ok so
man who would’ve thought a shitty post from three years ago would come back to haunt me ???? the curse of 2016 truly
anyway i forgot that tumblr defaults to mobile view so i think v few ppl ever saw my theme message abt the peter feminist post, but i’ll expand on it here.
1. yea that was fucked up right ???? like holy shit
2. it was also three years ago and believe it or not my understanding of feminism has changed and grown
i think, though, that since we’re all on the topic it’s a solid discussion point about how feminism has historically been steeped in exclusionary tactics (specifically racism), and that has compounded into contemporary feminism such as trans-exclusionary radical feminism & white feminism.
back when i wrote that post i understood very little about feminism, and intersectional feminism wasn’t something i had ever heard of. to me, at that time, feminism was very simply “women are equal to men” and i was ignorant to the nuances of that ideal. you can’t know what you don’t know, right?
i’m not here to give a history lesson to try and prove anything, but before i deleted the post i saw some people (very, very few people thankfully) agreeing with my reasoning. and i want to post this now to tell people that exclusionary feminism is morally wrong, and if peter pettigrew was ever a feminist, he was a shitty one. and a lot of feminists, historically, have been very shitty.
the suffrage movement was based largely on racism, that black men could vote before white women were allowed to was a key point in that fight. we now are dealing with exclusionary feminists in the form of terfs, and of course “white” feminists. and yet these people still call themselves feminists, and still believe in the “women are equal to men” simplistic brand of feminism, and largely that is what’s presented in media. we cannot discount that they are part of the feminist movement, even if they are wrong, even if there is much more nuance to feminism than they either realize or are willing to admit (also that trans women are women and belong in women-only spaces)
i mean the fact that an entire branch of feminism had to be like Officially Named in order to separate it from branches of exclusionary feminism is like. that says something, you know ??? feminism isn’t a singular entity, and as much work as there needs to be done outside of the umbrella of feminism, there needs to be a lot of work done within the group as well. whether we like it or not forms of exclusionary feminism have been around since the beginning, and they are often the most popular. white feminism is easy to understand because it fails to explore the nuances of race, wealth, opportunity, etc. and TERF is …… man idk what the fuck is up w/ that honestly like. that’s a whole other post.
but the point is, i think my shitty post can at least help facilitate a discussion or at least a reflection on shitty feminism, and hopefully, like, someone out there that is in the same boat i was in (ignorance) realizes that feminism, intersectional feminism, is the only way to really progress towards equality, and that comes with a lot of nuance and a lot of seeking out knowledge and a lot of “oh shit i’ve been a shitty feminist w/o realizing it”. like it sucks to admit you were way wrong about something, or that something was much more complicated than you thought it was, but fuck man it’s the only way shit’s gonna move forward.
it’s uncomfortable to find out you were discounting a lot of fuckin things that you just had no idea about. but it’s necessary. like no amount of being uncomfortable is worth staying ignorant of issues that are systematically oppressing and also killing people. and let’s be clear, people are dying because of exclusionary forms of feminism that feed into a larger exclusionary society. and it sucks, because you don’t want to admit that you were/are part of that system, because that makes you a Bad Feminist. but we all gotta start somewhere.
so, i mean i hope people had a good laugh at least; after i was done wanting to crawl into a hole and die i thought idk maybe i can at least like. put this out here and tell the few ppl that started following my blog (which is not coming back) that feminism should be much more than women are equal to men; that feminism should be intersectional, always. that peter pettigrew was not a feminist and my incredibly simplistic rationalization of that post was, like, fuckin straight up wrong
aight that’s it i guess. unless another post i’ve forgotten about comes back to haunt me. 2016 year of realizing shit right ???????? lmao
