Feminism. The new F-word.

So I kind of feel like I'm getting caught up in a blog-war here, but my post on the AROOO (anyone else think of rabid werewolves when they read that acronym?) site seems to have inspired them to write one about me. I say seems, because I can't be entirely sure it's directed toward me, but regardless, I relate to it, and I'm going to blog about it.

So long as men hold a position of dominance over women, having desires that coincide with theirs is simply complicity in male supremacy, not a female-derived interest that must be taken into account by radical feminists. I don’t care to re-frame this complicity as being a legitimately, or primarily, female compulsion. It would be nice if women who want to cooperate with men would simply say that, instead of masquerading their sheep-hood as independent thought.

First of all, I'm not masquerading anything as independent thought. I didn't invent the idea of marriage, and I'm sure if I was raised in a society without marriage I wouldn't support it. I just like it. I want it. It makes me happy, and sucks to you if you can't accept that. And secondly, yes I want to cooperate with men. I like men - they make up half the population, and I respect and adore them. I am not a lesbian - a world without men would make me very sad indeed.

Look at the antonyms for cooperate - conflict, rival, oppose, fight. I don't want to participate in a gender war. Every single one of us has a father and a mother...the world would quite literally be an empty place if it were only made up of females.

More importantly, I have a question for you. What do you want the world to be like? I've found that radical feminists are very good at opposing things, but when you ask them what they actually want, they give vague utopian generalities like "a world without rape." Well that's great, why not add in a world without theft or murder or name-calling?**

What do you really want? You're obviously against marriage (or as you call it, prostitution) and you consider transgendered people to be delusional so I'm guessing that's two things you'd ban right away. You consider all heterosexual experience to be on one end or another of the "rape spectrum" depending on if the woman is actually heterosexual, but you equate lesbians with spinsters, denying them their sexual agency, and say that anti-homosexual slurs are only used to insult men.

So what do you want? What is the ideal set of arrangements for you? And more importantly, are you afraid to actually make a stand FOR something because you know, deep down, that your vision of an ideal world isn't shared by most women?

**This is a joke, of course. I've never met anyone who participated in more name-calling than radical feminists, and I used to work with a neo-nazi. For real.

(Originally published 30 July 2009 @ The Femmenist )