Look, I don't actually hate or even necessarily dislike religious women; they are victims of patriarchy, too, just like the rest of us, and I firmly believe that radical feminism is beneficial to all women and probably attracts most of us for roughly the same reasons. BUT that doesn't mean that I appreciate religious women posting their religiosity onto my posts. All patriarchal religions as a rule have some pretty misogynistic teachings in them, and adding a bunch of stuff about God in there makes it pretty easy for conservative men to appropriate my posts to reinforce their patriachal worldviews, even if you don't necessarily agree with them yourself. These men don't want the sex trade to end because of the abuses committed in it to women; they just see those women as "dirty" and "tainted" and don't want them to cause them to be "tempted." They don't want to abolish gender as a hierarchical system designed to oppress women; on the contrary, they wish to enforce it, and their main beef with genderism is that they think it allows people to follow the "wrong" gender roles, not that it rigidly reinforces the idea that women have to be one way and men have to be another. And inserting God into radfem posts? Yeah, conservative men see that. Religious talk is their usual schtick; they know that if they use the "God" angle to insert themselves and their male worldview into the conversation, they can mess it up from the inside. They can undermine the entire point. I can already think of at least two different conservative men whom this has happened with, and they have taken loads of credit away from feminist women who actually had those ideas first, and then twisted them into something sexist instead. Remember, ladies, feminism is for women. Now, I'm not going to argue with anyone over whether God does or does not exist, or what sex God is, or anything like that. That sounds pointless and unnecessarily divisive without hard proof any which way, and I don't want my blog to be about that. But what I will say is that, regardless of what any of you (or even I) may or may not believe, theologically speaking, I still feel that it's important to me on this blog to approach radical feminism from a more or less secular point of view, and I would like things to stay that way. You don't have to agree with me, but please respect my boundaries about this. Thank you for your consideration.
