“What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?”
While it contends with his reflections on diet coke, this is likely the most profound observation ever made by Donald Trump—serial rapist, pedophile and architect of the objectively fascist policy agenda in the USA at time of writing.
But truly, what if anything? This is the core of radical ideologies: daring to imagine, and, not only that, but refusing to police the imagined. What if we paid for Medicare dental by cancelling AUKUS? What if we used a minerals tax to fund industry transition in mining towns? What if we broke the bipartisan consensus on humiliating and detaining refugees and migrants in this country for sport? Within radical thought, we have the capacity to discuss futures we’ve been told are crazy—without gatekeepers, without the neoliberal consensus accusing us of being the ideologue.
But what if a bomb drops on your head right now? Radical Feminism is dogshit because it asks the questions it deigns no-one else dares to, when the reality is that no-one else is asking these questions because they’re fucking stupid.
What if sexy lingerie under mesh tops is what makes men think they can rape women? What if OnlyFans creators are changing male expectations about consent when they find their stepsister stuck in a washing machine? What if women in the workplace wearing lipstick perpetuates the idea that a woman’s lips are made for sucking dick? Fucking what if??
These delusional fever-dreams are posed as questions from a movement with no horizon. Radical feminism in its various incarnations (TERF, SWERF—one and the same if you take an honest look—and similar) will make departures from the orthodoxy, but without any sense of destination. To them, “away from” is good enough. Where this rapidly falls apart is that, in an eagerness to depart from a perceived feminist orthodoxy, these so-called feminists so easily fall onto paths approaching all-too-familiar reactionary, right-wing niches.
If gender is a problem; do we need to reform it, abolish it, deconstruct it or reinterpret it? No, we simply need to critique it, and the solution will materialise. If the “female” body is commoditized by men to the detriment of women as a class, how do we solve that? Critique those females! Those impressionable harlots who contort the standard by which women are evaluated by men, remaking the platonic ideal of a woman into a product for men to buy, are clearly the source. And as we isolate that which is and is not woman, we must as well confront the transsexuals who clearly fetishise and commoditise us too. And as both are to our eyes, mere simulacra of women, it must be that the transsexual and the sex worker are both nothing better than men themselves!
Our theorist is a fucking idiot.
True, it wouldn’t take a genius to look at the degraded state of the women’s movement and assess that faillennial women vlogging about their job in the armed forces didn’t destroy the patriarchy. Uncritical veneration of women choosing whether and how to participate in patriarchy and its adjacent capitalist structures has given us a choose-your-own-adventure of “got mine, fuck you” for a lucky few. Will you be a girl-boss landlord raising the rent, or a right-wing all-meat-diet stay-at-home influencer-mum? Those without loaded parents need not apply. For all the talk of “choice” feminism, the fundamental choices of those suffering under patriarchy are often out of reach. Even abortion is still up for debate in several parts of Australia and abroad, both its provision and even its criminality.
But it’s equal parts bewildering and unsurprising that the critique of this era has been simply to home in on the advocacy for sex workers and trans people. It bewilders, because sex workers and trans people are on the frontlines of oppression, facing the most degrading example of any struggle a woman might face. Whether you’re dealing with the healthcare system, employment, or sexual violence, if you are trans or a sex worker, you will have it worse. God forbid you are both! It fails to surprise, however, because when considered by the lazy and wilfully ignorant brain-trust of the radfems, claiming “feminism has failed because women are too fucking stupid to realise sex work is bad and trans people are a conspiracy” sounds airtight!
And notice, when radfems make this impulsive diagnosis that “some women went too far”, how quickly one finds friends on the right! Look to the US, where the campaign to “protect women’s sport” has come to finally bore fruit, and radfems unabashedly thank Donald Trump for his sudden interest in their cause. With not a moment of introspection at the fact a rapist pedophile is the knight in shining armour for their supposedly feminist cause. Similarly, we have seen a million jingoistic QAnon freaks who want to expose supposed sex trafficking, which by now we can instantly identify as cover for racism, homophobia, transphobia and eliminationist white supremacy. And yet class-comfortable radfems tidily insulated from the bigotry these conversations inspire, will wade in so often like “Ok but seriously, we need to talk about sexual exploitation.” Maybe somebody should! The groups actually affected by these issues have been! Here’s an idea: if you have a passing interest in their liberation, maybe hand the mic over to Asian Migrant Sex Worker Advisory Group (AMSWAG) and other grassroots sex worker action collectives and SHUT THE FUCK UP!
And something has to be said of the proposed antidotes to patriarchy that these thinkers suggest. Bizarre proposals of a “sex-strike”. There is a toxic idea of sexuality embedded in this that erases queerness. Dynamics such as top/bottom/side/vers/etc all give way to a heteronormative understanding that cedes territory to the patriarchy; the penetrator/dominant and the penetrated/submissive. And I’m sorry but this myopic view of sex is getting as dignified response as it is owed: I LIKE GETTING FUCKED! The sex strike assumes those in opposition to patriarchy stand to lose nothing by withdrawing from sex, assumes transphobic and queerphobic notions about the dynamics of pleasure in sex, notions which in turn reinforce a patriarchal idea that those with vaginas should not expect their partners to find ways to pleasure them during sex. And the hard question has to be put to these radfems: WHEN a man breaks the strike, and rapes a woman, as they already do, does that make her a scab? Because you are placing the onus on women to maintain this vow of chastity.
As our contemporary breed of fascism metastasises, it seems trite to write more polemics on radfems. They have been the useful idiots of the right wing, who laundered the dismantling of feminist progress under the rationale that reforms represented a movement losing its way. We may not have to suffer them much longer: when you can openly advocate for sending minorities to concentration camps, you no longer need a liberal to sanitise your rhetoric. But their example should be remembered as one of liberatory politics which buckled to reactionary forces for lack of a view to the future.
Should choice feminism have a considered critique and evaluation? Absolutely. But a sober analysis of where-from and where-to is fundamental to avoid running headlong into a conservatism for whom those who are leading this adventurism didn’t even have the foresight to define. Without it, we are not charting a course for a new wave of feminism, but simply dismantling the furthest we’ve come yet. Radical thought and action succeed when it is in service of a coherently imagined future. Taking the steps no one else dares to take is not so inspired when you are marching off a cliff.
