#dekatria

when you a priori define feminism as synonymous with women’s struggle, you both belittle all the people who fought for gender equality before the term was coined as well as many people who fought for it who actively distanced themselves from it (such as emma goldman because they thought that the movement as such did not actually represent women’s interests or anyone, for that matter) whether it was because they put gender inequality down to root causes which deserved more attention or because they felt that feminism did not represent them in general. thus, from a histiographical perspective, feminism is indeed best defined as 'a range of social movements, political movements, and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes‘— as borrowed from wikipedia.

redefining things into what you need them to be isn’t an argument against that, much like you might think it is. specifically, arguing that when feminists do what you like that is feminists but when they don’t do what you like it is not, that it is ‘separate’ completely precludes any sort of analysis of the actual substance and influence of such movements. moreover, you clearly do not apply this standard fairly: when people who stand for and benefit from advocacy for equity do as you like, they are feminists, when they take issue with feminists not representing their interests, they are ‘demonising feminism’. you are doing nothing with your definition but using it as a cudgel to render people who take issue with what’s at stake here politically abject and de-identified from their actual struggles. not only do you prop up a “no true scotsman,” you strip away people’s interests until their genuine complaints have turned into something that you could only ever ascribe to be toxic in essence. this is intellectually dishonest and blatantly fallacious, not to mention disrespectful and callous.

when you do this, you enable a framing in which oppression has nothing to do with the factually oppressed. when you do this, you prop up a frame in which the oppressed speaking up against people who do not represent their interests are actually perpetrators, this is quite explicitly and demonstrably what you did. this is what you are doing, factually, when you say that people who take issues with real deviations from constructive discourse in feminist circles are just ‘demonising feminism’ (already defined as all that is good in the world). thus the tanden situation is relevant: your kind of rhetoric is and has been used to keep the frame away from actual evil and suffering in the world and instead brings it back to whether people are obedient enough to people who while professing to stand for progress and indeed to ‘embody’ it (even though someone being elected into the parliament of a global superpower does not help people globally or even within domestic spheres).

your language games do nothing but preclude analysis of what’s actually going on and are dependent on stark and obtuse denials of things that have been documented, and it serves for nothing but to enable media pundits to get away with lying to the public about the concerns that people have with political figures that are supposed to represent them, or to deny people like me the language to describe how they have been failed by certain mass movements. it does not matter whether you personally perform wrong analysis (although you do) and whether you personally lie to the people, but you seem intent on being a useful idiot to these people, and it’s what you are when your language game makes any analysis of movements as they actually exist in the world already impossible. your love for a definition stops you from doing what you need to in order to actually speak to the concerns of the people, and it stops you from engaging in the kind of histiographical and ideological analysis that could ever serve anyone. it is masturbatory, and every stroke of repetition of your tautology convinces nobody who don’t agree with the same cult-like behavior that places you above all criticism in the first place. no knowledge is gained here and nobody is advocated for, all that has happened is that you’ve defined yourself as being always right.

When a book series brings up fond childhood memories...right Clarence?? Oh sorry I meant Ash! *runs for dear Life*