A Follow-Up Note (Sexual Redistribution)

#TheWomeAreSpeaking | #PayAttention

Meanwhile, there is this:

It’s really something the way Douthat can barely hold his nose to mention the monstrous “left leaning and feminist” among us, but it’s outstanding that he can then go on to leap from “the overweight and disabled” to internet trolls.

You want to have a conversation about sexual agency for marginalized groups, I am there for it. Surrogacy, self-pleasure, community: awesome. We are all entitled to healthy, safe, consensual sexual expression. But (grudgingly hoists megaphone): YEAH, THESE GUYS DON’T WANT THAT.

This isn’t rocket science. Men who idolize mass murderers do so because they hate women. They feel they have a right to their bodies. It enrages them when women do not behave in a sexually conciliatory way toward them. It enrages them that other men can obtain what they cannot, because they don’t see sex as a mutually pleasurable experience but as a reward they have been deprived of. They see themselves apart from the “Chads and Stacies” and “normies”—their version of the popular kids—and take comfort in posting memes about evil females and their precious man spaces. Oh, no, you’ve got us all wrong, they argue, I just want a nice girlfriend, and why can’t these ungrateful bitches understand that?

Douthat’s willful ignorance is telling. He hilariously believes that “The sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.” Because nobody wanted to screw good-looking people before disco and the Pill were invented. He sees the sexual economy in blanket terms, ignoring that the perpetrators of mass violence are generally not, say, women in wheelchairs. He visualizes “commerce and technology . . . harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of incels.” My dude, these guys don’t want to BUY sex. They want to be GIVEN sex. A big part of the incel mindset is a revulsion of women who are sexually independent. As Jennifer Wright noted recently in Harper’s Bazaar, “There’s a lot of slut-shaming.” No hypothetical robot is going to cure that.

(Marcotte)

Required Reading (Whipping Girl)

“You don’t need to make us invisible to keep us safe. We need to be named and openly supported in women’s spaces.”

―Luna Merbruja

The pretense of required reading is something of a joke; it’s not like you’re being graded.

But I really, really, really need you to please spend some time with Luna Merbruja’s explanation of “3 Common Feminist Phrases That (Unintentionally) Marginalize Trans Women”, posted to Everyday Feminism about a year ago.

But for trans women, who spend a lifetime having the authenticity of our very identity and existence questioned and rejected over and over and over again, these experiences are often life threatening and play a significant role in creating an unsafe world for us.

We are denied access to various women’s spaces, like nail and hair salons, political movements, support groups, and bathrooms. And all of these exclusions are based on a simple transmisogynist idea―that trans women aren’t women.

Please?

Thank you.

____________________

Merbruja, Luna. “3 Common Feminist Phrases That (Unintentionally) Marginalize Trans Women”. Everyday Feminism. 12 May 2015.