By Willow (willowashmaple.sbs, formerly of willowashmaple.xyz)
July 17, 2024
An old acquaintance of mine appeared surprised when I told her that I am studying at a Bible college, working toward a diploma in divinity and ministry. She knew me from the feminist organizing and a "Goddess" circle, as someone who was heavily invested in feminine spirituality.
I was what some may call a cultural feminist, and most of my friends shared the same interests.
I used to deride Christian women, questioning how they could worship a patriarchal deity (and I questioned how Blacks could worship the God of the white oppressors, too).
My "red pill" moments came sometime around the end of 2018.
My line of thoughts is preserved on my old Medium blog:
Count me out of your sisterhood
Then I also discovered that "radical feminists" were working with, and accepting money from, the far-right "Christian" nationalists in their united-front struggle against the trans community, which was the last straw for me.
Final words on anti-trans rhetoric by so-called feminists
The more I gave serious thought to feminism, the more I realized that feminism was just another identitarian movement based on grievance, resentment, and hatred. While many self-identified feminists advocate egalitarianism, many others are simply "female supremacists" who prefer to denigrate and exclude men as a category.
Both males and females suffer from the tyranny of gender, albeit in somewhat different ways. While feminists emphasize how oppressed women are, it is also true that:
- Men are more likely to receive harsher sentences than women for identical crimes.
- Men almost always receive disadvantageous judgments in divorce and child custody cases.
- Men are more likely to die on their jobs due to the dangerous work they do than women, whose jobs on average are not as hazardous.
- Except in Israel and North Korea, men are conscripted into the military but women are not.
- Men are more likely to be chronically unhoused than women.
- Men are far more likely to be murdered by cops or prison guards.
- Men are more likely to commit suicide than women.
- Gay men are far more likely to be on the receiving end of hate crimes than lesbians.
- If a random woman takes a walk in a park and says hi to someone's child, no one raises an eyebrow; if a man does the same, he is automatically a suspected pedophile.
- While men may be paid more wages for identical jobs than females, they are more likely to be saddled with child support and/or alimony.
- In case of a plane crash or a shipwreck, it is always women and children who are rescued first, while men are left to their own devices to fend for themselves or die.
For more discussion on this, watch the movie "The Red Pill" (2016, dir. Cassie Jaye) here
If feminists are okay with any of these, then they are not the egalitarians they purport to be.
And I have seen enough feminists whose words reify and reinforce sexist stereotypes and rigid gender norms.
"Women are this and that, men are this and that."
"Celebrate the Divine Feminine, you are a Goddess."
How can we have a genuine liberatory movement without turning it into an exclusionary identitarian movement based on grievance? This goes true also with other liberatory movements such as racial justice and queer justice movements. At the end of the day, unless everyone is free, nobody is really free.
Why not abolish gender altogether? What if every human being is "nonbinary," free from gender yet also encompassing an expanse of genders? What if we stopped pigeonholing people into binary and limiting categories?
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