benvolio would be disappointed

netflix just released the film ‘ek ladki ko dekha toh aisa laga’ which is an indian movie about a girl who’s into girls and how she gets the courage to come out and face her family and be with the woman she loves. sound familiar? yeah, i know it’s the basic plot of most hollywood lgbtq movies but that’s not the point. 

this is literally the first indian movie i’ve seen on a famous platform, accessible by anyone, that actually represents the lgbtq community in all its beauty and love and affection, rather that scorning or mocking it. 

the movie is beautiful and the scenes and the fluff and the cute couple and the emotions just make it so worth watching, and that’s not all.

i’m an indian bisexual teenager and i would’ve been so happy to have been exposed to a movie like this when i was younger. if i had seen this kind of portrayal in the film industry, i doubt that i would’ve been the afraid young girl i was and i would’ve had the courage to do what the main characters did and just BE MYSELF. 

all i hope is that someone sees this movie, some little girl out there sees it and knows that she is not alone, that she is not abnormal. with a topic such as this, which has been treated as taboo for decades now in my country (still is kinda), when it is actually being represented and being represented well, i can’t help but wanna scream about it from the rooftops. 

also just look at this adorableness:

This is so important when dealing with the misconception of black history and what Americans are taught about the Civil Rights Movement.

sokka: ... at what? hand-to-hand combat?

Katara: I hope the boys aren’t getting into a huge mess while we’re gone. [sighs] Who am I kidding...?

Suki: No, it’s cool, Aang is with Guru Pathik so it’s just Sokka and Zuko.

Katara: ...what.

Suki [thoughtful]: But just to be sure, I told Toph to watch out for them. She seemed pretty sure of herself.

Katara: ...

Suki: Katara? Are you okay?

Katara: ...

The idea that it’s your responsibility as a feminist to police all your thoughts and private sexual expression (which I would strongly argue appropriately tagged and archived fiction/art is) in order to avoid harming feminism and Be A Good Woman is radfem. There is no way around it.

If your taste in fiction/fantasies necessarily correlates to your personal politics and morals, then it makes sense to ensure that yours and others fantasies line up with your politics and morals. It becomes a form of protecting yourself, a subset of activism in its own right. And all of a sudden we’ve looped straight back around to policing women’s sexual thoughts for The Good Of Society.

When radfems use the word “radical” they are not using it in the general political sense of having an extremely different point of view, they are using it from the sense of believing that the root of all the world’s troubles is sexism/misogyny.  (”radical” as derived from “radix”, meaning root) and that therefore if you eradicate all vestiges of sexism and misogyny (including from your own heart and mind) the world will therefore be Perfect and so will you.  In this ideology (evolved among academic upper-class white women in the 70s and 80s, and largely unchanged since then) there is no room for intersectionalism, for the oppressions of racism, classism, ableism, or queerphobia (other than lesbophobia).  (lesbianism, being by, for, and about women, is ideologically congruent with their beliefs, and hatred of lesbians can be boiled down to “people hating women and hating that they don’t depend on men,” but other forms of hatred of LGBTQ+ people can’t really be acknowledged because first you would have to acknowledge that isms other than sexism exist, and that it is possible for men to be oppressed.)

Radfems did some wonderful theoretical work in the 70s and 80s.  They really did provide the theoretical foundation for a lot of our understandings of sex, gender, and oppression.  However, they proved more interested in putting themselves at the top of the hierarchy than in dismantling it, because they chose not to acknowledge other oppressions than the one they themselves faced, and so did not listen to their sisters of color and of lower class, or who were in any way different than themselves, and so they didn’t and do not accept responsibility for the ways in which they contribute to the oppression of others.  And they are willing to join with ultra-conservative Evangelical groups to enact and enforce laws that fit their ideology.  Radfems believe that they are the ultimate arbiters of feminism, and that therefore any woman who does not agree with them is either deluded about the patriarchy or consciously participating in her own oppression.  Therefore, they have the right and the duty to tell other women what they can and should think and do.

For example: they did some really EXCELLENT theoretical work on the exploitation of women inherent in the sex industry, both pornography and prostitution.  About the ways in which our culture devalues women’s bodies and uses them as articles of consumption for men.  Well and good.  But when women who work in the sex industry, both porn stars and prostitutes, point out their limited economic choices and why they and women like them don’t always have better options, radfems do not listen.  To a radfem, a woman in the sex industry is either a blameless victim, or an oppressor who betrays your own people.  Because of this, not only have radfems endorsed laws created by the Religious Right (blech), they have doxxed sex workers and former sex workers who publicly disagree with them.  Including at least one case where a radfem sent a woman’s current location to her former pimp.  This is why radfems are sometimes called SWERFs, Sex-Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists.

Also, radfems got the ball rolling in the 70s and 80s talking about gender and how we should abolish gender roles.  But they also believe that men/males are the root of all evil.  Therefore, any transman is betraying their sisters by joining the oppressive patriarchy, and any transwoman is a “man” who is trying to infiltrate women’s spaces.  Thus radfems have doxxed transpeople, signed on to bathroom bills, consistently deadname and misgender them, and done a variety of other transphobic things.  This is why radfems are sometimes called TERFs, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.

Okay this is apparently controversial so I’ll try to be clear about it:

I think TERFs are bad and I think their targeting of trans women is repugnant, harmful, bigotry and that is why I block terfs.

HOWEVER

I also think that even radical feminists who are *not* trans exclusionary are also bad and I think that their framework of “patriarchy is the root of all societal harms” is genuinely damaging, gender essentialist bullshit that ALSO erases race, class, and nationality from conversations about how the world might be improved and in ADDITION to that making radical feminism logically and morally shaky it is ALSO a hive of classist, nationalist, racist thought.

(all of that is beside my thoughts about radfems and sex work because my thoughts are that radical feminism refuses to allow people to make choices; it is a philosophy that believes that people don’t know what’s best for themselves and must be controlled and that’s not a philosophy that I’m ideologically open to)

AND ALSO ON TOP OF ALL OF THAT

I think that it is sometimes worthwhile to (if you can, if you want to, if it doesn’t hurt you to do so) have conversations with TERFs, SWERFs, and Radfems because a lot of them (on tumblr especially) are very young women who have been specifically targeted by TERFs and who have been radicalized and isolated and sometimes patiently answering questions that make me want to tear my hair out can do a lot more to make someone question a harmful ideology than an impassioned, thoughtful, well-sourced essay.