The petition poses the question to Albertans; “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”   “Virtually all our people know 80 per cent of Albertans want to sign this petition,” Lukaszuk told The News. “Petitions have their lineups forming immediately to sign this petition, which is great. It is really heartwarming.”  First proposed in June of this year, Lukaszuk made it clear that the initiative is an attempt to squash any discussion of Alberta separatism.  

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That being said. I really have an issue with the idea of separatism being promoted as a strategy of safety for women. Yes statistically the biggest threat to women’s safety is men but limiting contact with men is not only impossible for most women financially but also undesirable and at odds with her own desire to live a free and full life. Women might want to excel in their career of choice, they might want to travel, they might want to live in a city or a town, they might want to find love with a man or have children. Even if a woman does everything to limit contact with a man, lives in the woods alone or with a female partner. Men can still find her and hurt her. There is a lot to criticize about heterosexual partnerships and how men hold women back/overburden them within them but from a perspective of safety from male violence any focus on the victim preventing violence and off the perp/taking the violence of the perp for granted is victim blaming.

I am a lesbian feminist, outside of my Dad, brother a few coworkers (I work with mostly women) and friends from childhood, I really don’t interact with men. I don’t live with them, date them or spend time with them socially. In part because I was very much harmed by men indoctrinated by homophobic lesbian pornography and in part because I just….find men a little boring. I was still raped in September and my social choices/lesbian separatist lifestyle did nothing to protect me. How could it? Because male violence has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the HIM. Because even though most men attack women in romantic relationships it has nothing to do with a woman choosing to be in that relationship. Perpetrators find any way they can to gain access to lone women in moments of vulnerability. Men are indoctrinated into women hating by rituals of masculinity, by religion, by pornography, through our mass media and music to hate women and to desire to enslave, torture and murder them. Our society is entirely numb to this.

Women are raped who interact with men in the workplace, women are raped by men being their neighbors or viewing them on the street, women are raped by bosses and fathers. Women are raped by their doctors and most of all women are raped by their husbands. All of these men do it because because they can. They are groomed into wanting to via masculine social rituals and female hate materials. They seek out ordinary women living their lives due to vulnerability, physical looks and opportunity. It has nothing to do with her. And therefore, she can’t change anything to stop it.

I don’t think women who strongly support separatism are intending to victim blame, but I do think the ideology that women should limit their socializing, forgo romantic connection, change career course to limit contact with males can easily become victim blaming. Is it a woman’s fault when she decides she doesn’t want to live without love? When she wants children?

When I disclosed my rape to some feminists, some remarked that they were glad to not live in an urban area where these things happen. But it was precisely because I was living in a city, where there were witnesses and people who put themselves between myself and my attacker, people who called the police when they saw me, that I did not end up in the East River. It is the friends I have made through living in a dense gay friendly city that have supported me through this. And it is the resources of a dense urban city that gave me access to medications and police resources to minimize the transmission of STI’s entirely free of charge. It’s not as simple as rural safe/city dangerous. It is not as simple as just not dating men or sleeping or getting sick or anything. No woman is safe unless we banish woman hating from our social landscape and work to make the world safe for all women, no matter what.

Indeed, the more women you befriend and connect you-the more you realize there is no lifestyle that protects you from male violence. One only has to look at the history of religious communities and witchcraft/lesbian persecution for confirmation. Independent women are as much of targets as wives. They are made examples of. Even Joan of Arc was raped to but her back in her place….her place being sexually submissive to a man 🙃 (patriarchy doesn’t allow women a path to freedom).

That is not anyone’s fault either for making an assumption that x kind of women are “at-risk”, the scale and reality of our mass vulnerability to male violence is truly too terrible to fully behold but we must as feminists resists this at every opportunity. The more women we connect to, individually and as a movement, the easier it is to internalize the idea no woman is at fault for her abuse or exploitation. It can feel easier to think that doing x, easy to think that living in the country or not dating men will protect you or choosing x or y will keep you safer, it’s human to want some control over male violence.

Thank you anon for your question. I will use this post to summarize & clarify my stance on female seperatism:

What radical feminism means by criticizing heterosexual relationships is highlighting they are in majority of cases characterized by a power imbalance, which is caused by patriarchal structures. It is supposed to bring attention to said imbalance and educate women about what it generally means to partner with a man and the risks that come with it, while also encouraging them that female seperatism is an option for them.

Partnering with a man is not feminist, but neither is partnering with a woman. Framing one as more "feminist" than the other, implicates that sexual or romantic orientation is a political position & that at the same time, there are both choice and morals imposed on that sexuality. It's not feminist to impose a moral hierarchy onto women's sexuality, as if choosing a female partner automatically absolves you of patriarchal dynamics, or as if loving a man makes you complicit by default.

But sexual and romantic attraction to someone doesn't automatically mean that we can't resist the urge to be with them, right? There is still a choice to be made to engage in an active partnership? Yes, that it true. The action of dating men definitely can be criticized (to a certain extent) but the breaking point is that I disagree with the way most seperatist feminists or especially blackpillers are going about this & how devoid of empathy those conversations often are.

A good way of approaching the subject of seperatism would be saying that "female seperatism is a great tool of radical feminism and many women would most likely be happier." Destigmatize and break down women's fears of being single, tell them more about arguments pro seperatism while also spreading awareness about how to pick up on signs of toxic relationships, how to get out of them and if you have the capacity: lend them a listening ear. You cannot do more than giving women the resources they need in order to come to their own conclusions and make their own decision. You can't force any woman into seperatism. The only thing aggressive pushing for it causes, is further alienating potential radfems or already existing radfems.

There already is a distinct type of feminism called "seperatist feminism". I don't believe it is productive to use the label radfem when what you really mean is seperatist and to then go and get mad at other radfems for not being seperatists.

I think that radfems who do partner with men already have the best resources; know which red flags to look out for and are aware of the potential risks. I do think it's possible for women to have loving and equal partnerships with men, but at the same time those are rare. I also believe that by partnering with a man you as a woman have to taken on the role of a "teacher" for their male partners misogyny for the rest of their lives. A burden no woman should have to take on and should be able to opt out of at any point in time but it is ultimately her burden to bear if she wants to.

I think radical feminist communities thrive best when we conceptualize ourselves as a collection of women who are all pursuing radical feminist actions VS picturing ourselves as individuals who's every action is automatically radically feminist by the nature of identifying as one.

The first option dilutes the community by stretching the ideology to cover whatever choices and actions people want to make or take, weakening it. The second one views the ideology to be separate of the individual, and asks the individual to be in alignment with it to be a part of the community.

I'm a radical feminist because I agree and align with the values of radical feminism, which means I try to make choices in alignment with radical feminist ideology, but since no person is politically pure, some of my actions sometimes won't be perfectly aligned & I have accepted that. (I'm still an individual aside from the political stance I take and personally, I am looking out for what I think is best for me over what is perfect.)

I want radical feminist communities to be a place to learn from each other, help each other, organize, discuss feminist literature and to encourage one another to try and stick to radical feminist actions wherever we personally can. I don't want it to be a chronically online hive mind.

HERE is another take from me about female seperatism, focusing on a better approach and how the current one often openly discredites & berates non seperatist women, which is not beneficial when the goal is to convince them to join the movement.

All you can do is provide someone with resources. What they do is always their choice. It is neither a good investment of your energy to try and force anyone into something they haven't freely chosen for themselves out of genuine conviction & comittment nor is it to start and shame them if they decline.

To answer your question: What solution do I have?

Black and white thinking is sadly incredibly common on radblr whereas nuance is often unwelcome. A person not partaking in seperatism or criticizing aspects of the online discourse is often seen as "being against it" in the sense of "If you're not with me, you're against me!" Which is not true.

The truth is that it is unrealistic to expect all osa women to refrain from dating men and I repeat: you cannot force women into seperatism. What is the alternative to accepting that not all women will want to join the movement of seperatism?

Does this now mean that all effort is futile and you should stop separating yourself from men or talking about the positive effects seperatism? Also no!

Regarding seperatism, it involves more than "not dating men". Broken down quickly, it means actively centering women in your life whenever possible. Reading books written by women, listening to music made by women, supporting female owned brands, prioritize female friendships, overall taking actions that benefit women as a class, using micro feminism in daily life... - which is something that can still be done for radfems with male partners.

More and more I am continuing to see how different the type of separatism being portrayed on tumblr is to real life separatism. Tumblr separatism rarely moves beyond aesthetic disillusionment and personal boundaries that are framed as moral superiority. It's less about dismantling structures of male dominance and more about creating an ingroup identity based on who has successfully renounced men, sex, or relationships.

Tumblr separatism is often portrayed in a performative-purity-test kind of way with little real world application. This stands in stark contrast to real life separatist movements like the one in South Korea, where women aren't just retreating from men for ideological validation, but organizing around concrete political demands: safer public spaces, legal reforms, and systemic protections from male violence.

Those women aren't measuring each other's worth by relationship status, instead they are strategizing, marching, building, and resisting collectively.

Holding men accountable doesn't require pretending that they're a monolith, nor does having a male partner mean that this woman believes she's "found the only good man" or sees herself as some kind of superior person that is exempt from male harm. It means she understand structural power, context and that individuals exist within that and can consciously choose to reject and work on their socialization. The point of feminist analysis isn't to retreat into separatism as a defense mechanism and call it morality, it's to understand the world enough to navigate it with clarity, not fear.

Trying to redefine the label “radfem” as a "female separatist" aka women who reject all contact with men is historical revisionism. It strips radical feminism of its political roots and turns it into a lifestyle identity. The original movement wasn't about personal virtue, it was about collective resistance. Rewriting the label erases its history and silences/excludes the women who built it and if your definition of radical feminism would've kicked out the founders, maybe rethink it, because you might be engaging in historical gatekeeping and no true scotsman fallacies. Movements are defined by their originators and core texts.

I have written another post about this topic of historical revisionism when it comes to "radfems can't be het partnered" in particular.

Regardless, every radical feminist action any woman takes, regardless of if she is 30% radical feminst, 90% radical feminist, or 0% radical feminist, is an action that is good for her and other women.

And another woman in the fight is another woman in the fight, right?