“I just don’t want men in women’s spaces, and I don’t care how those men identify.”

The clip is Kellie-Jay Keen (AKA Posie Parker) attempting to converse with someone called James Max, “It’s up to everybody however they want to live their life, but when it impinges on my life – ” 

“How does it impinge on your life?” Jim is cavalier in his home field advantage.

“If I want to go into a female-only space and there’s men in there who decide that they’re women, then it’s no longer a female-only space, is it?”

“Magic is a female fantasy and a male nightmare.”

The Witch has endured for millennia as a symbolic challenge to male supremacy. She represents our innate understanding of the power structure we live in, her different forms expressing our shifting feelings about Woman regaining her place on even footing with Man.

Magic was traditionally Woman’s purview – Our friends the Ancient Greeks, founders of Western civilization, worshipped a Goddess of Magic called Hecate. Hecate’s three faces are reminiscent of the traditional phases of a woman’s life – Maiden, Mother and Crone.

Feminism is stuck in a rut. We seem to have settled for joining the world, rather than changing it.

In seeking equal treatment, we have slowly conceded our identity, piece by piece. We’ve taken on masculine affectation to fit in. Our attempts to avoid being framed as needy and demanding have played into our critics’ hands, and we’ve abandoned most of our ideas for change. 

We don’t have equal pay, political parity, or even workplace day care. Neither do we have our own spheres of unique experience and expertise. In not sticking up for ourselves moment-to-moment, we affirm the general message that we are not important.

The Internet can be a dangerous place, but the rabbit hole I fell down this week goes much deeper than I anticipated.

It all started with Abby Cox. She’s one of my favorite YouTubers, and she put the brakes on her whole video concept this week to address a glaring issue she found in her research.

Girlhood As Internalized Misogyny

Abby is an historical costumer with several years in a living history museum under her belt. In comparing recent remakes of classic historical fiction to older productions, she noticed an uncomfortable trend: “I’m frustrated,” she tells us, “by the reliance on ‘Girly-Bad, Boy-Good’ clothing defaults that our feminist characters are shoved into!”

The outside world will save us. I know it exists, because I lean on it all the time.

We all do – Medicine relies on it to make diagnoses and treatments. We’re using it right now because, of course, technology counts on particles, materials, software, and even human intuition to function in expected ways.

But we don’t really like applying this predictability to ourselves. Each of us is a brave pioneer in her own universe! We’re all soaking in Choice Philosophy, the spread of Gender Religion just the latest wave of neoliberal nonsense to wash over us.  

A powerful tool in our fight to preserve women’s rights may be staring us right in the face.

It’s easy to take the obvious for granted, and confronting this social norm is a flashpoint for many of us. 

But why is makeup mandatory? It’s obviously a holdover from older, stricter ideas of what women should be. What a corset does for the waist, contouring does for the face. And we all know it’s at least as bad for us.

I’m not going to lecture anyone about harmful chemicals or animal testing. There are plenty of other people more qualified to take on these very important issues. 

The current model of Choice Feminism is riddled with problems.

In radfem and GC spaces, we take them as a gimme. We understand that many of the alternatives we throw around are older than any of us, that radical feminism is not a reaction to Choice Feminism.

In our sheltered enclave, it’s easy to forget how confusing it is out there.

French YouTuber Alice Cappelle takes on some meaty subjects with a laywoman’s perspective. She lays out details and liberally quotes others, while admitting she doesn’t always know where she stands on things.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I had no idea what separatism was.

Doing some long-overdue digging, I learned it’s at the root of the weed that’s choking modern politics.

Research Is Safe And Fun!

I quickly found myself lost in a dense, dry old bramble. Kathy Rudy’s tale of joining a ‘radical feminist’ group is littered with breadcrumbs along the trail into the political wilderness.

She describes the lesbian community she joined in North Carolina in 1980. They put separatism first, theorizing among themselves about an ‘essential female nature’ that inevitably reflected their own experience.

The other day, I was reading that same discussion again.

“I can’t wait till the tide finally turns and all these loudmouths on the Trans Train will get their just desserts!”

“Yeah, I think about that, too. But I’m afraid the world will just pretend it never happened.”

This goes against the gut feeling of Justice, but the pessimists have a point. How many times have we had something completely off-the-charts insane splashed across our screens, only to have the News Cycle churn onward and nothing really happen?

The pandemic has demonstrated how little has actually changed for women. 

We spent the past year getting used to being at home. Many lost their jobs, or quit to take care of the kids. Many more soldiered on, playing Mom, Wife and Worker on a single, ramshackle set. Meanwhile, Joe Biden executive-ordered us out of legal existence.

Adding insult to injury, #NotAllMen refuses to go away.

The response #TooManyWomen was pretty satisfying, but it exposed some confusion in the feminist conversation.

How Many Men?

“No one is saying that it’s all men,“ wrote one commenter, “so we don’t need to say ‘not all men.’“

It’s not every day I find something I think everyone needs to hear.

Today was one of those days. These are the moments that still fill me with hope.

Two Truth Bombs And A New Subscription

Michael Browne has been feministing about as long as I have, with even less exposure. 

I assumed YouTube’s algorithm made the introduction but, retracing my steps, I found his video on Ovarit. He appears to have uploaded it himself.

Michael has been taking on the big boys for a while, releasing long, detailed responses to the likes of Riley J Dennis and Contrapoints. More recently, he commented on Philosphy Tube’s transformation and even Lindsay Ellis. 

I think men convinced themselves women were just a little too stupid for all those centuries, so they wouldn’t have to face what they had done to us.

Exploiting a natural weakness to strip an intelligent, self-aware person of their individuality, and put them to work for the benefit of others – Well, that would be pretty evil. One might be tempted to empathize with such a person, to imagine what it’s like to let go of any thought of personal achievement.

To have no dreams, plans, or hobbies of your own. That’s a miserable existence for any mildly intelligent person, without some serious brainwashing.

Motherhood was abandoned by feminism a long time ago.

Enticed by the promise of economic power, repulsed by the body horror of childbirth and the mental torment of parenting, we have worked hard to become more like men.

Who can blame us? They have taken advantage of a drone’s greater mobility to arrange the world to suit themselves for thousands of years. They reinterpreted us and brutalized dissent. Archeology tells us that women once had a vibrant culture of our own. We once commanded respect for our uniquely female qualities. Whatever we once had has been crushed or commandeered.

I’m not sure I understand her methods.

Martyrdom is pretty universal, although volunteering takes a special kind. Emily Wilding Davison devoted her life to gaining women the vote in England. At the age of 40, Emily was already a catalyzing force in the Women’s Movement. 

She had been a gifted student, eventually attending Oxford University. This being the Victorian era, she never earned a degree because Oxford didn’t award them to women at the time.

Emily became a teacher and, by and by, a political activist. Denied greater exercise of her talents, the obvious first step to liberation was civic engagement. She joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1906, a very active group of agitators founded by another famous suffragist, Emmeline Pankhurst.

I’m worried about becoming a bitter old woman.

Things started out alright. Those of us born in the 1980s were given bunk beds, Kool-Aide, an education in the foundations of computing, and the assumption that we’d eventually end up better than we started.

I doubt we would have welcomed the new millennium with such enthusiasm if we had any idea just how disappointing it would be.

Graduating in 2002, I promptly moved out and into the dorms of a big state college. A year and a half later I found myself back in Mom’s family room, having left school to focus on a doomed relationship. It’s always a boy, isn’t it?

The left has a misogyny problem.

No kidding, right?

Jessica Valenti takes aim at the hypocrisy of so-called liberal men in a recent piece on Medium. Using as her example the disgusting current case of a 19-year-old Democrat congressional candidate in Kansas, she points out that men on the left are using the same arguments to defend him that Republicans used to defend Brett Kavanaugh.

"Men might want to take a pause and examine why,” Jessica suggests, missing the obvious explanation – It works!

"They said he was just a kid at the time of the abuse, but didn't dwell on how his victims were children too.” Drawing much-needed attention to the girls, but missing the fact that people who are abusive as children very often go on to do some truly horrible things as adults.

Born to a wealthy Russian military family at the height of the Victorian era, Alexandra Kollontai rejected the upper-class life.

Opinionated and intelligent, she dove into politics young. Driven by the conviction that “bourgeois feminists” could never really understand the plight of The People, at 21 she ran away from her army officer husband and married a poor cousin. But it was the dangerous conditions in a local factory that caused her to snap. Devoting herself to Marxism, Alexandra left her second husband and made the acquaintance of the important men in the revolutionary Bolshevik party.

We have to stop holding back before it’s too late.

Dr. Amanda Foreman should be a household name. In her excellent four-part BBC series ‘The Ascent of Woman,‘ she explains why our past has never been a straight line: “The status of women is a barometer of a society’s tolerance, fairness and openness.”

Dr. Foreman asks the big questions – Why did history become dominated by men? Why has nearly every society placed harsh limits on us? And why are we so vulnerable to the changing winds of politics, economics and religion?

The world has gone crazy, but I push myself to not let anything completely slide. The blog is especially vulnerable, it would be easy to get caught up in the daily scramble and lose touch with my webspace.

My developer Jay is a few years older than me, our kids go to school together. A peach of a man, he comes from a military family and at politics from the Other Side. We laugh about that quite a bit. We met a few years ago when my older son joined Scouts, the one year Jay was Scout Leader.

We live in the same subdivision, his son works at the grocery store up the street. I see him and his family around plenty, even for a small town. But we only got together professionally this past Winter. It was actually Hubs who put it together in conversation that Jay was moving into managing blogs, and I definitely have one.

I would bet good money that every straight woman, at some time in her life, has asked herself, “Why do I put up with their crap?“

Do We Need Men?

Walking away is tempting sometimes, but something holds us back. Something more than comfort or children or poverty or all the social pressure in the world. None of these stop a determined woman.

On the intriguingly titled blog She Has The Power, I finally found analysis with some meat to it:

"This need for women to be with men begins to reveal itself as a means for surviving male violence. This becomes even more evident when you read that even men display "feminine" behaviors when they are dominated. What if women have adapted to male domination and violence by ‘sleeping with the enemy’?"

….OK, Boomer.

Two words have crystalized our generational friction as we slip into the second decade of the 21st century. The “entitled” Millennials and our

Zoomer cousins are beginning to see we are in for a struggle to inherit the world.

Stephanie Hofeller has it worse than most. Her Dad, Thomas Hofeller, was the architect of today’s political landscape. Called “The master of the modern gerrymander” by The New Yorker, Tom died in 2018 and left a lot of interesting things behind.

Stephanie has been using her father’s files to chip away at his work. She was instrumental in the Supreme Court ruling against including a citizenship question in the 2020 census, after Tom’s cache revealed a study showing the question to be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.” Which, obviously, is a faux pas.

The Washington Post spilled a lot of digital ink recently to pose a simple question:

What does it mean when left-wing feminists and conservatives work together?

“Tensions between the TERFs and transgender activists erupted at the Seattle Public Library as hundreds of women -“

Stop right there. Please enjoy this photo of those hundreds of “women.”

Hot stuff, no?

It’s fun when formerly-trustworthy pillars of Journalism leave out inconvenient facts, isn’t it? It’s like a Journalism scavenger hunt!

For many years, Feminism has encouraged women to turn our backs on the kitchen.

From De Beauvoir to Friedan, through to Sandberg and others, we are shown Traditional Womanhood as Debasing. As Zombifying. As Unfortunate Details.

Surely any self-respecting woman with half a brain would decline to pursue life as a “Housewife.”

But you’re not married to the house (although it does feel like that sometimes) and this lifestyle made little sense to me until I had my children.

When you are the mother of a newborn, your world is suddenly very small. It expands back out over time, but it’s never quite the same.

Yesterday evening in Toronto, the irrepressible Meghan Murphy spoke for about 30 minutes at the public library.

Her program, Gender Identity – Society, the Law and Women, follows in a string of appearances in Canada and Britain. These events are increasingly controversial, and the Toronto library was the scene of vehement protest.

Meghan is a Feminist freelance writer. She has become more and more high-profile since Gender ID became law in Canada.

(Seriously, they even record crime statistics according to the offender’s “expressed gender” rather than sex. Get ready for a spike in “female” crime in Canada….)