winnie lark

Total Woman Victory is excited to announce that Sasha S. Graham will facilitate a workshop on feminist organizing! She is the author of “Applied Feminism: Bridging Radical Theory and Realized Practice” and “The Fundamentals of Activism.” Graham is also the creator of Sista Surge Media, an independent feminist media project developed to amplify women’s voices, promote radical feminist analysis, and create spaces for political education and organizing. Graham’s work is grounded in the belief that feminist theory must extend beyond intellectual discussion and become a foundation for organized political action. Through her activism and media work, she focuses on challenging the social structures that maintain women’s subordination and developing practical strategies for advancing women’s liberation. 

To acknowledge the majority of men are sadists and the majority of women are masochists, while simultaneously denying the role of sexist power dynamics, is intellectually dishonest. What other possible reason could there be for this disparity?

The lead author of this paper is a woman, Ashley Brown. She is throwing all women under the bus by normalising and legitimising BDSM. To state BDSM is not sexist, harmful, or abusive in academic literature is putting women’s lives at stake.

How are women supposed to speak out about the misogyny and abuse of the BDSM community, when ‘official’ academic findings will be used to discredit this argument?

What is consciousness raising?

The Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1960s inspired women to gather and share their struggles with sexuality, domestic life, work, and more. Through these conversations, they realized that their “personal problems” were, in fact, shared experiences in a system of male dominance—in other words, they were manifestations of systemic problems. These women then worked to develop a way of analyzing political problems that is relevant to women and based on information they could trust is true, adopting and adapting similar techniques from the Civil Rights Movement and Chinese Revolution to ultimately create the tool that they called “consciousness raising” (CR). CR taught women that our own experiences are the most reliable source of information we need to understand the sex contradiction and formulate theory. CR encouraged women to deeply analyze their own lives and identify the root causes of women’s oppression, and through this they understood that the system of patriarchy was not an abstract force, but one that manifested daily in the most intimate spheres.