rise from the ashes

Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land. 

And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand. 

This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade. 

So what did they do?

They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required. 

So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?

So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter. 

but feminism has also allowed me to define myself, as a woman, completely through myself and my sisters, in the complete absence of men.

i now see the obstacles in my way, but i also see the women who came before me, who leapt and flew above them. i see the women standing next to me, i see the fire in her eyes. i look at myself in the mirror and i no longer see my flaws as unforgivable. i no longer see myself as a failure to look like an emaciated model.

i see my face free of make up and i know it is my face, my natural face, and it is good. i see my eyes and they are beautiful, no painting required. i see my arms and they are strong. i see my legs and they are muscular. my body is not for male consumption. i do not exist to be beautiful. my body is a wonder, it enables me to live my life freely and lets me do sports, it lets me travel. my body is perfect.

i can hear my voice loud and clear, speaking up. i can see the contempt in men’s faces, it was always there, and i used to try and shrink myself to escape. not anymore. because no matter how submissive i will be, it will always be there. we can never be small enough for them. now it makes my voice rise up even louder, it makes my arguments even more succinct. the contempt in their eyes turns to fear when they see a woman like me. i revel in it.

now i know my history. i know about women in science, women in literature, about so many lesbians that were and are at the forefront of women’s rights, no matter how hard history tried to erase them, my lesbian sisters will always be there. we will refuse to forget them.

i can see the obstacles in my way. i can see the woman who came before me that leapt over these obstacles. but once on top of them, she didn’t just jump down. she turned around, reached out her hand to the next woman that was alone and doubting herself, standing before an obstacle that seemed unsurmountable. i see that woman taking her hand, i see her being lifted up by her sister. and i see her turning around, offering her hand to me.

i take it, i let her help me climb. when i’m on top of the obstacle, i turn around. i offer my hand to the next sister already waiting, insecure still, but i smile at her.

So if a woman is attracted to someone with XY chromosomes, she’s either heterosexual or bisexual. This isn’t bigotry, it’s basic definitions of what sexuality is. Bigotry is intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself.

To make it easier, remember this:

“It’s homoSEXual, not homoGENDERual.”

https://www.dailydot.com/via/sex-is-not-biological-reality/

http://skepchick.org/2011/12/bilaterally-gynandromorphic-chickens-and-why-im-not-scientifically-male/

The first two articles rely heavily on the existence of intersex people to push their agendas. While it is true that biological sex is more complex than most give it credit for, the characteristics associated with either sex correctly align around 98.3% of the time. The struggles of intersex people are not for trans identified males to appropriate, and since most transwomen aren’t intersex, this should be the end of the discussion, but let’s keep going.

What exactly is biological sex, how did we come to label it as we have, and how do intersex people fit into all of this? Let’s look at the definition of female:

Looks like it’s defined by gametes, not secondary sex characteristics, not hormones, not chromosomes, not genitals. And no, this does not mean infertile women aren’t women. “Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs…” An infertile female is still of the sex that can bear offspring, even if she herself can’t. If her reproductive organs were healthy and had undergone standard development, she could get pregnant, but even a fertile female can never produce sperm as there has never been a case of a human capable of producing both types of gametes. As for the language differentiation, our ancestors took notice of these differences in sex and gave them names. The fact that breasts are associated with women is not arbitrary. Women, throughout history, have predominately been the people who have had breasts. Our language reflects that. Intersex people are not some weird, third sex and it is offensive to other them like that. In fact specific intersex conditions affect specific sexes. Turners Syndrome affects females and Klinefelter Syndrome is specific to males. Sex is also not a spectrum. Given this, you would expect fertility to remain generally consistent the farther it got from either end of the “spectrum” but this is not the case; usually the farther away it is, the more severe the health problems. On the flipside, many intersex people have only a hormone imbalance and may very well die before realizing the have the condition. Not every person that is part of that 1.7% was born with ambiguous genetalia that was forcibly opporated on (though that doesn’t make the incidents where that does happy any less tragic or less necessary to talk about).

Onto some quotes from the articles.

“If sex isn’t the All Mighty Binary Universal Constant that some people think it is, why do they place so much importance on it? The easy answer is that it gives them an excuse to misgender and exclude trans people, and specifically trans women.”

The word transexual/transgender hasn’t been around for much more than half a century, while human life dates back thousands of years. Gender, a social construct, was created with the intended purpose of oppressing women through the control of their bodies, mainly their reproductive capabilities, not with the purpose of attacking transwomen. Even if you use the argument of multiple genders in indigenous cultures, you have to understand that these genders were only created in societies with already strict gender roles and were forced onto infertile and gay men, while women rarely had the option of opting into a third gender.

“His simplistic claim that “sex is a biological reality” has long been debunked by scientists and social theorists alike.”

What scientists? Name them. The author cites two, but neither say “biological sex isn’t a reality,” but rather something along the lines of “the existence of intersex individuals has revealed that sex is more complex than originally though,” which we’ve already been over.

“Bodies are real, yes. Bodies even have certain characteristics that may or may not relate to reproduction, yes. But “sex” is not a biological reality. “Sex” is our way of making sense of bodily difference in a world committed to the notion that there are two distinct and inalterable genders.”

Reproduction has everything to do with “making sense of bodily difference[s].” There is a class of people who can impregnate (or who at least share the characteristics of those that can impregnate) and a class of people that can be impregnated (or who at least share the characteristics of those who can be impregnated). The former has clear power over the latter. Men made marriage so they could treat women like property, as nothing more than just another head of cattle meant to breed. To this day they still rape women and coerce them into having babies they don’t want so they can snare them into abusive relationships. The majority of people deciding the legality of abortion are the same people who will never have to fear finding themselves in a situation where they were forced to use that service. So until a man conceives and carries an eight pound baby to term and then pushes it out of his penis, I don’t want to hear about how there are no distinct sex differences.

 "it implies that things like my skin tone, my lack of body hair, my hormone levels, my breasts, my scent and all the other female or feminized aspects of my body are all somehow just in my head, figments of my imagination"

Skin tone: female… skin…. tone… ???

Lack of body hair: women have body hair you dipshit

Hormone levels: artificial

Breats: achieved through synthetic hormones

Scent: achieved through synthetic hormones

“Meanwhile saying that my completely invisible, anatomically irrelevant Y chromosome trumps everything else and dictates what my body really is.”

The entire reason you are able to deceive the general population into thinking you are female is because of the marvels of modern medicine. If a brunette dyes her hair red, people will think she has red hair, even if her genes have her hair coded as brown. If her hair grows out and she doesn’t dye it again, it will start to turn brown. Likewise, a transwoman who stops taking estrogen will quickly return to her previous state (mostly). That’s because despite presenting as a woman, she is still biologically male and her body will act accordingly.

Now that brings me to the point of this response: lesbians. Lesbians are homosexual females period. But let’s pretend for a minute that transactivists somehow manage to disprove biological sex. There will still be a group of “vagina-havers” who are attracted exclusively to other “vagina havers.” There has always been females who exclusively love other females. It cost them their homes, their lives, their dignity, their careers, their ambitions. Homosexuals have always been persecuted for our same-sex attraction. That’s what conversion therapy is meant to cure. Gay people aren’t shown clips of piv as they’re being electrocuted. Gay people are shown gay sex as they are being electrocuted.

“Early treatments in the 1960s and 70s included aversion therapy, such as shocking patients or giving them nausea-inducing drugs while showing them same-sex erotica, according to a 2004 article in the British Medical Journal.”

https://www.livescience.com/25082-gay-conversion-therapy-facts.html

We share the specific experience of being homosexual females, so what is so wrong about demanding a word to describe ourselves? If you think sex is vague and subjective, why even bother with the term “lesbian” in the first place?

but looks like queer is, uh, still the

most

used

Yes, I’m fucking serious. Ladies, go ahead and start submitting your posts (follow link 3 in the header). It’s still in the works a bit but pay no mind. If you want to find other available radfem women to talk to, this is the place to start!

As for your suggestion, I review every submission before publishing it, and if there was any potentially risky content i.e. a building address number in the photo behind them, or they shared something about where they work or live, I would contact them to amend it before posting. Otherwise, I expect everyone (especially in the context of a dating blog) to be mature and aware enough not to put themselves at risk in an online forum. 

Ladies, please protect yourselves and be aware of what you share if you feel at risk!

As for the honeypot thing, I’m glad you’re not suspicious lol. I’ve had this blog for 5 years and plenty of photos and videos to confirm who I am, if anyone wants to check, you’re free to stalk my tags on @radhadess to see yourself.

Yes, I’m fucking serious. Ladies, go ahead and start submitting your posts (follow link 3 in the header). It’s still in the works a bit but pay no mind. If you want to find other available radfem women to talk to, this is the place to start!

despite their moral crusades, well-read liberals will defend endless droves men from varying backgrounds, from scientists to thought leaders to even celebrities, no matter what they’ve been accused, of just because they have some kind of insight that’s just too valuable to let go of.

he might be horrifically racist, but you can still find some value in what he wrote!

he might be an unrepentant misogynist, but he made a really good point here!

he might be a literal pedophile, but hey, he knows what he’s talking about!

as it turns out, there is no crime a man can commit that would mark his words as nothing more than the insipid scribbles of a wretch. men are allowed the humanity of being both deeply flawed and unmistakably gifted at the same time.

yet rarely does anyone salvage what they can of a woman’s insights once they’ve decided that she’s damned. it doesn’t matter what she’s been accused of nor the clarity that she views the world with. if she’s not perfect, her words are meaningless.

let everything she ever thought fall into obscurity, lost to the sands of time, for if she wanted to be listened to, she would’ve tried to be perfect: no holes in her arguments, no tendency for fallacies, no flaws or biases of any kind.

perfect. she has to be perfect.

before anyone thinks that i believe we should forgive awful women just because they’re women, i’d like to point out my specific choice of language here. i’m not talking about female bigots and abusers, but about the fact that women are held to higher standards than men, as they are punished worse for lesser infractions.

what is a woman’s misstep compared to a man’s? sometimes, all a woman must do is be seen as too backwards to be respected.

backwards. synonyms: archaic, antiquated, outdated.

we read the words of men from centuries ago, trying to fit their perspectives into modern times, but if a woman alive today isn’t constantly updating her viewpoints to align with the ever-shifting landscape of politics, she’s obsolete. she’s fallen out of fashion, so she’s fallen out of line.

other times, her sin is that of her own individuality getting in the way of being a pristine philosophical figure. she’s too hot-headed or too dispassionate, too poetic or too literal, too merciful or too merciless. whatever insight she might have is clouded by the problem of her personality.

while women must have the most well-developed, contemporary and thought-provoking arguments while remaining the picture of purity at all times, somehow the most despicable and ignorant of men are still worth something, regardless of how unoriginal, undeveloped or anachronistic their ideas actually are.

it ties back in to the narrow standards which we hold all women to, like a madonna/whore complex for theorists and scholars. at the core of this, women are not afforded humanity the way men are. we cannot be varied and imperfect, influenced by our own lives and experiences.

our minds, like our bodies and our spirits, must be perfect. of course no woman will ever be perfect, which means no woman will ever be worth listening to.

this works out wonderfully, because the honest truth is that people don’t want to listen to women.

a woman could have the most stunning insights on earth, but if they find her guilty of anything at all, they’ll find any way to discredit and demonize her, all the while picking the carcasses of male intellectuals for any scrap of wisdom, careful to wipe off the rot and the maggots.

maybe that’s a little nauseating for some. here’s something more nauseating: there are those who read women’s words, finding that they resonate powerfully, and then steal them from her because they’ve judged her to be unworthy of speaking them. they didn’t salvage her words but robbed her of them, purposefully eroding her signature so that no one can trace back the source.

if you find a reason to hate her, even if she’s right, then you can take her words and rephrase them, remix them, redefine them. at least when a man’s thoughts are extracted, they’re usually left relatively intact and tethered back to him; women just get our thoughts lifted wholesale, an arguably better ending than having them erased completely.

unworthy of speaking and unworthy of being listened to. is there any surprise that women don’t take their own mental prowess seriously? whether stolen from or silenced outright, it seems our minds are a dangerous weapon that we can’t be trusted with.

female thinkers are a problem, so it’s best if we never wake this beast that lies in every woman, a sleeping giant that can move mountains.

if we keep holding women to impossible standards and forcing them to stamp down their humanity in order to be respected, we minimize the risk that they could ever use those wicked brains of theirs to awaken other women. best to keep them distracted with the obsession of their own purity, maintained meticulously to avoid punishment from others.

thankfully, some of us have decided that we’re done with worrying about purity. i spent too long trying to be perfect, and i’ve found freedom in giving up the hunt for an impossible ideal.

i still worry about it sometimes, fearing that i’m being repetitive or nonsensical when i write posts for this blog. how many ways can i write “misogyny is alive and well”? how many ways can i describe that there’s a war on women, and some of the most destructive battalions are formed by so-called progressives?

am i a broken record, doomed to repeat the same song again and again?

perhaps. but who cares if i’m repetitive, monotonous, clever or wise?

it’s so FUCKING CLEAR when radfems/non rad just fucking ~rudefemmes~ have never once been indoctrinated into radical queer circles. it’s SO FUCKING CLEAR how little you understand about how these social circles work.

“using she/her will never get these TRAs to listen” you absolute fucking idiot YES IT WILL. take it from literally all of us who have been in RQ circles instead of being a fucking idiot demon screeching about how you refuse to use anything but sex based pronouns.

seeing a trans woman misgendered, even a rapist, has been DRILLED INTO THEIR HEADS, as being LITERAL VIOLENCE. seeing a trans woman misgendered makes them automatically assume everything that comes after it is terf propaganda meant to harm an innocent person. does it make sense? no. is it frustrating? yes.

god read any fucking book about helping people out of cults and you’ll see that screaming at them and calling them idiots won’t help. jesus. fucking christ. have some empathy for the female people who are actively HARMED by the rapists in their community and let them do what will WORK to spread awareness.