kiss me, my girl, before i'm sick

they’re doing “is shaving feminist” discourse on twitter right now and we all know my thoughts on it. no need to do this again. but i will say. if our most “progressive/leftist feminist” women cannot wrap their heads around the concept of shaving being a tool of the patriarchy aimed to control women’s bodies that we should be ultimately working to discard. then maybe we should all just line up and sh**t ourselves. maybe there’s no hope for women after all.

like if we can’t rally against shaving what the fuck are we even doing anymore. genuinely.

it’s so interesting to see the ways feminism has been defanged and pacified in our broader culture. suddenly everything is about the individual woman instead of about the oppressive systems controlling us.

and of course you see this same logic being used to defend trad wives and right wing women, because feminism is about “the women’s right to choose” because what if she wants to be barefoot and pregnant at 14? did you ever consider that? you think you’re a better feminist than her, huh? what happened to girls supporting girls? so grim. so incredibly grim.

or the “she does it for herself” line of thinking, where if you ever criticize anything a woman does ever through a feminist lense or say that she’s ultimately doing it because men expect it of her, suddenly YOURE the misogynist. you’re the one forcing male expectations onto her. you’re bringing men into the conversation and centering men and can’t a woman just conform for herself, sometimes? just because it makes her feel good? and not doing it makes her feel dirty and ugly? just for her?

like following this point to the end, there is no feminist action that can be done here. this is a nonstarter. we can’t encourage women to examine why they feel the need to shave or to stop shaving, because maybe some women do it for themselves or have sensory issues. we can’t tell women to stop doing unpaid unacknowledged reproductive labor in the domestic sphere, because maybe she’s just a tradwife for her. and that’s a choice she gets to make, and it’s inherently feminist that she made it. we need to stop patting women on the back for doing nothing and calling that “feminist” or hiding from uncomfortable truths just because they’re hard to confront and make us look inward or change our behavior. no work gets done like that. none at all.

so hard not to become the most annoying person on earth if you're a little excitable and just learned a little about a topic literally no one around you has any interest in