A place to stand

partly I'm looking for a place to stand. the world changes. Maybe its an age thing, maybe its a running out of energy thing. maybe you just get to a point where its all stripped bare of its bulshit and you realise that its only what matters that matters, everything else is just chaff on the wind.

Mainstream and even not so mainstream feminism has left me deeply dissatisfied, there is a hollow at the center of it. It has been swallowed by the status quo, it has been distracted and then consumed by consumerism as if we could buy liberation. It seems to be becoming more defensive and demanding of femininity and less accepting of lesbianism, butchness, masculinity in women or just a refusal to take part in the work that femininity entails. I cannot even count the number of times I've heard a feminist say "being a feminist doesn't mean you're a hairy legged lesbian!" There seems to be a thread in feminism that is getting stronger of being deliberately non threatening, of making sure men are comfortable and this excludes women who men do find threatening or women who wont or cant change themselves to make men comfortable around them.

There's a focus on middle class professional women in the work place without an acknowledgment that most women are not middle class professionals and so face very different issues around work, unemployment and childcare.

Mainstream feminism if it remembers disabled women exist at all pays the bare minimum lip service to accessibility, in fact most of the feminist groups and conferences I've attended  are at least as abelist as the rest of society and often more so. I have too many stories of being dismissed, ignored or forgotten about when I try to talk about accessibility issues.


And radical feminism, I have a lot of time for radical feminist theory and radical feminist history but it seems that women who call themselves radical feminist don't actually know much about radical feminism. The tend to be very young and think that just being anti porn and anti prostitution makes one a radical feminist. I am anti porn and anti prostitution but I don't want to talk about it all the time, in fact due to personal history I don't want to talk about it much at all, and there are other issues that are just as important to the liberation of women as issues around porn and prostitution.

And theres lots of vicious transphobia in radical feminism that I'm deeply uncomfortable with, which also seems to be an obsession at least amongst radical feminist bloggers.

Feminism tends to be dismissive of religion, of women who are religious and my religion is important to me, my feminism and my Christianity work together fine and I'm sick of feminist telling me I'm not a real feminist because of my religion.

One thing that bothers me about social justice in general it the utter lack of compassion within it. the acknowledgment that  we are all damaged by the society we grow up in and we all make mistakes and sometimes the choices we make are for reasons of survival than ideology and that's okay. I think if  compassion is not wound into and through everything we believe and in the way we engage with and understand the people who are fighting the same or similar battles, who are also oppressed, then what we create will lack compassion and a compassionless world is an oppressive one