Jacobin vs. Honey Bees
Jacobin vs. Honey Bees
Jul 25 2026, 8:07 PM
Nine years ago, Erica West of a Trotskyist group called the International Socialist Organization (or ISO for short) wrote a polemic called The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism for the main socialist magazine in the United States, Jacobin. Although Jacobin has published a number of articles accosting "terfs" over the years, this one has remained their principal critique of radical feminism as an overall phenom. I haven't counted myself a radfem in some eight years now, so you may be wondering why I care. My main motivation to write this response is the fact that West is actually critiquing female separatism specifically. Her polemic describes all radfems as separatists despite the obvious reality that (to my irritation) only a minority are. Female separatism is an area of ongoing overlap between my approach to life and the world of radfems (hence my presence here), so I feel obliged to defend it. Why this timing though, you ask, what with the polemic I'm responding to being nine years old already? Because my country is talking a lot about socialism, including socialist feminism, since a few members of the Democratic Socialists of America (or DSA for short) have recently won Democratic Party primaries, so the main socialist feminist critique of female separatism has gained new relevance lately, I feel.
The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism is dumb and poorly written, so large swaths of it really don’t earn a response and won't get one from me. I'll just stick to addressing the most pungent quotes therefrom in my response. West's article has four main tenets, which are 1) that women must tolerate pornographers because reducing their power in the world would require state action (oh my), 2) that patriarchy doesn’t exist under socialism, 3) that TIMs are the real victims of sexual violence, and 4) that female separatism is a form of white racism. I will now dismantle that load of horse shit (with a rhetorical shovel, not my hands...ew
).First of all, before I begin my critique of the article itself, I think it may be worth pointing out that, despite their rhetorical obsession with class conflict and constant claims to represent "the working class", groups like the ISO, the DSA, and so forth (which were or are, as applicable, based on college campuses, not at workplaces) , are in fact principally composed of disgruntled yuppies, not members of the working class as the term is commonly understood. Their ranks are mostly composed of what Karl Marx would've called the bourgeoisie, in other words, or a particular, often downwardly mobile subsection thereof anyway, that struggles to afford the high cost of living in the expensive metropolitan areas where they most typically reside. Ideologically, they form the preponderance of the small group that Pew Research describes as "leftward progressives" and what I like to describe as the woke crowd. Because it's politically active and vocal, this demographic enjoys disproportionate representation in, and influence over, the public discourse. It's also statistically from this same demo that we get the most active and principled feminists (including likely the majority of our users here based on the bios I've seen), along with idealists of all kinds, so there's tons of overlap. Nothing wrong with belonging to said demographic by any means. I mean one way of summing it up would be to say that these are some of the smartest, best-educated, and most informed folks on Earth! But I just think it's worth clarifying that there is in fact some cosplay going on here insofar as intellectuals, small business owners, professional activists, and other members of the bourgeoisie go around proclaiming their worldview synonymous with proletarian interests and claim to speak for those of us who do in fact do menial or manual labor (work that's done with the hands) for a living. Whether it's by choosing to embrace a broadened definition of working class status that includes such persons or an intentional form of identity appropriation, there is something obnoxious and presumptuous about the practice. That's all I have to say about that for our purposes here. Moving on!
ANSWERING KEY CLAIMS IN 'THE PITFALLS OF RADICAL FEMINISM'
Quote:Radical feminists’ anti-porn work throws into sharp relief the dangers of misidentifying the roots of women’s oppression. Relying on the state for censorship, emboldening the carceral apparatus, making alliances with opponents of progressive change — this is where radical feminism’s analysis leads us.
At the core of radical feminism’s theoretical blunders is its conception of class.
For radical feminists, the two main classes in society are not the working class (who sell their labor power) and capitalists (who exploit them), but men (the oppressors) and women (the oppressed). They call this patriarchy theory.
The only thing wrong with the radfem analysis of pornography is their reversal of cause and effect. They have often claimed that stuff like porn causes misogyny. In reality, it reflects misogyny. The pathetic content on the Love After Porn subreddit demonstrates with crystal clarity the complete and utter depravity of the male sex and the comical lengths to which women are willing to go to excuse and forgive everything from their moid cheating on them with dozens of prostitutes for years to real-world incest and bestiality to necrophilia and everything in-between. Whoever can look at that sub and somehow conclude that pornography deserves to keep existing for any reason has no right to lecture anyone about their commitment to women's liberation! Don't take my word for it though, read the words of pornographers themselves concerning what they really think of women. Here are some of the classic quotes that really helped put things in perspective for me back in the day:
Also have you noticed how just about every sex crime that gets committed these days involves porn in some form or fashion (usually including child porn specifically)? And if it's not formal porn then it's the soft core variety like what you get through Grok. Men use porn as a threat, as revenge, make you a "sex worker" without your knowledge or consent, flood the social medias and (if famous) Wikipedia pages of the women they don't like with porn. And it ain't a new thing either. The very most prehistoric men's cults we know of reflected the same mindset, depicting women naked in their art work and their weapons as phallic symbols. What we today would call porn has been a part of men's rape culture since long before the dawn of recorded history. And they use the same violent language of pornographers to describe the act of fucking: "hit", "bang", "smack", "slam", "smash", "destroy", etc. Does any of this sound like it's something that's good for you? Something that's in your better interests to tolerate the continued existence of?
The real truth is that while Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring had an especially massive cultural impact on my entire generation, it was no aberration. Analogous, more institutionalized versions of his repressive child rape cult have been pervasive throughout all of known human history and the only reason your moid doesn't run one of his own is because he can't afford to. Basically, the male sex is particularly attracted to children and animals and nearly all of your beauty practices reflect this fact. They are calculated efforts at self-infantilization and self-dehumanization, and expensive ones at that. (And guess who you pay for the privilege, incidentally? You guessed it, men!) The porn men consume reflects it as well. So anyway, to state more directly what I've just made obvious here, while you may not want to sic the state on men, rest assured that they have no problem using it against you (as any publication with the name "Jacobin" should know very well considering that the Jacobins, among other things, guillotined the author of The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, Olympe de Gouges.) Not that they need to. The male physical power advantage by itself renders stateless situations deferential to chodes as well. And speaking of that, let's talk more specifically about anti-carceralism.
It's not a coincidence that misogynist parasites like Graham Platner are among those who feel that there should be no police. I'll leave you to figure out why. This is a widespread sentiment amongst the woke crowd though. For example, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a recently-nominated Democratic candidate for New York's 13th congressional district who also belongs to the DSA, was asked if convicted murderers should serve time in prison and refused to answer. Instead, she proposed the vague alternative of preventing violence from happening without explaining how that would be done. In the course of doing so, she pointed out that the American criminal justice system discriminates against people of color. While that certainly is true, it would be easy to point out that so does abolishing law enforcement. The difference being that incarceration and other state violence is almost exclusively faced by men while male violence at home and on the streets is half the time faced by women and girls.
Many feminists have pointed out the obvious problems with reframing rape, femicide, and other crimes that prodes commit against the female sex as issues of state violence against individuals or workers rather than as male violence against us, ranging from radical feminist Jen Izaakson to conservative feminist Louise Perry, but it's quite frankly the latter's commentary on the subject in her 2020 article Why Defunding the Police Will Hurt Women the Most that is the best one I've read to date, mostly because it doesn't bother reducing the problem of male violence to one of male socialization like radfems do. The entire article is highly recommended reading, especially (but not only) for those us who lived through the year 2020 in America, as it will give you a new, woman-centered perspective on many highly publicized events that took place around that time frame, but the most salient point that she made was this in answer to a contemporaneous Teen Vogue article championing the abolition of police and prisons:
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"Promoting “safety, agency, and healing” sounds very nice, but does not constitute a substantive solution to the problem of male violence because what is notably absent from this vision is any means of physically separating violent men from their potential victims, with that separation maintained — as it has to be — through force. Instead, we are offered woolly solutions that are both highly ideological and highly experimental, based on the premise that offenders can readily be socialised out of their violent behaviour by nonspecific “experts” and “tailored responses” — against all the evidence.
While it might perhaps be possible that a nation like America could become the first in the history of the world to abolish violent crime, we have no reason to expect this to be the consequence of police and prison abolition, and lots of reasons to believe that the precise opposite would happen. The CHAZ/CHOP experiment, for instance, was a triumph for the Hobbesian understanding of human nature. This short-lived community set up within Seattle, beyond the reach of official authorities, soon descended into chaos and violence, with vigilante groups organised to maintain order, and a resulting homicide rate fifty times greater than Chicago’s.
In a world like this, with no police or prisons, how do you think that the smaller, weaker half of humanity would fare? The half who commit very little violent crime but are the victims of a great deal of it?
Historically, what happened was that women were forced to find male protectors who could use force to repel or punish other men, and any woman without such a protector was on her own. Because with no police, there are just two options available to vulnerable people: vigilantism, or nothing at all. The new abolitionists can imagine a third, fanciful option only because they choose to turn away from historical and international examples of what happens when the state’s monopoly on violence is undone.
Accepting the necessity of the criminal justice system doesn’t mean that we can’t criticise it, as becomes clear if we apply the same reasoning to the medical profession. There are significant racial disparities in health outcomes. There have historically been terrible abuses perpetrated by doctors against black Americans, who are still under-represented in the profession. But these facts do not justify defunding the healthcare sector, still less burning down the local hospital.
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...The reality of male violence does not sit well with the kind of utopianism that thrills the woke Left. But there remains an awful, unhappy fact that must still be contended with, once all the utopianism falls away. It is this: some men need to die in prison, and only the state can put them there."
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She wasn't wrong. My point being that in opposing the use of state force as such, West is objectively rationalizing away male violence of all kinds.
Quote:As Marxists, we know the enemy is not men, but the capitalist class — which itself is multi-gendered and multiracial — and that our strategy must reflect this. Women’s oppression is not innate in humans but instead arose at a particular historical and political moment, alongside the development of class society and the nuclear family.
Women’s oppression persists not simply because men hate us, but because of the role we’ve played historically in the nuclear family. While men headed off to work each morning to engage in capitalist production — making cars at the factory, writing legal briefs at the office — women typically engaged in what is known as social reproduction: the biological reproduction of new workers (i.e. having children) and the day-to-day reproduction of workers — doing laundry, feeding the family, getting children ready for school, and so on.
Even in recent decades, as women have entered the paid workforce en masse, they’ve still tended to be saddled with the “second shift,” carrying out social reproduction at home after they return from work.
These tasks are all vital to capitalism. Workers must be fed, clothed, and prepared every day for capitalism to function. But it is in capitalism’s interest for this work to be done for free and in the private sphere.
As a result, socialist feminists argue that the only way we can liberate women is to end class society, once and for all.
I've bolded a key claim above. West's claim here, which forms the foundation of her case for working with men to defeat the capitalist class, is a common one among Marxists because it reflects claims made by Karl Marx's chief patron Friedrich Engels in his 1884 book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Much time has transpired since the publication of said text and much more knowledge of ancient and prehistory has been gained in the interim and the simple fact is that this key, foundational claim is untrue. The men's cults that I referenced above appear to date all the way back to the Upper Paleolithic period. Arranged marriages date back to the very first migration of modern humans from Africa. And male-biased leadership patterns and patterns of extreme and rapacious male violence against females and the young are pervasive across primates as a group, not just human beings, and this definitely includes our closest living ancestors, chimpanzees. The oppression of women by men, in other words, has evolutionary roots that predate the existence of our species!
What's more, as William Buckner well demonstrated in 2018 in his article On the Nature of Patriarchy, matrilineal descent, extensive female control of resources, and relatively low levels of wealth inequality between men don't by any means necessarily weaken the power of patriarchal social relations at all. Simplistic Marxian materialist analyses that center on the merits of wealth redistribution fail to account for the kind of cultural power than men can still wield over women purely through institutions like religion or the simple threat of force alone, and how reduced wealth inequality between men can sometimes in fact increase male solidarity against women. And we have seen historically that Bolshevik governments themselves have shown a pattern of ultimately retreating on women's emancipation in the end. (Consider the example of Stalin.) Frankly, I've found that even exclusively female communities often have a way of surviving on a phallocentric basis, like by attracting male tourists with sex appeal. There is nothing I've seen to suggest that patriarchy is a transcendable condition for our species, let alone that men are our natural allies in alleviating it. The simple fact of how Marx treated his own wife and kids should tell you much about what his level of interest in the project was. (Spoiler: There's lots of female suicide involved in the tale.)
To best understand the actual roots of the human patriarchal condition, let me supply you with this excerpt from another Quillette article by Buckner entitled A Girl's Place in World:
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"Understanding these trends [of male privilege and power] that we see across human societies requires a careful consideration of our evolutionary history, and the constraints imposed by this history. Based on their analysis of intersexual dominance status and dimorphism across 79 primate species, anthropologist Rebecca Lewis and her colleagues conclude that “High [sexual] dimorphism probably characterized the catarrhine LCA [the Last Common Ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes], which constrained dominance relationships within this clade and helps explain why living catarrhines are primarily male dominant.” Similarly, in their review investigating obstacles and opportunities for female leadership across 76 nonhuman mammal species, evolutionary biologist Jennifer E. Smith and her colleagues write that, “The paucity of female-biased leadership across multiple domains is evident across the other primates, suggesting that male-biased leadership within the primate lineage has deep evolutionary roots and perhaps imposes a phylogenetic (historical) constraint on its evolution.”"
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Or, in other words, primate males are substantially bigger, stronger, and faster than females and social power and privilege have had a way of corresponding to those traits. And the corresponding cultural sex bias against females likely goes back all the way to our last common ancestor. We're talking tens of millions of years of evolutionary history, not just a few thousand years of human history, that the women's liberationist finds herself going up against and tasked with overcoming! And you feel that history every time you, generic heterosexual reader, find yourself physically attracted to a male precisely BECAUSE he is muscular and tall. You are literally biologically programmed to perpetuate the very condition that has rendered your sex subordinate up to now. All of which is to say that men oppress women because they can, because it works to their reproductive advantage to do so, and because women are both culturally and evolutionarily disposed to let them.
In the animal world, you will find that the bigger the size and power difference there is between its sexes, the more one tends to dominate its social life. It really is that simple. Everything else is an outgrowth of that base reality. How then have women achieved the advancement we have in recent decades and centuries, you ask? To quote feminist sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy, modern advances toward sex equality reside on a “unique foundation of historical conditions, values, economic opportunities, heroism on the part of women who fought for suffrage, and perhaps especially technological developments which led to birth control and labor-saving devices and hence minimized physical differences between the sexes.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, the most important component-part really has been the reduction of our physical differences, at least in social significance, by technological means. That is what separates this era from past periods in human history. The optimist will look at this promise and conclude that continued ascent of women is inevitable. The pessimist (as me) though will look at it and conclude that we are but one true disaster away from losing everything we've gained. All you have to do to gather the latter case is look how we responded to Covid-19. It illustrates how people respond to crises. One sex always falls further than the other when those happen.
To sum it all up, I will quote once more from Buckner:
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"Men tend to be bigger and stronger than women are. Males tend to benefit more from engaging in violence—both individually and in groups—and they can reap greater fitness benefits through mating with different partners than females do, as women’s reproductive output is more constrained by lactation and gestation time. Further, humans are a species with particularly helpless infants, who often require significant material investments from males to survive, unlike most other mammals. Across human societies, children often inherit material and nonmaterial traits or resources from parents and ancestors—like social status, lineage identity, and property—planting an even stronger importance for men to secure paternal certainty, otherwise they risk devoting substantial resources to unrelated children, which in many circumstances would hamper their own fitness interests. This has led to common domains of intersexual conflict found across the world, exhibited in phenomena like rape and bride capture, arranged child marriages and polygyny, and intimate partner violence."
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It all leads me to question whether there even is a true solution to male oppression.
Quote:This exclusion isn’t just bigoted — it’s hypocritical: while radical feminists campaign vigorously against sexual violence, it’s trans women who suffer from disproportionately high rates of sexual and physical violence (particularly trans women of color).
TERFs may argue that trans women do not share a reproductive system with cis women, and thus can’t understand women’s struggles for birth control and against forced sterilization. But then what do they say of solidarity with lesbian women, or cis women who cannot or choose not to have children? The arguments that TERFs put forth are both weak and prejudiced.
Actually it's trans-men, i.e. the biologically female members of the trans community, who suffer the most disproportionate rates of both sexual and other physical violence. Here in the United States of Assholes, for example, 37% of trans-women report having experienced sexual assault before...as compared with 51% of trans-men; a full majority! Likewise an investigation by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found 86.1 physical attacks for every 1,000 trans-women...and 107.5 for every 1,000 trans-men. As to who it is attacking both groups, at least 81% of sexual assaults against trans-identified people in the U.S. are committed by men. So even within the trans community, just as in the larger world, the principal victims of violence (especially sexual violence) are female and the assailants are overwhelmingly male, just as you'd expect.
Males masquerading as females aren't just victims of sexual violence though, they also commit a lot of it. For example, in 2017 Fair Play For Women used publicly available data on prisoners in the UK to estimate that 41% of TIM prisoners were there at least in part for sex crimes. A follow-up Freedom of Information request from the BBC to the country's Ministry of Justice revealed it was actually 48%, i.e. about half, of all TIM prisoners who were there on sex crimes convictions. This contrasts starkly with the 3% of actual female prisoners who were there for sex crimes and even with the nearly 20% of other men who were, suggesting that TIMs are in fact especially prone to sexual aggression themselves even in comparison to other males. What's more, these investigations revealed the existence of not a single TIF prisoner in the country. So in other words, TIMs behave like men and TIFs behave like women, just as you would expect. They behave in a way that aligns with, or even exaggerates the typical traits of, their biological sex.
These facts show both that the biological males of the trans community are more privileged and violent than their comparatively invisible female counterparts and also that especially high danger to girls and women exists in trans inclusion policies.
Now I'd like to address this claim that having a reproductive system is irrelevant to the lives and oppression of lesbians. Without dragging you through the whole story of my life, this notion to me is personally insulting. I was impregnated by my dad and had a decision to make about whether to functionally end my life at age 13 to raise a child born of rape or get an abortion. I chose the latter option and have not a single regret about it. I figured out I was pregnant because of missed periods. To make a long story short, I went through the well-known trauma response of hyper-sexuality as a teen and landed in prostitution as a way to try and pay my own way through college since my dad and stepmom had kicked my ass out the door on my 18th birthday and my birth mom was in no position to help me out financially. During that especially trying time in my life, you won't be surprised to learn that I became pregnant again, bringing me back around to the same aforementioned decision. While men, including TIMs, may endure rape and prostitution, they will never face that unique kind of life-altering consequence as a result! The curse of reproductive capacity is biologically unique to biological women. I've been lucky to have had the option of remaining childfree. Many women all around the world haven't been so lucky.
All of this for me was mixed in with and connected to struggling with my sexuality. Being a bit older than some who will be reading this thread, you may not be surprised to learn either that I was raised in/with non-accepting households, schools, churches, media, and general social environments, and couldn't help internalizing the message. Part of my struggle during those awful years was trying to fix myself -- trying to make myself straight. Matter-of-factly, fucking boys or men is how many girls and women figure out that they're lesbians, it might be worth adding, and that itself carries a certain risk of pregnancy. I might also add that, although I haven't taken advantage of this option and never will, lesbian couples also often opt to have biological children via IVF. My point being that your reproductive system doesn't just become irrelevant because you're lesbian. You are still female and it still very much matters to the course of your life!
Quote:Radical feminism is also noticeably silent on the question of racism, and is burdened by a politically suspect strategy for fighting it.
Men of color perpetuate sexism just like white men. But their experience of racism also binds them together with the women of color in their communities. As Sharon Smith writes, “the need to fight alongside men in the fight against racism or in the class struggle [has] made separatist ideas unappealing” for women of color.
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While radical feminists posit separatism as a political strategy — and for some, the goal — socialist feminists understand that our power lies in our numbers. The division between working-class men and women, between cisgender people and transgender people — these fissures are detrimental to our overall aims. They only make us weaker and our fight against capitalism that much harder.
Socialist feminists’ goal is to build solidarity across the entire working class. Our fates are tied together, and the struggle against gendered oppression is inseparable from the struggle against transphobia, racism, and capitalism more broadly. Any movement or theory of feminism that either explicitly or implicitly excludes trans people, intentionally misgenders them, or perpetuates transphobia has no business being on the Left.
First of all, to state the obvious, most radfems aren't female separatists. They're predominantly heterosexual and romantically involved just like most other feminists. Concerning those of us who are separatists though, let me just point you to an insightful data post by hayong-gamyeolchijoj163 of the South Korean female supremacist group Womad real quick:
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"Daughters increase longevity of fathers
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16634019/
Daughters spend more time caring for aging parents
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/08/20/daughters-spend-more-time-caring-for-aging-parents-than-sons/
Wives increase husband's lifespans while husbands decrease wive's lifespan (correlation is even greater when age gap increases)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100512062631.htm
Men with sisters are happier and more optimistic
https://www.tlc.com/life---relationships/study-says-having-a-sister-makes-you-more-optimistic-kinder-and-happier
Women with brothers earn less money
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/women-brother-gender-pay-gap-earn-less-study-research-cornell-university-a7959166.html
Women with brothers are forced to conform more strongly to gender expectations
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-021-00830-9
Mother's lives are reduced by giving birth to sons
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/having-sons-can-shorten-a-woman-life/
No shit: Women are happier without parasites and children
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert
The Kinsey Reports found out (in 1948) that at least half of m*les have cheated on their female partners. 24 percent of these subhumans 80 years or older report cheating while only 6 percent of women say the same.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02693241
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/11/dr-kinseys-revolution/303649/
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/age-married-men-most-likely-044145609.html"
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I would point out again that Womad is a Korean message board. The users there feel that the reality of comparative female resilience -- the fact that mentally-emotionally women need men less than they need us and that we tend to be happier, healthier, and lead longer lives the further away from them we get -- is in fact a proof of female biological superiority. 4B is likewise the main and most popular form of female separatism in the world today and you can read about its origins in South Korea here. I point these facts out to highlight obvious examples of how there are in fact plenty of women of color who don't feel "the need to fight alongside men in the fight against racism or in the class struggle". It's simply ridiculous and male chauvinist to equate a female-centered focus of attention and energy to white racism.
In building the case for living as separately from the male sex as feasible, I could add lots more useful factoids to the above examples. For instance, did you know that men's self-confidence drops when their wives and girlfriends succeed (at anything!), but women's self-confidence doesn't conversely drop when their husbands and boyfriends succeed? Did you know that the scrotes prefer stupid women? Did you know that men interrupt others twice as often as women do and are three times more likely to interrupt women than other men...and that women who get ahead in male-dominated fields like tech do so by mirroring that very behavior and learning to interrupt men more often? Concerning coeducation, a user of the 4B Movement subreddit who goes by the superb screen name of catastrophejr offered this insightful case for female-only public schools:
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"I fundamentally disagree with coeducation. Girls cannot thrive in coed schools. Girls rarely thrive with male teachers. Say what you will about the Muslim world and its awful attitude toward women, but there are more female engineers and mathematicians coming out of countries like Egypt, Jordan and the Emirates than in more gender-equal regions like Europe, North America and Latin America. Why? Because in the Muslim world all schools are single-sex and teachers usually match the sex of the students, so little girls learn math and science from female teachers. Little girls have women STEM role models and learn STEM in all-female environments You can read about more about this phenomenon here, "The STEM Paradox: Why are Muslim-Majority Countries Producing So Many Female Engineers?"
Meanwhile in the West, I went to a coed STEM magnet public school where all the engineering and math teachers were male and all the humanities and soft science teachers were female. The result? Boys bullied the girls harshly in STEM classes. A boy told me in a sixth grade compsci class that "computers are for boys" and the emotionally cold male teacher just laughed when I complained. My only safe haven was English/history class where I had kind women as teachers. As a result, my natural love for science was crushed and I ended up going into the humanities because I associated math and science classes with being bullied by boys. This is a systemic phenomenon in the West; I know many girls and women who pursued humanities despite being good at math and science because they felt that math was "for boys".
Other issues with coed schools:
- School shootings are a big problem in my country. It's gender unequal: boys are doing the killing, girls are doing the dying. Almost no school shooting has ever been perpetrated by a girl or woman, but women and girls are always included in the victims. If we made public schools single-sex tomorrow, I believe we would see a 50% decrease in school shootings. Why don't we care enough about our daughters' safety to make this happen??
- Sexual harassment and misogynistic bullying. Depending on my age and location, I was sexualized by some male peers while others told me I was ugly and should kill myself because of my ugly face. Almost all of my school bullies were male; girls rarely even insulted me while boys made sport of calling me an ugly b*tch, flat-chested, denigrating my facial features, saying my nose was too big etc... A boy threw a chair at my face once just because he thought I was ugly and wanted to hurt me. So much for "Mean Girls": my problem was never mean girls, it was cruel and violent boys. I'm sure others can relate."
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Even online, teenage girls face such severe harassment from their male counterparts that it often shatters their self-esteem. (Example of exactly how that happens, in detail.) In fact, even pregnancy itself is a kind of war between mother and baby for oxygen and nutrients that's instigated by the competitive nature of male genes! Yes, misogyny finds expression in our world even at the genetic level!!
The case for recognizing ourselves as a class apart from moids just in general seems pretty damn overwhelming to me, but finds no greater expression than in the demise of the party to which West belonged, the aforementioned International Socialist Organization itself, which occurred in 2019, two years after she authored The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism. The ISO itself wound up being a casualty of the #MeToo movement. At their 2019 convention, much of the party's long-time leadership was voted out over concerns about, as their official publication the Socialist Worker put it, "unaccountable leadership structures and a damaging internal culture that had a disproportionate impact on people of color and others with oppressed identities". Soon after, it was revealed that one of the newly-elected leaders on the party's steering committee had raped a female ISO member in 2013 and that the party leadership at the time forced the national appeals committee of the ISO to overturn an earlier finding of rape in order to clear the pig. Because this situation made it impossible for party members to trust either their past or present leadership, the organization was quickly thrown into crisis. Within weeks, about a third of their members had resigned and within a month the remaining party membership had voted overwhelmingly to dissolve the ISO itself. And so, despite all their rhetoric, in the real world the conflicting interests of the sexes triumphed over class solidarity in the end, even for the ISO, just as it does within the actual American labor movement and everywhere else.
I'M A WANNA-BEE
So now that we've answered all the key arguments contained in The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism, I think it may be worth pointing out that patriarchy isn't uniformly characteristic of nature. There are in fact non-patriarchal species out there and I think that, unfortunately, they offer us the real answer to our dilemma as a sex, which is that we simply need to have different biological characteristics to live without male rule. For simplicity's sake, I'll concentrate on the most pronounced example of matriarchy in nature that I know of: honey bee colonies.
Honey bee colonies are said to be the most perfectly functioning societies on Earth. In fact, they're actually considered to be a super-organism, meaning that their colonies function as though they were one giant brain with individual bees serving the role of its neurons. Scientists today are actually studying honey bees to learn more about how OUR brains work! And these most perfectly functioning societies on Earth are in most senses strictly matriarchal. They're not the only species out there to feature a kind of collective consciousness and, interestingly enough, I think you'll find that lots of the other examples of that in nature are also governed by females, including not only the likes of ants and whatnot, but even mammalian examples like dolphins and orcas. Those are some of the most interesting animals out there to me! The most thoroughgoing example though are honey bees, which, after all, are our very source of the term "hive mind". No, they don't actually work like Borg did on Star Trek. You may be confused by the lingo scientists use to describe bee castes because there's a crystal clear division of labor in honey bee colonies, but actually no, the queen bee is NOT the ruler of the colony. Honey bee colonies are actually highly democratic in their decision-making. They use what we would call consensus-based democracy, not simple majority rule. In fact, their system of doing things has been a source of inspiration to many anarchists. I even recall the Occupy Wall Street movement trying to use consensus-based democracy at our encampments. Many techno-utopians envision a future in which human beings might develop a kind of shared consciousness of our own by merging with socially networked machines in some fanciful form or fashion. Some of my favorite cyberpunk animes (e.g. Ghost in the Shell, Serial Experiments Lain, etc.) have invoked that very theme. Anyway, here's a glimpse of how it works for honey bees:
I'm pretty sure that's at best aspirational for human beings. Bees work this collectively out of survival necessity. Individual bees, unlike individual people, cannot possibly survive on their own. They objectively require an strong division of labor and clear sense of direction for each member of a large hive and necessity is the mother of evolution. Also the hive is a family unit, to be clear, not a civic structure composed mostly of unrelated members. The family unit is about as big as life gets for honey bees. Bee hives are not a model for human beings to achieve oneness with the universe or whatever mystical mumbo jumbo like that. They ARE fucking amazing though!!!
Anyway, what is it that keeps males from taking over bee colonies? Well a lot of things, all of which are grounded in honey bee biology, which is quite different from ours in more than just the obvious ways. Bees avoid the biggest problem that females of ours and countless other species face in life -- the vulnerability that comes with gestation time -- by consigning all reproduction to only one female, which is actually possible for them owing to genetic quirks like queen bees having a built-in storage room for semen and all the eggs she would ever need. This one female has sex one time fairly early in life and the spends literally the rest of her life (she doesn't even sleep!) constantly laying eggs; as many as 2,000 a day. That's her role in life. She is the mom to the whole colony and they love her. She has no time to raise them though. She must continue to constantly lay eggs. Instead, vulnerable larvae are safeguarded, fed and cared for by the youngest worker bees right after they emerge from their metamorphosis. By the time this happens, they're already adults, so we're talking young adults tending to larvae here, not infants doing so.
Another important thing that distinguishes honey bees from our condition is that queen bees have the ability to control the sex of their offspring. In fact, bees don't actually need to mate in order to reproduce! Any worker bee even could lay eggs. They would all yield male offspring though because, owing to a quirk of nature, only bee eggs that are fertilized yield females, while unfertilized ones yield males, and only the queen undergoes the full sexual development needed to store sperm. Anyway, the queen uses this ability to heavily favor female offspring. A typical honey bee hive will wind up with around 2,000 or 3,000 males, known as drones, and more like 50,000 or 60,000 worker bees, all of whom are female. So, in other words, your typical bee colony is about 90 to 95% female. Drones may be big, but they're no match for the numerical advantage the females have going on. Also also, female bees -- both workers and especially the queen -- are born with stingers while the male -- drones -- are not. A bee stinger at their size is a bit like having a retractable steak knife growing out of your vagina. It's not only useful for certain emergency situations, but it also makes rape impossible. A female bee's private area cannot be accessed without her choosing to retract her stinger, so any aspiring rapist would impale himself in his attempt.
Worker bees, who form the overwhelming majority of each honey bee colony, engage in a fascinating three-stage role change over the course of their short and inglorious lives that you can see detailed here in this documentary. It begins with caring for the queen's brood, then progresses to stuff like guard duty before finally a worker graduates to not retirement in old age, but the most difficult task of all, which is foraging (which obviously involves leaving the safety of the hive). Drones are the only bees with leisure time. In fact, they have nothing but leisure time since, much like male Zoomers, they're useless NEETS outside of their role in reproduction who just laze around waiting to be fed. They can't do the work of maintaining the hive and they can't guard it either. All they're really good for is providing semen to an unrelated queen. The fact that this is necessary in order for more workers and queen bees to be born is the sole reason they're tolerated and when the cold weather sets in and the opportunity to pollinate and gather nectar has ceased, a hive has an annual feminist revolution to conserve resources wherein the drones are kicked out and left to freeze or starve, whichever comes first. The act of sex is the drone's final one because in the process of trying to pull himself out of the queen, he tears his abdomen apart and dies. This is another key difference between how our reproductive system works versus theirs: sexual reproduction among bees is a much costlier prospect for the males than it for the females. This situation also makes honey bees polyamorous since queens will typically mate with at least ten drones and even upwards of 40 or 50 sometimes in the span of the roughly 13 minutes that form all the sex she will ever have, while death is the price for one successful interaction for drones. This would be close to the opposite of how things work in humans for obvious reasons. Polygyny has been far more common in human beings and tends to be how things work whenever all laws and social controls are suspended. (Polygamist cults form and become the main form of social organization.) Even where monogamy is formally expected of men, the statistics on affairs clearly reveal that they are much more likely to become involved with multiple partners simultaneously than women.
(Why do bees have #NoKings, you ask? Here's an explainer on queen bee reproductive biology that clarifies why king bees are impossible in any universe.)
The point here is that ending patriarchal social relations isn't likely something that can happen for our species. One has to turn to other species to find successful examples of any alternantive, and that alternative is invariably female rule over males. Honey bees are just one such example of what an alternative can look like, but you will find it true not only in their pronounced example, but also in the others out there in nature, that different biology than we possess is required. Females need things like physical power advantages, the ability to control sex ratios, and for most females to be celibate for life. It also helps if sexual reproduction is costlier for the males than it is for females. Radical feminists have often taken these points seriously and proposed compensatory workaround policies like curfews for men, castration of rapists, state control of sex ratios, and the establishment of separate nations for women. While these are all far more serious answers to the problem of socio-economic and political misogyny than the standard liberal answers like subsidized child care and paid family leave that the socialist feminists (including Erica West, the DSA, and so forth) really tend to confine themselves to, the problem with them is well-concentrated in the demonstrable lack of uptake. Radfems are very often frustrated, in fact, by the general failure of their efforts to help women who don't want to be helped; to liberate women from problems they don't want solved, like prostitution, transgenderism, and relationships that are clearly violent and abusive. It's this lack of uptake on their ideas that suggests to me the problem cannot be solved because the instincts of the human female are a defining part of the problem. Maybe technology will continue to advance in a way that further minimizes the relevance of male physical strength and our dependence on them for reproduction. That is the real hope that I have for the future, not the feminist movement. In the meanwhile, I will focus on minimizing my own suffering in this life and improving my mental-emotional well-being rather than on saving a world that cannot be saved and living as separately as feasible from the male sex is a defining aspect of doing so. It's improved my mental health markedly so far.
Edited Aug 23 2026, 3:22 AM by Impress Polly.
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INTRODUCTION
Nine years ago, Erica West of a Trotskyist group called the International Socialist Organization (or ISO for short) wrote a polemic called The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism for the main socialist magazine in the United States, Jacobin. Although Jacobin has published a number of articles accosting "terfs" over the years, this one has remained their principal critique of radical feminism as an overall phenom. I haven't counted myself a radfem in some eight years now, so you may be wondering why I care. My main motivation to write this response is the fact that West is actually critiquing female separatism specifically. Her polemic describes all radfems as separatists despite the obvious reality that (to my irritation) only a minority are. Female separatism is an area of ongoing overlap between my approach to life and the world of radfems (hence my presence here), so I feel obliged to defend it. Why this timing though, you ask, what with the polemic I'm responding to being nine years old already? Because my country is talking a lot about socialism, including socialist feminism, since a few members of the Democratic Socialists of America (or DSA for short) have recently won Democratic Party primaries, so the main socialist feminist critique of female separatism has gained new relevance lately, I feel.
The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism is dumb and poorly written, so large swaths of it really don’t earn a response and won't get one from me. I'll just stick to addressing the most pungent quotes therefrom in my response. West's article has four main tenets, which are 1) that women must tolerate pornographers because reducing their power in the world would require state action (oh my), 2) that patriarchy doesn’t exist under socialism, 3) that TIMs are the real victims of sexual violence, and 4) that female separatism is a form of white racism. I will now dismantle that load of horse shit (with a rhetorical shovel, not my hands...ew ).
First of all, before I begin my critique of the article itself, I think it may be worth pointing out that, despite their rhetorical obsession with class conflict and constant claims to represent "the working class", groups like the ISO, the DSA, and so forth (which were or are, as applicable, based on college campuses, not at workplaces) , are in fact principally composed of disgruntled yuppies, not members of the working class as the term is commonly understood. Their ranks are mostly composed of what Karl Marx would've called the bourgeoisie, in other words, or a particular, often downwardly mobile subsection thereof anyway, that struggles to afford the high cost of living in the expensive metropolitan areas where they most typically reside. Ideologically, they form the preponderance of the small group that Pew Research describes as "leftward progressives" and what I like to describe as the woke crowd. Because it's politically active and vocal, this demographic enjoys disproportionate representation in, and influence over, the public discourse. It's also statistically from this same demo that we get the most active and principled feminists (including likely the majority of our users here based on the bios I've seen), along with idealists of all kinds, so there's tons of overlap. Nothing wrong with belonging to said demographic by any means. I mean one way of summing it up would be to say that these are some of the smartest, best-educated, and most informed folks on Earth! But I just think it's worth clarifying that there is in fact some cosplay going on here insofar as intellectuals, small business owners, professional activists, and other members of the bourgeoisie go around proclaiming their worldview synonymous with proletarian interests and claim to speak for those of us who do in fact do menial or manual labor (work that's done with the hands) for a living. Whether it's by choosing to embrace a broadened definition of working class status that includes such persons or an intentional form of identity appropriation, there is something obnoxious and presumptuous about the practice. That's all I have to say about that for our purposes here. Moving on!
ANSWERING KEY CLAIMS IN 'THE PITFALLS OF RADICAL FEMINISM'
Quote:Radical feminists’ anti-porn work throws into sharp relief the dangers of misidentifying the roots of women’s oppression. Relying on the state for censorship, emboldening the carceral apparatus, making alliances with opponents of progressive change — this is where radical feminism’s analysis leads us.
At the core of radical feminism’s theoretical blunders is its conception of class.
For radical feminists, the two main classes in society are not the working class (who sell their labor power) and capitalists (who exploit them), but men (the oppressors) and women (the oppressed). They call this patriarchy theory.
The only thing wrong with the radfem analysis of pornography is their reversal of cause and effect. They have often claimed that stuff like porn causes misogyny. In reality, it reflects misogyny. The pathetic content on the Love After Porn subreddit demonstrates with crystal clarity the complete and utter depravity of the male sex and the comical lengths to which women are willing to go to excuse and forgive everything from their moid cheating on them with dozens of prostitutes for years to real-world incest and bestiality to necrophilia and everything in-between. Whoever can look at that sub and somehow conclude that pornography deserves to keep existing for any reason has no right to lecture anyone about their commitment to women's liberation! Don't take my word for it though, read the words of pornographers themselves concerning what they really think of women. Here are some of the classic quotes that really helped put things in perspective for me back in the day:
Also have you noticed how just about every sex crime that gets committed these days involves porn in some form or fashion (usually including child porn specifically)? And if it's not formal porn then it's the soft core variety like what you get through Grok. Men use porn as a threat, as revenge, make you a "sex worker" without your knowledge or consent, flood the social medias and (if famous) Wikipedia pages of the women they don't like with porn. And it ain't a new thing either. The very most prehistoric men's cults we know of reflected the same mindset, depicting women naked in their art work and their weapons as phallic symbols. What we today would call porn has been a part of men's rape culture since long before the dawn of recorded history. And they use the same violent language of pornographers to describe the act of fucking: "hit", "bang", "smack", "slam", "smash", "destroy", etc. Does any of this sound like it's something that's good for you? Something that's in your better interests to tolerate the continued existence of?
The real truth is that while Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring had an especially massive cultural impact on my entire generation, it was no aberration. Analogous, more institutionalized versions of his repressive child rape cult have been pervasive throughout all of known human history and the only reason your moid doesn't run one of his own is because he can't afford to. Basically, the male sex is particularly attracted to children and animals and nearly all of your beauty practices reflect this fact. They are calculated efforts at self-infantilization and self-dehumanization, and expensive ones at that. (And guess who you pay for the privilege, incidentally? You guessed it, men!) The porn men consume reflects it as well. So anyway, to state more directly what I've just made obvious here, while you may not want to sic the state on men, rest assured that they have no problem using it against you (as any publication with the name "Jacobin" should know very well considering that the Jacobins, among other things, guillotined the author of The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, Olympe de Gouges.) Not that they need to. The male physical power advantage by itself renders stateless situations deferential to chodes as well. And speaking of that, let's talk more specifically about anti-carceralism.
It's not a coincidence that misogynist parasites like Graham Platner are among those who feel that there should be no police. I'll leave you to figure out why. This is a widespread sentiment amongst the woke crowd though. For example, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a recently-nominated Democratic candidate for New York's 13th congressional district who also belongs to the DSA, was asked if convicted murderers should serve time in prison and refused to answer. Instead, she proposed the vague alternative of preventing violence from happening without explaining how that would be done. In the course of doing so, she pointed out that the American criminal justice system discriminates against people of color. While that certainly is true, it would be easy to point out that so does abolishing law enforcement. The difference being that incarceration and other state violence is almost exclusively faced by men while male violence at home and on the streets is half the time faced by women and girls.
Many feminists have pointed out the obvious problems with reframing rape, femicide, and other crimes that prodes commit against the female sex as issues of state violence against individuals or workers rather than as male violence against us, ranging from radical feminist Jen Izaakson to conservative feminist Louise Perry, but it's quite frankly the latter's commentary on the subject in her 2020 article Why Defunding the Police Will Hurt Women the Most that is the best one I've read to date, mostly because it doesn't bother reducing the problem of male violence to one of male socialization like radfems do. The entire article is highly recommended reading, especially (but not only) for those us who lived through the year 2020 in America, as it will give you a new, woman-centered perspective on many highly publicized events that took place around that time frame, but the most salient point that she made was this in answer to a contemporaneous Teen Vogue article championing the abolition of police and prisons:
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"Promoting “safety, agency, and healing” sounds very nice, but does not constitute a substantive solution to the problem of male violence because what is notably absent from this vision is any means of physically separating violent men from their potential victims, with that separation maintained — as it has to be — through force. Instead, we are offered woolly solutions that are both highly ideological and highly experimental, based on the premise that offenders can readily be socialised out of their violent behaviour by nonspecific “experts” and “tailored responses” — against all the evidence.
While it might perhaps be possible that a nation like America could become the first in the history of the world to abolish violent crime, we have no reason to expect this to be the consequence of police and prison abolition, and lots of reasons to believe that the precise opposite would happen. The CHAZ/CHOP experiment, for instance, was a triumph for the Hobbesian understanding of human nature. This short-lived community set up within Seattle, beyond the reach of official authorities, soon descended into chaos and violence, with vigilante groups organised to maintain order, and a resulting homicide rate fifty times greater than Chicago’s.
In a world like this, with no police or prisons, how do you think that the smaller, weaker half of humanity would fare? The half who commit very little violent crime but are the victims of a great deal of it?
Historically, what happened was that women were forced to find male protectors who could use force to repel or punish other men, and any woman without such a protector was on her own. Because with no police, there are just two options available to vulnerable people: vigilantism, or nothing at all. The new abolitionists can imagine a third, fanciful option only because they choose to turn away from historical and international examples of what happens when the state’s monopoly on violence is undone.
Accepting the necessity of the criminal justice system doesn’t mean that we can’t criticise it, as becomes clear if we apply the same reasoning to the medical profession. There are significant racial disparities in health outcomes. There have historically been terrible abuses perpetrated by doctors against black Americans, who are still under-represented in the profession. But these facts do not justify defunding the healthcare sector, still less burning down the local hospital.
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...The reality of male violence does not sit well with the kind of utopianism that thrills the woke Left. But there remains an awful, unhappy fact that must still be contended with, once all the utopianism falls away. It is this: some men need to die in prison, and only the state can put them there."
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She wasn't wrong. My point being that in opposing the use of state force as such, West is objectively rationalizing away male violence of all kinds.
Quote:As Marxists, we know the enemy is not men, but the capitalist class — which itself is multi-gendered and multiracial — and that our strategy must reflect this. Women’s oppression is not innate in humans but instead arose at a particular historical and political moment, alongside the development of class society and the nuclear family.
Women’s oppression persists not simply because men hate us, but because of the role we’ve played historically in the nuclear family. While men headed off to work each morning to engage in capitalist production — making cars at the factory, writing legal briefs at the office — women typically engaged in what is known as social reproduction: the biological reproduction of new workers (i.e. having children) and the day-to-day reproduction of workers — doing laundry, feeding the family, getting children ready for school, and so on.
Even in recent decades, as women have entered the paid workforce en masse, they’ve still tended to be saddled with the “second shift,” carrying out social reproduction at home after they return from work.
These tasks are all vital to capitalism. Workers must be fed, clothed, and prepared every day for capitalism to function. But it is in capitalism’s interest for this work to be done for free and in the private sphere.
As a result, socialist feminists argue that the only way we can liberate women is to end class society, once and for all.
I've bolded a key claim above. West's claim here, which forms the foundation of her case for working with men to defeat the capitalist class, is a common one among Marxists because it reflects claims made by Karl Marx's chief patron Friedrich Engels in his 1884 book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Much time has transpired since the publication of said text and much more knowledge of ancient and prehistory has been gained in the interim and the simple fact is that this key, foundational claim is untrue. The men's cults that I referenced above appear to date all the way back to the Upper Paleolithic period. Arranged marriages date back to the very first migration of modern humans from Africa. And male-biased leadership patterns and patterns of extreme and rapacious male violence against females and the young are pervasive across primates as a group, not just human beings, and this definitely includes our closest living ancestors, chimpanzees. The oppression of women by men, in other words, has evolutionary roots that predate the existence of our species!
What's more, as William Buckner well demonstrated in 2018 in his article On the Nature of Patriarchy, matrilineal descent, extensive female control of resources, and relatively low levels of wealth inequality between men don't by any means necessarily weaken the power of patriarchal social relations at all. Simplistic Marxian materialist analyses that center on the merits of wealth redistribution fail to account for the kind of cultural power than men can still wield over women purely through institutions like religion or the simple threat of force alone, and how reduced wealth inequality between men can sometimes in fact increase male solidarity against women. And we have seen historically that Bolshevik governments themselves have shown a pattern of ultimately retreating on women's emancipation in the end. (Consider the example of Stalin.) Frankly, I've found that even exclusively female communities often have a way of surviving on a phallocentric basis, like by attracting male tourists with sex appeal. There is nothing I've seen to suggest that patriarchy is a transcendable condition for our species, let alone that men are our natural allies in alleviating it. The simple fact of how Marx treated his own wife and kids should tell you much about what his level of interest in the project was. (Spoiler: There's lots of female suicide involved in the tale.)
To best understand the actual roots of the human patriarchal condition, let me supply you with this excerpt from another Quillette article by Buckner entitled A Girl's Place in World:
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"Understanding these trends [of male privilege and power] that we see across human societies requires a careful consideration of our evolutionary history, and the constraints imposed by this history. Based on their analysis of intersexual dominance status and dimorphism across 79 primate species, anthropologist Rebecca Lewis and her colleagues conclude that “High [sexual] dimorphism probably characterized the catarrhine LCA [the Last Common Ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes], which constrained dominance relationships within this clade and helps explain why living catarrhines are primarily male dominant.” Similarly, in their review investigating obstacles and opportunities for female leadership across 76 nonhuman mammal species, evolutionary biologist Jennifer E. Smith and her colleagues write that, “The paucity of female-biased leadership across multiple domains is evident across the other primates, suggesting that male-biased leadership within the primate lineage has deep evolutionary roots and perhaps imposes a phylogenetic (historical) constraint on its evolution.”"
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Or, in other words, primate males are substantially bigger, stronger, and faster than females and social power and privilege have had a way of corresponding to those traits. And the corresponding cultural sex bias against females likely goes back all the way to our last common ancestor. We're talking tens of millions of years of evolutionary history, not just a few thousand years of human history, that the women's liberationist finds herself going up against and tasked with overcoming! And you feel that history every time you, generic heterosexual reader, find yourself physically attracted to a male precisely BECAUSE he is muscular and tall. You are literally biologically programmed to perpetuate the very condition that has rendered your sex subordinate up to now. All of which is to say that men oppress women because they can, because it works to their reproductive advantage to do so, and because women are both culturally and evolutionarily disposed to let them.
In the animal world, you will find that the bigger the size and power difference there is between its sexes, the more one tends to dominate its social life. It really is that simple. Everything else is an outgrowth of that base reality. How then have women achieved the advancement we have in recent decades and centuries, you ask? To quote feminist sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy, modern advances toward sex equality reside on a “unique foundation of historical conditions, values, economic opportunities, heroism on the part of women who fought for suffrage, and perhaps especially technological developments which led to birth control and labor-saving devices and hence minimized physical differences between the sexes.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, the most important component-part really has been the reduction of our physical differences, at least in social significance, by technological means. That is what separates this era from past periods in human history. The optimist will look at this promise and conclude that continued ascent of women is inevitable. The pessimist (as me) though will look at it and conclude that we are but one true disaster away from losing everything we've gained. All you have to do to gather the latter case is look how we responded to Covid-19. It illustrates how people respond to crises. One sex always falls further than the other when those happen.
To sum it all up, I will quote once more from Buckner:
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"Men tend to be bigger and stronger than women are. Males tend to benefit more from engaging in violence—both individually and in groups—and they can reap greater fitness benefits through mating with different partners than females do, as women’s reproductive output is more constrained by lactation and gestation time. Further, humans are a species with particularly helpless infants, who often require significant material investments from males to survive, unlike most other mammals. Across human societies, children often inherit material and nonmaterial traits or resources from parents and ancestors—like social status, lineage identity, and property—planting an even stronger importance for men to secure paternal certainty, otherwise they risk devoting substantial resources to unrelated children, which in many circumstances would hamper their own fitness interests. This has led to common domains of intersexual conflict found across the world, exhibited in phenomena like rape and bride capture, arranged child marriages and polygyny, and intimate partner violence."
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It all leads me to question whether there even is a true solution to male oppression.
Quote:This exclusion isn’t just bigoted — it’s hypocritical: while radical feminists campaign vigorously against sexual violence, it’s trans women who suffer from disproportionately high rates of sexual and physical violence (particularly trans women of color).
TERFs may argue that trans women do not share a reproductive system with cis women, and thus can’t understand women’s struggles for birth control and against forced sterilization. But then what do they say of solidarity with lesbian women, or cis women who cannot or choose not to have children? The arguments that TERFs put forth are both weak and prejudiced.
Actually it's trans-men, i.e. the biologically female members of the trans community, who suffer the most disproportionate rates of both sexual and other physical violence. Here in the United States of Assholes, for example, 37% of trans-women report having experienced sexual assault before...as compared with 51% of trans-men; a full majority! Likewise an investigation by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found 86.1 physical attacks for every 1,000 trans-women...and 107.5 for every 1,000 trans-men. As to who it is attacking both groups, at least 81% of sexual assaults against trans-identified people in the U.S. are committed by men. So even within the trans community, just as in the larger world, the principal victims of violence (especially sexual violence) are female and the assailants are overwhelmingly male, just as you'd expect.
Males masquerading as females aren't just victims of sexual violence though, they also commit a lot of it. For example, in 2017 Fair Play For Women used publicly available data on prisoners in the UK to estimate that 41% of TIM prisoners were there at least in part for sex crimes. A follow-up Freedom of Information request from the BBC to the country's Ministry of Justice revealed it was actually 48%, i.e. about half, of all TIM prisoners who were there on sex crimes convictions. This contrasts starkly with the 3% of actual female prisoners who were there for sex crimes and even with the nearly 20% of other men who were, suggesting that TIMs are in fact especially prone to sexual aggression themselves even in comparison to other males. What's more, these investigations revealed the existence of not a single TIF prisoner in the country. So in other words, TIMs behave like men and TIFs behave like women, just as you would expect. They behave in a way that aligns with, or even exaggerates the typical traits of, their biological sex.
These facts show both that the biological males of the trans community are more privileged and violent than their comparatively invisible female counterparts and also that especially high danger to girls and women exists in trans inclusion policies.
Now I'd like to address this claim that having a reproductive system is irrelevant to the lives and oppression of lesbians. Without dragging you through the whole story of my life, this notion to me is personally insulting. I was impregnated by my dad and had a decision to make about whether to functionally end my life at age 13 to raise a child born of rape or get an abortion. I chose the latter option and have not a single regret about it. I figured out I was pregnant because of missed periods. To make a long story short, I went through the well-known trauma response of hyper-sexuality as a teen and landed in prostitution as a way to try and pay my own way through college since my dad and stepmom had kicked my ass out the door on my 18th birthday and my birth mom was in no position to help me out financially. During that especially trying time in my life, you won't be surprised to learn that I became pregnant again, bringing me back around to the same aforementioned decision. While men, including TIMs, may endure rape and prostitution, they will never face that unique kind of life-altering consequence as a result! The curse of reproductive capacity is biologically unique to biological women. I've been lucky to have had the option of remaining childfree. Many women all around the world haven't been so lucky.
All of this for me was mixed in with and connected to struggling with my sexuality. Being a bit older than some who will be reading this thread, you may not be surprised to learn either that I was raised in/with non-accepting households, schools, churches, media, and general social environments, and couldn't help internalizing the message. Part of my struggle during those awful years was trying to fix myself -- trying to make myself straight. Matter-of-factly, fucking boys or men is how many girls and women figure out that they're lesbians, it might be worth adding, and that itself carries a certain risk of pregnancy. I might also add that, although I haven't taken advantage of this option and never will, lesbian couples also often opt to have biological children via IVF. My point being that your reproductive system doesn't just become irrelevant because you're lesbian. You are still female and it still very much matters to the course of your life!
Quote:Radical feminism is also noticeably silent on the question of racism, and is burdened by a politically suspect strategy for fighting it.
Men of color perpetuate sexism just like white men. But their experience of racism also binds them together with the women of color in their communities. As Sharon Smith writes, “the need to fight alongside men in the fight against racism or in the class struggle [has] made separatist ideas unappealing” for women of color.
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While radical feminists posit separatism as a political strategy — and for some, the goal — socialist feminists understand that our power lies in our numbers. The division between working-class men and women, between cisgender people and transgender people — these fissures are detrimental to our overall aims. They only make us weaker and our fight against capitalism that much harder.
Socialist feminists’ goal is to build solidarity across the entire working class. Our fates are tied together, and the struggle against gendered oppression is inseparable from the struggle against transphobia, racism, and capitalism more broadly. Any movement or theory of feminism that either explicitly or implicitly excludes trans people, intentionally misgenders them, or perpetuates transphobia has no business being on the Left.
First of all, to state the obvious, most radfems aren't female separatists. They're predominantly heterosexual and romantically involved just like most other feminists. Concerning those of us who are separatists though, let me just point you to an insightful data post by hayong-gamyeolchijoj163 of the South Korean female supremacist group Womad real quick:
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"Daughters increase longevity of fathers
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16634019/
Daughters spend more time caring for aging parents
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/08/20/daughters-spend-more-time-caring-for-aging-parents-than-sons/
Wives increase husband's lifespans while husbands decrease wive's lifespan (correlation is even greater when age gap increases)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100512062631.htm
Men with sisters are happier and more optimistic
https://www.tlc.com/life---relationships/study-says-having-a-sister-makes-you-more-optimistic-kinder-and-happier
Women with brothers earn less money
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/women-brother-gender-pay-gap-earn-less-study-research-cornell-university-a7959166.html
Women with brothers are forced to conform more strongly to gender expectations
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-021-00830-9
Mother's lives are reduced by giving birth to sons
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/having-sons-can-shorten-a-woman-life/
No shit: Women are happier without parasites and children
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert
The Kinsey Reports found out (in 1948) that at least half of m*les have cheated on their female partners. 24 percent of these subhumans 80 years or older report cheating while only 6 percent of women say the same.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02693241
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/11/dr-kinseys-revolution/303649/
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/age-married-men-most-likely-044145609.html"
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I would point out again that Womad is a Korean message board. The users there feel that the reality of comparative female resilience -- the fact that mentally-emotionally women need men less than they need us and that we tend to be happier, healthier, and lead longer lives the further away from them we get -- is in fact a proof of female biological superiority. 4B is likewise the main and most popular form of female separatism in the world today and you can read about its origins in South Korea here. I point these facts out to highlight obvious examples of how there are in fact plenty of women of color who don't feel "the need to fight alongside men in the fight against racism or in the class struggle". It's simply ridiculous and male chauvinist to equate a female-centered focus of attention and energy to white racism.
In building the case for living as separately from the male sex as feasible, I could add lots more useful factoids to the above examples. For instance, did you know that men's self-confidence drops when their wives and girlfriends succeed (at anything!), but women's self-confidence doesn't conversely drop when their husbands and boyfriends succeed? Did you know that the scrotes prefer stupid women? Did you know that men interrupt others twice as often as women do and are three times more likely to interrupt women than other men...and that women who get ahead in male-dominated fields like tech do so by mirroring that very behavior and learning to interrupt men more often? Concerning coeducation, a user of the 4B Movement subreddit who goes by the superb screen name of catastrophejr offered this insightful case for female-only public schools:
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"I fundamentally disagree with coeducation. Girls cannot thrive in coed schools. Girls rarely thrive with male teachers. Say what you will about the Muslim world and its awful attitude toward women, but there are more female engineers and mathematicians coming out of countries like Egypt, Jordan and the Emirates than in more gender-equal regions like Europe, North America and Latin America. Why? Because in the Muslim world all schools are single-sex and teachers usually match the sex of the students, so little girls learn math and science from female teachers. Little girls have women STEM role models and learn STEM in all-female environments You can read about more about this phenomenon here, "The STEM Paradox: Why are Muslim-Majority Countries Producing So Many Female Engineers?"
Meanwhile in the West, I went to a coed STEM magnet public school where all the engineering and math teachers were male and all the humanities and soft science teachers were female. The result? Boys bullied the girls harshly in STEM classes. A boy told me in a sixth grade compsci class that "computers are for boys" and the emotionally cold male teacher just laughed when I complained. My only safe haven was English/history class where I had kind women as teachers. As a result, my natural love for science was crushed and I ended up going into the humanities because I associated math and science classes with being bullied by boys. This is a systemic phenomenon in the West; I know many girls and women who pursued humanities despite being good at math and science because they felt that math was "for boys".
Other issues with coed schools:
- School shootings are a big problem in my country. It's gender unequal: boys are doing the killing, girls are doing the dying. Almost no school shooting has ever been perpetrated by a girl or woman, but women and girls are always included in the victims. If we made public schools single-sex tomorrow, I believe we would see a 50% decrease in school shootings. Why don't we care enough about our daughters' safety to make this happen??
- Sexual harassment and misogynistic bullying. Depending on my age and location, I was sexualized by some male peers while others told me I was ugly and should kill myself because of my ugly face. Almost all of my school bullies were male; girls rarely even insulted me while boys made sport of calling me an ugly b*tch, flat-chested, denigrating my facial features, saying my nose was too big etc... A boy threw a chair at my face once just because he thought I was ugly and wanted to hurt me. So much for "Mean Girls": my problem was never mean girls, it was cruel and violent boys. I'm sure others can relate."
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Even online, teenage girls face such severe harassment from their male counterparts that it often shatters their self-esteem. (Example of exactly how that happens, in detail.) In fact, even pregnancy itself is a kind of war between mother and baby for oxygen and nutrients that's instigated by the competitive nature of male genes! Yes, misogyny finds expression in our world even at the genetic level!!
The case for recognizing ourselves as a class apart from moids just in general seems pretty damn overwhelming to me, but finds no greater expression than in the demise of the party to which West belonged, the aforementioned International Socialist Organization itself, which occurred in 2019, two years after she authored The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism. The ISO itself wound up being a casualty of the #MeToo movement. At their 2019 convention, much of the party's long-time leadership was voted out over concerns about, as their official publication the Socialist Worker put it, "unaccountable leadership structures and a damaging internal culture that had a disproportionate impact on people of color and others with oppressed identities". Soon after, it was revealed that one of the newly-elected leaders on the party's steering committee had raped a female ISO member in 2013 and that the party leadership at the time forced the national appeals committee of the ISO to overturn an earlier finding of rape in order to clear the pig. Because this situation made it impossible for party members to trust either their past or present leadership, the organization was quickly thrown into crisis. Within weeks, about a third of their members had resigned and within a month the remaining party membership had voted overwhelmingly to dissolve the ISO itself. And so, despite all their rhetoric, in the real world the conflicting interests of the sexes triumphed over class solidarity in the end, even for the ISO, just as it does within the actual American labor movement and everywhere else.
I'M A WANNA-BEE
So now that we've answered all the key arguments contained in The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism, I think it may be worth pointing out that patriarchy isn't uniformly characteristic of nature. There are in fact non-patriarchal species out there and I think that, unfortunately, they offer us the real answer to our dilemma as a sex, which is that we simply need to have different biological characteristics to live without male rule. For simplicity's sake, I'll concentrate on the most pronounced example of matriarchy in nature that I know of: honey bee colonies.
Honey bee colonies are said to be the most perfectly functioning societies on Earth. In fact, they're actually considered to be a super-organism, meaning that their colonies function as though they were one giant brain with individual bees serving the role of its neurons. Scientists today are actually studying honey bees to learn more about how OUR brains work! And these most perfectly functioning societies on Earth are in most senses strictly matriarchal. They're not the only species out there to feature a kind of collective consciousness and, interestingly enough, I think you'll find that lots of the other examples of that in nature are also governed by females, including not only the likes of ants and whatnot, but even mammalian examples like dolphins and orcas. Those are some of the most interesting animals out there to me! The most thoroughgoing example though are honey bees, which, after all, are our very source of the term "hive mind". No, they don't actually work like Borg did on Star Trek. You may be confused by the lingo scientists use to describe bee castes because there's a crystal clear division of labor in honey bee colonies, but actually no, the queen bee is NOT the ruler of the colony. Honey bee colonies are actually highly democratic in their decision-making. They use what we would call consensus-based democracy, not simple majority rule. In fact, their system of doing things has been a source of inspiration to many anarchists. I even recall the Occupy Wall Street movement trying to use consensus-based democracy at our encampments. Many techno-utopians envision a future in which human beings might develop a kind of shared consciousness of our own by merging with socially networked machines in some fanciful form or fashion. Some of my favorite cyberpunk animes (e.g. Ghost in the Shell, Serial Experiments Lain, etc.) have invoked that very theme. Anyway, here's a glimpse of how it works for honey bees:
I'm pretty sure that's at best aspirational for human beings. Bees work this collectively out of survival necessity. Individual bees, unlike individual people, cannot possibly survive on their own. They objectively require an strong division of labor and clear sense of direction for each member of a large hive and necessity is the mother of evolution. Also the hive is a family unit, to be clear, not a civic structure composed mostly of unrelated members. The family unit is about as big as life gets for honey bees. Bee hives are not a model for human beings to achieve oneness with the universe or whatever mystical mumbo jumbo like that. They ARE fucking amazing though!!!
Anyway, what is it that keeps males from taking over bee colonies? Well a lot of things, all of which are grounded in honey bee biology, which is quite different from ours in more than just the obvious ways. Bees avoid the biggest problem that females of ours and countless other species face in life -- the vulnerability that comes with gestation time -- by consigning all reproduction to only one female, which is actually possible for them owing to genetic quirks like queen bees having a built-in storage room for semen and all the eggs she would ever need. This one female has sex one time fairly early in life and the spends literally the rest of her life (she doesn't even sleep!) constantly laying eggs; as many as 2,000 a day. That's her role in life. She is the mom to the whole colony and they love her. She has no time to raise them though. She must continue to constantly lay eggs. Instead, vulnerable larvae are safeguarded, fed and cared for by the youngest worker bees right after they emerge from their metamorphosis. By the time this happens, they're already adults, so we're talking young adults tending to larvae here, not infants doing so.
Another important thing that distinguishes honey bees from our condition is that queen bees have the ability to control the sex of their offspring. In fact, bees don't actually need to mate in order to reproduce! Any worker bee even could lay eggs. They would all yield male offspring though because, owing to a quirk of nature, only bee eggs that are fertilized yield females, while unfertilized ones yield males, and only the queen undergoes the full sexual development needed to store sperm. Anyway, the queen uses this ability to heavily favor female offspring. A typical honey bee hive will wind up with around 2,000 or 3,000 males, known as drones, and more like 50,000 or 60,000 worker bees, all of whom are female. So, in other words, your typical bee colony is about 90 to 95% female. Drones may be big, but they're no match for the numerical advantage the females have going on. Also also, female bees -- both workers and especially the queen -- are born with stingers while the male -- drones -- are not. A bee stinger at their size is a bit like having a retractable steak knife growing out of your vagina. It's not only useful for certain emergency situations, but it also makes rape impossible. A female bee's private area cannot be accessed without her choosing to retract her stinger, so any aspiring rapist would impale himself in his attempt.
Worker bees, who form the overwhelming majority of each honey bee colony, engage in a fascinating three-stage role change over the course of their short and inglorious lives that you can see detailed here in this documentary. It begins with caring for the queen's brood, then progresses to stuff like guard duty before finally a worker graduates to not retirement in old age, but the most difficult task of all, which is foraging (which obviously involves leaving the safety of the hive). Drones are the only bees with leisure time. In fact, they have nothing but leisure time since, much like male Zoomers, they're useless NEETS outside of their role in reproduction who just laze around waiting to be fed. They can't do the work of maintaining the hive and they can't guard it either. All they're really good for is providing semen to an unrelated queen. The fact that this is necessary in order for more workers and queen bees to be born is the sole reason they're tolerated and when the cold weather sets in and the opportunity to pollinate and gather nectar has ceased, a hive has an annual feminist revolution to conserve resources wherein the drones are kicked out and left to freeze or starve, whichever comes first. The act of sex is the drone's final one because in the process of trying to pull himself out of the queen, he tears his abdomen apart and dies. This is another key difference between how our reproductive system works versus theirs: sexual reproduction among bees is a much costlier prospect for the males than it for the females. This situation also makes honey bees polyamorous since queens will typically mate with at least ten drones and even upwards of 40 or 50 sometimes in the span of the roughly 13 minutes that form all the sex she will ever have, while death is the price for one successful interaction for drones. This would be close to the opposite of how things work in humans for obvious reasons. Polygyny has been far more common in human beings and tends to be how things work whenever all laws and social controls are suspended. (Polygamist cults form and become the main form of social organization.) Even where monogamy is formally expected of men, the statistics on affairs clearly reveal that they are much more likely to become involved with multiple partners simultaneously than women.
(Why do bees have #NoKings, you ask? Here's an explainer on queen bee reproductive biology that clarifies why king bees are impossible in any universe.)
The point here is that ending patriarchal social relations isn't likely something that can happen for our species. One has to turn to other species to find successful examples of any alternantive, and that alternative is invariably female rule over males. Honey bees are just one such example of what an alternative can look like, but you will find it true not only in their pronounced example, but also in the others out there in nature, that different biology than we possess is required. Females need things like physical power advantages, the ability to control sex ratios, and for most females to be celibate for life. It also helps if sexual reproduction is costlier for the males than it is for females. Radical feminists have often taken these points seriously and proposed compensatory workaround policies like curfews for men, castration of rapists, state control of sex ratios, and the establishment of separate nations for women. While these are all far more serious answers to the problem of socio-economic and political misogyny than the standard liberal answers like subsidized child care and paid family leave that the socialist feminists (including Erica West, the DSA, and so forth) really tend to confine themselves to, the problem with them is well-concentrated in the demonstrable lack of uptake. Radfems are very often frustrated, in fact, by the general failure of their efforts to help women who don't want to be helped; to liberate women from problems they don't want solved, like prostitution, transgenderism, and relationships that are clearly violent and abusive. It's this lack of uptake on their ideas that suggests to me the problem cannot be solved because the instincts of the human female are a defining part of the problem. Maybe technology will continue to advance in a way that further minimizes the relevance of male physical strength and our dependence on them for reproduction. That is the real hope that I have for the future, not the feminist movement. In the meanwhile, I will focus on minimizing my own suffering in this life and improving my mental-emotional well-being rather than on saving a world that cannot be saved and living as separately as feasible from the male sex is a defining aspect of doing so. It's improved my mental health markedly so far.
I wish there were such a place, lol!
I feel like the larger animal world kinda puts a lot of our issues into more perspective oftentimes.
It really is true. In so many of the more matriarchal species out there, you'll find family structures where all the adults are female because the males are eased or kicked out once they start getting horny and they often lead more solitary lives. There's a certain pattern there that surely should at least be noteworthy to us, IMO.
