war to come.
During the hormonally saturated mid-teens of the 21 century, a still nascent cancel culture would find its feet via the practice of no-platforming, ironically, once a tactic employed against self-proclaimed fascists and Holocaust deniers, today used against implicit fascists by explicit Holocaust deniers.
Cleavages in women’s liberation have always been common, and have a habit of emphatically dancing around whatever phallic symbol it is they are demanding to be liberated from. This is an odd state of affairs if you think of other campaigning groups. For instance, I’m not aware of any deep ideological differences between the American Tortoise Rescue and the American Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals. Though both are competing in the same pond for limited resources, I’ve yet to hear of the former trying to no-platform the latter for its blatant indifference to reptiles. Each group has its focus and differences of focus are not duly labelled as phobias or outrages.
Wherever feminists meet, however, fisticuffs fly. Why?
Enter, Intersectionality
Google trends re intersectional, radical and liberal feminism since 2004.
In 1982, the radical “women’s liberation” magazine Spare Rib responded to accusations of white middle-class feminist bias, still a common criticism now, by exploring and giving voice to “black and third world women”, and an “emerging black feminist identity” and welcomed these voices into their non-hierarchical cooperative.
Pretty soon, it wasn’t a cooperative anymore and it was noted that the newbies soon had more editorial power than the rest. An interview with Palestinian women was published, entitled, “Women Speak Out Against Zionism: If a woman calls herself a feminist, she should consciously call herself an anti-Zionist”. I have not been able to ascertain if one of these women was, in fact, a time-travelling Linda Sarsour, but so began a new sundering in the feminist hinterland identical to the one occurring today, almost 40 years later.
As documented in the British Library archives, the controversy was intense in a movement that was already riven with disagreements between anti-porn radical feminists demanding a pornography ban, and free speech radical feminists who opposed such censorship. These anti-porn radical feminists are the same feminists today, derisively labelled “TERF’s” (trans exclusive radical feminists) by trans activists and intersectional feminists. In fact, everyone who has something nuanced to say about trans activism is labelled a TERF, whether they are feminists or not.
The disagreements now, as they did then, all centre on what flavour of liberation you fancy. Radical feminists only want liberation from patriarchy and maybe capitalism. Intersectional feminists, those feminists who were warmly invited in by the radicals, want liberation from white-cis-hetero-capitalist-patriarchy, so they are all aboard the family and gender disrupting trans train.
Google trends in “trans rights” rise in tandem with intersectional feminism.
But over the last decade, both egalitarianism and women’s rights have trended higher and have remained largely stable.
And as revealed by that subtweet in 2014 and confirmed by their own website today, those are also the goals of Black Lives Matter, which is itself, just another political tentacle of the intersectional feminist matrix.
It seems what we are witnessing today are simply the feminist postmodern chickens coming home to roost.
While radical feminists battle intersectional feminists for the right to female-only places, it was radical feminists who began campaigns to make same-sex clubs illegal. They are still doing it today. The Garrick Club, one of the oldest “gentlemen’s clubs” (no not that kind!) in London is being sued by a female lingerie tycoon because she cannot become a member, but is welcome everywhere in the club as a guest, as are other women. And this is happening while exclusive women’s only clubs, such as The Wing, are popping up all over the shop. What’s good for the goose is clearly not good for the gander.
What the archives of Spare Rib show are that orthodox radical feminism was bludgeoned to death in the 80s and then reanimated with intersectionality. Via the fraud of equality, as Greer admitted in 2014, intersectional feminism has weaponized a benign-sounding “liberal feminism” and used it as a vector to mainline itself into, and undermine, every one of our institutions, as Trump noted. Orthodox radical feminists don’t like it, but they laid the foundations for it. And they should not be trusted as egalitarians because of it.
Ideological Bag of Bricks
It’s also worth remembering that most people, male or female, do not identify as feminist even though they agree with egalitarian principles. Many feminists complain that this consistent finding is because women don’t actually understand what feminism is. I beg to differ. They know exactly what it is and what stops them from identifying as feminist is the ideological bag of bricks that feminism comes with; social constructionism, patriarchy theory, gender theory (which both intersectional and radical feminism have wrong), critical race theory. How can denying the laws of biology possibly be in anyone’s best interests? What’s next, decolonising gravity?
These battling dogmatic demographics are vanishingly small yet have complete executive control of the debate. Trans activists and intersectional feminists need to understand, it’s not TERFs they are fighting, it’s just normal women who do not identify as feminist.
Radical feminists need to understand that their theory does not represent what women want either. It has been clear for many years that feminism and women’s rights are not one and the same thing and all creeds of feminisms, which necessarily sign up to ludicrous post-modern, neo-Marxist, critical theories of the world and human nature, are fundamentally intellectually compromised in their supposed goal of social and moral amelioration.
Feminism does not support women, it supports other feminists. It’s not an inclusive human rights movement, it’s an exclusive partisan movement. The turf war for control of the feminist brand, a brand that has direct and privileged access to our political infrastructure, is being fought by people who do not represent the commons. It is an ideological, undemocratic power grab.
The answer to the dilemma is not to take sides with one creed of feminism or the other, but to disavow both.
I know this as I have personally been on the receiving end of the kind of feminist advocacy and support reserved for women who do not subscribe to the feminist church. The hashtag #womeninSTEM ought to be #feministsinSTEM as, in the media, the arts, humanities and increasingly the sciences, feminist gatekeepers stand guard with an explicit agenda to keep non-feminist women – that is a majority of women – frozen out.
Nice, huh? Feminists really care about women…and women in STEM.
What is Feminism?: https://zerocontradictions.net/pdfs/what-is-feminism.pdf
Good blog post. Forgive the intrusion but is your old WordPress post 'An Old Sexual Manifesto' on this blog?
https://porlawright.wordpress.com/2020/10/09/an-old-sexual-manifesto/