Have recently experience purity wank and hate going right up to suicide baiting from people whose urls featured ‘lesbian’, ‘wlw’ and ‘sapphic’. Anybody got insight into the connection between declaring this sexuality in particular so prominently and being a raging cock to everybody else?
Radfem politics (anti-kink /anti non-normative sexual expression, anti sex-worker, black-and-white, non-intersectional understanding of oppression, blatant transphobia, biphobia, paternalistic and downright vicious attitudes toward women who don’t parrot radfem ideas) have been very successful in infiltrating and taking over a certain subset of lesbians on Tumblr (young, inexperienced, isolated from the wider LGBTQ+ community out in meat-space, psychologically and emotionally vulnerable).
The first idea seeded was ‘lesbians are the most oppressed members of the community / the most oppressed marginalized group full stop.’ This not only wrecked the progress we were making in getting people to stop doing the IMMENSELY counterproductive shit called ‘playing Oppression Olympics’, it dynamited intra-community solidarity at all but the shallowest level. In practice, it’s made it very difficult for other groups to talk about their specific issues or about intra-community aggression without the thing somehow getting construed as an assault on lesbians, further ‘validating’ the ‘most oppressed’ bubble.
Then followed the natural flow of other radfem ideas, to the point where I was getting harangued by 15 year-olds with URLs such as ‘lesbian-[fictional-character-name]’ for being unapologetically kinky and defending BDSM/kink. The shit-flinging ranged from ‘other women are more important than your orgasms!!’ (word for word what I’d been shouted at by older radfems in the past, it was like listening to a broken record) to ‘you’ve been traumatized and brainwashed by men / the patriarchy into liking what you like’.
This idea that other women cannot possibly be TRUSTED with our desires and must be ‘taught better’ is central to radfem sexual politics. It isn’t difficult to see how a bunch of young, inexperienced lesbians whose anger was carefully stoked, made the jump from haranguing others over IRL kinks to fictional portrayals of various kinks and fetishes. ‘Anti’ culture itself wasn’t created this way (various forms of purity wank existed in fandom even when I was on LJ, over ten years ago) but it did get a shot in the arm by the popularity of radfem ideas on Tumblr. You can see this very easily – poke someone with the URLs you mentioned above, who is engaged in a content-elimination crusade in fandom. Poke them enough and they *will* go on a furious rant against kink as a whole, liberally peppered with ‘how dare you get off on that, you disgusting—!’ Always like clockwork.
The end result is that a subset of young lesbians have been effectively PRIMED for purity wank and all the nonsense that entails. Policing the content and sexual expression of other marginalized people (women, queer, PoC, disabled, neurodivergent, etc) ends up being justified with ‘we were taught that we are The Most Oppressed, they must cater to us or be punished for not doing so.’
Nota Bene: Not all young lesbians on Tumblr fell for this and it’s quite possible to find bi/pan/ace people engaging in purity wank. But the above model does explain why young, educated-on-Tumblr lesbians seem to be massively over-represented in the Purity Wank Brigade and the accompanying Acting Like A Gigantic Douche-Canoe Brigade. It also explains why showing all of the purity wank to older lesbians in meat-space produces reactions that can be best summarised as UUUURGH!’
Though the range of political/social influence is different,
and so are some of the goals, this is eerily like how racist groups stoke the
anger, fear, and inexperience of vulnerable (mostly white) young men and
teenage boys to further their agenda—all through social media.Again, I’m not trying to say the two are exact equivalents
or even that their targets are a 1:1 comparison. Just that both are terrible
philosophies and both are preying on vulnerable people in ways that would be almost
impossible these days without social media.Oh, no, I completely agree. Both are hugely regressivist political movements that prey on vulnerable people, and hate the idea of anyone having sexual or gender experiences they deem Bad.
I mean both groups even refer to straight and bi women as “cumbrains,” and treat non white experiences as animalistic and inferior. I’ve been told that using vocab common among poc is proof of my inferiority by radfems at least as often as alt-righters.
Both groups look at people who as suffering, and say, “the reason you’re suffering isn’t injustice, it’s these particular marginalized folks who are stealing from you.”
With the alt right, the scapegoat group is brown people and the target is young white men. With radfems the scapegoat group is non-lesbian queer women, and the target is lesbians.
The comparison is 100% valid.
Same behaviors, similar goals, different details.
Y’all even in my days of specifically looking through TERF blogs just to fight them I’ve never fucking seen this. Y’all are just reaching six ways to Sunday to justify hating lesbians. Die.
this is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read, which is typical of people who have gone so far into insular online spaces that they no longer understand the concerns that people typically have in the real world or somehow believe that they themselves are so oppressed that it’s progressive for them to say whatever they want about any other group as long as they think this group is inherently evil or judgemental. ironically, terfs do this too.
Do you have lesbian, sapphic or wlw in your name? Did you come to my inbox and tell me to kill myself? No? Then you’re not one of the young lesbians this is about.
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