lea's radfem library

my special interest in sexuality and gender started in 2013 (i was 11 years old at the time), but i didn't become a radical feminist until a decade after that. like most radical feminists, my radfem origin story is quite heavy. i initially learned about mainstream feminism from instagram and tumblr, and i supported it. i liked the idea that patriarchy hurts everyone, and that its supporters would change their minds after accepting the reality that feminism helps everyone, including them. i was mainly focused on lgbt liberation at that point, and by the time i got to university, i had decided that i wanted a career dealing with lgbt youth and/or sex education. as such, i began to work for my campus's lgbt organization. i quickly became disillusioned when i realized that men dominate those spaces, so i decided to work at the women's centre after my contract ended. the women's centre was allied with the sexual education centre, which i'd became increasingly critical of as i collaborated with them on projects.

i was still timid about feminism and women's spaces when i started working at the women's centre. i was in the midst of dealing with trauma from the anti-trans conversion therapy that i'd experiened not even a year prior, and i was still making sense of a lot of what i was told about gender. the manipulation i'd been subjected to at the hands of my mother (a self-proclaimed radical feminist), made me want nothing to do with radical feminism, or anything that reminded me of the hurt she'd caused me. nonetheless, i worked at the women's centre for nearly two years, and i sincerely loved my job.

a few days after ending conversion therapy, i dealt with the pain of losing a grandparent. the stress of both of these events happening so close to each other caused me to become hypersexual as a coping mechanism. it didn't take long until i became unknowingly addicted to pornography, and i wasn't noticing how serious of a problem it was yet. the women's centre, the education centre, and campus culture at large were all pro-sex work, pro-kink, and pro-porn. sexuality was talked about very casually among my social circles, and sex work and kink were framed as empowering. porn was promoted as a method of discovering one's innate sexual desires, and it was considered feminist for women to watch, and even produce, porn. this way we could stick it to the man and explore our own pleasures independently. i vividly remember (and am now deeply ashamed of) a time when i was co-facilitating an event with the women's centre and sexual education centre, and i parroted this exact rhetoric to the audience. of everyone who saw the plan before the event, and everyone who attended the event, not one person questioned what i was saying.

at some point my mother asked me what the women's centre does for all women and not for men. i didn't have a quick or easy answer to that. i searched my memory and found that many of the events we had hosted were socials. they could have only been considered women's events by their proximity to the women's centre--otherwise they're really just events that were open to all students, but had a predominantly female audience. the events weren't advertised as women-only, and the activities we did weren't necessarily feminist. they were just fun things, like making crafts or watching movies. the educational events dealt with specific categories of oppressed people, such as indigenous peoples, lesbians, or lgbt south asians. but there was nothing that dealt with all women as a broader concept.

i found this troubling, so i reached out to the friends i made at the centre and asked them if they knew anything about women's oppression. they sent me articles and social media posts/accounts about specific categories of women: women of colour, working class women, trans women, disabled women, etc. but nothing about women as a united class. nothing about the gender-based or sex-based oppression that all women are subjected to, which is modified by their other identity markers but exists because they are women. when i tried to express that that wasn't what i was looking for, i was met with phrases like "but these people are women" and "you really should think more intersectionally." this is when i started to notice, not just in these social circles but also in my women's studies classes, that there seems to be a widespread idea that women are not oppressed for being women. women are only oppressed by the mixing of some other social disadvantage with their womanhood. just being a woman isn't enough.

the oppression of women who have racial privilege and class privilege was largely ignored and dismissed in my university's wgs(s) program. i remember reading authors like betty friedan, simone de beauvoir, and mary wollstonecraft in class, and then spending more time criticizing their "white feminism" than engaging with the arguments that these women made. friedan's approach in particular "has been conflated with all of second-wave feminism, which is fantastically inaccurate" (source). she wrote about her own life, just as lesbian feminists wrote about theirs, black feminists about theirs, and so on. no individual feminist represents the entire feminist movement, and none of them should be dismissed for daring to speak out about their own struggles with patriarchy--regardless of their race and class. the claim that the second wave was not intersectional only furthers the erasure of second-wave feminists who were marginalized in multiple ways. the same goes for queer theorists' claim that queer theory was born to challenge the rigidity of gay and lesbian studies. queer theory and mainstream feminism must both justify their existences by misrepresenting the movements that came before them. vitrue-signaling is inherent to both of these ideologies as they must falsely claim that second-wave feminism and gay and lesbian studies were regressive, exclusionary, and rigid, thus contributing to the erasure of the feminists who didn't fit into this narrative.

the common theme in all feminist texts, across every race and class, was that women are not valued for much more than our reproductive (or otherwise unpaid) labour. my women's studies classes never asked me to make these connections between the texts, nor to present any of my theories about the overarching themes that every woman's oppression seems to be based around. each course only required me to interact with each text individually, or to connect two or three course texts to each other, and to some outside sources of my choice. our professors fixated on details and never encouraged their students to look at the big picture--in fact, it was discouraged to do so, because students who made universal claims about womanhood and patriarchy were accused of essentialism. i'm not sure if academia ever had any rigor, but this was beyond disppointing and intellectually understimulating.

so at that point, i got on tumblr, and tried on my own to find some feminists that were like me. i found radical feminism, and dismissed it because it reminded me too much of both my conversion therapist and my mom. i was worried that i'd become like them, and that i'd start hurting trans people the same way that i'd been hurt. i tried my best to just drop that subject and try to forget about what had happened. who said i had to be a feminist, anyways? who said i needed to have any sort of opinion on the niche topics that my mom was interested in? what if i just wanted to live in ignorance and bliss, at least until i could move out and have the space to figure out where i stood on all this?

through all this stress, i became more and more maladaptive. i eventually became so interested in porn and sex that i started filming and selling my own porn. part of my reason for doing so was that i didn't see anyone like me in porn, nor anyone i could realistically be attracted to. no hairy women, no midsize women, no saggy breasts, stretch marks, or butches. so i took matters into my own hands and represented myself in porn that i made. i managed to convince myself that i was making feminist porn, and i even had the nerve to feel guilty about taking money from these unfortunate, lonely, porn-addicted males. women prioritizing men's feelings over their own needs and wellbeing is female socialization at its finest.

a mere two months into my porn-selling endeavors, i quit making porn and deactivated all the accounts i'd posted it on. at that point, it had caused too much psychological damage to me for me to justify continuing. i started to criticize pornography and the culture that encourages young people to consume it. i started speaking out against sex work in my women's studies class, only to be shut down by my male professors who were pro-sex work. this pattern continued in class, in the women's centre, in the sexual education centre, and even among my friend groups. i learned that it was frowned upon to criticize the sex industry because of a bad experience that i had with it.

despite my newly developing anti-sex work stance, i was still addicted to pornography and i was obsessed with sex. i'd have sex with people i wasn't attracted to, and who treated me very badly, because i couldn't bear to still be a virgin after experiencing all that i had. after being inflicted with some sexual trauma, and noticing that my hypersexuality was getting in the way of my life, i had to get serious about making sense of this and regaining control over my sexuality. so i went back to tumblr and i started learning more about anti-porn feminism.

that was my second willful exposure to radical feminism, and i was a lot more receptive to it. i was a little bit older, and i'd started to heal from what happened in conversion therapy. of course there were some weirdos on radblr, and it was triggering at times, but i started think deeply and critically about until i came into my own understanding of gender, feminism, and the world around me.

then i started seeking out other radical feminists and realized that they were a lot like me! they were very intelligent and compassionate, and i'm proud to call them my friends.

that's the end for now. thanks for reading!

• ageism and anti-aging practices
• bdsm and kink
• beauty industry + beauty standards
• cosmetic surgery
• dieting industry
• division of domestic and reproductive labour
• domestic violence
• exclusion of women from medical trials
• financial dependence on men
• gendered socialization
• heterosexuality
• honour killing
• lack of research into women's health issues such as endometriosis
• lack of women in powerful positions
• loss of women-only spaces
• marriage
• pornography
• prostitution
• rape
• restricted access to abortion, contraception, and sex education
• sex trafficking
• sexual violence
• street harassment (catcalling)
• surrogacy
• wage gap
• workplace harassment

A: currently, there is no ethical pornography.

this is my thought process: imagine a woman who is making pornography under the ideal circumstances. she derives pleasure from sex work and has no financial need for it. she is perfectly informed about the potential consequences of sex work, and she has no sexual trauma or internalized misogyny that influences her choice to enter the industry. perhaps it isn't sex work at all, but a hobby that she freely engages in, purely for her own enjoyment. she is in total control of the content that she chooses to make. the content that she makes is body-positive, sensual, vanilla, respectful, and it depicts sex in a realistic and even educational manner. she chooses when and how she will publish her pornography. she can easily quit and revoke her consent at any time, and is able to destroy all existing copies of her pornography upon making this decision.

this is the fantasy scenario that pro-pornography feminists have in mind when they defend pornography. let us assume for a moment that the pro-pornography feminists are right, and that such a woman does exist--then what? what if there are hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of these women? the fact of the matter is that hosting sites and consumers cannot possibly verify that the women who are publishing pornography fit into this category. it is inevitable that, as long as pornography is allowed to be published, there will always be some content that involves coercion or force behind the scenes. i would gladly ban thousands of women from publishing pornography if it meant i could prevent one girl from having intimate images of herself recorded and published against her will. i hardly doublt that anyone's ultimate passion in life is to become a pornograph--and even if that were the case, nobody's hobby is important enough to justify putting women and girls at risk of sexual exploitation.

then there's the issue of supply and demand. whenever a pornograph advertises their services, they're encouraging an increase in demand. considering that our brains are hardwired to seek pornography featuring more and more extreme sex acts (source), from more and more actresses (source), there will never be enough ethical porn to meet the ever-increasing demand that ethical porn creates. as long as this holds true, the demand will be filled by unethical porn. the only ethical thing to do is to stop demanding porn. that starts with us, as individuals, boycotting the sex industry.

i'm not sure that pornography ever could be ethical. if feminism were to succeed, and if all forms of sexual violence were to become ancient history, pornography might still be ethically dubious at best. considering the effects of pornography on the viewer's brain, i don't think that the perfect pornograph nor any amount of equality between the sexes can turn pornography into a good thing.

A: i would absolutely argue that sexism and patriarchal beliefs are at the heart of the culture war. the demonization of feminists is nothing new--before we were called trans-exclusionary, we were called sex-negative puritains, white feminists, conservatives in disguise, man-hating dykes, hysterical bra-burners, suffragettes who want to destroy society, witches, etc. there has never been a point in history where feminists were not the subject of some type of moral panic.

what perplexes me most is the massive cultural shift in how feminists are percieved by liberals. notice that "man-hating dykes, hysterical bra-burners, suffragettes who want to destroy society, and witches" are very different insults than "trans-exclusionary, sex-negative puritains, white feminists, and conservatives in disguise." it used to be that we were too radical; that our demands for society were unreasonable and would destroy families and governments. now we are deemed too exclusionary and not radical enough. what changed is not radical feminism, but the cultural idea of what it means to be a feminist.

around the late 1990s, the idea that "feminism is for everyone" started gaining traction in mainstream western society. liberals began to understand feminism not as a serious political movement advocating for women's liberation from male supremacy, but as a feel-good movement that solves every disparity between the sexes. "feminist" ceased to be "the f-word" and became a trendy self-identifier that could mean anything at all. when radical feminists contined doing what we were doing, not concerning ourselves too much with the problems of marginalized men, lonely men, or the elusive falsely-accused rapist, we were branded as regressive and exclusionary. the culture became post-feminist, giving into the idea that women aren't oppressed anymore, and that feminists who still insist on rigorously critiquing society through a feminist lens are only driving an unnecessary wedge between women and men.

people who support the abolition of patriarchy are hated by general society because society is still patriarchal. thus, radical feminism will, by nature, make most people very uncomfortable. the problem is that humans, by nature, are not very good at tolerating discomfort. regardless of political orientation, people manage to turn discomfort into moral statements--this manifests as anything from "i have decided that homosexuality is immoral because it disgusts me personally" to "i have decided that radical feminists are trans-exclusionary because their sex-based analysis of oppression makes me uncomfortable." most of the time, the accusations of trans-exclusion are purely based in emotional reasoning.

in the rare instances where the accusations are based on logical reasoning, we ought to ask ourselves: why are transphobic women given so much less grace than transphobic men are? why are feminists, who hold little to no political power, made into mascots for ideologies that are primarily spread and enforced by male politicians, political commentators, podcasters, authors, religious authorities, educators, and healthcare providers? the answer is twofold: (1) because the left has never taken a break from infighting, and (2) because in a patriarchal society, it is very easy to hate women and to exaggerate women's roles in perpetuating social ills.