SYABM

roxanegay:

Today, I am done with women bending over backwards to disavow feminism. I’ve been done with this for a while but I am EXTRA done today.

I mean, ladies, do whatever you want and be whatever you want and be however you want and believe whatever you want but stop saying, “I’m not a feminist, but,” and then proceed to list everything that has been borne of the feminist movement. You don’t get to have that cake and eat it too. Wipe that frosting off your face.

How many different ways can a successful, highly visible woman declare to anyone who will listen that she is not a feminist?

Let’s take a look.

…

Actually, all of the rights women have today have actually been granted to them by the Patriarchy, with, at best, the help of feminism. Which means that feminism only exists and is effective with the dispensation of the very thing they’re supposedly fighting against.

If someone says they agree with the goal of a cause, but don’t consider themselves part of it, there are only a handful of explanations. 1)they don’t agree with the means, b)they don’t think the cause is actually effective at working towards its goal, c)both a and b. They could still be wrong, of course.

I mean, if thousands of women were saying they weren’t part of my cause, I’d be looking very hard at it to ask why they think that way. They can’t all be ignorant, since many of the women in question are, in fact, former feminists who were turned off from the movement. Some of the people who criticize feminism consider themselves current feminists, and make a distinction between what “their feminism” believes and what they think feminism in general believes. Are they all wrong too? Every one?

Did you check each and every claim made by these women who said they weren’t feminists and found they were wrong?

Do you check feminist claims so closely?

Those are both rhetorical.