Feminism

What is feminism?

The classic answer is: "Ideology and movement for liberation of women and abolition of the patriarchy". This is so peculiar; Black Rights Movement isn't called Blackism, GSRM movement isn't called Queerism. What is the difference? Well, the obvious answer is: "The word is quite old in the history of civil rights movements and carries much historical and cultural significance because of it, so it's still an extremely popular to use." But that's not very satisfying. My answer is that feminism is a very meaningful name for the movement because it's fundamentally about exalting femininity in the same level of the masculinity. This is often forgotten in liberal feminism and the most vital to differentiate between actual feminist movement vs reactionary feminist-posers.

What is patriarchy?

In patriarchal societies body organs, styles of appearance, clothing, colors, behavior, occupiancies, hobbies, aspirations, social groups, locations, communication, language, culture and down to most non human objects are marked such a way in order to strictly separate them into usually two groups. The stricter the patriarchy is, more seriously they are applied and evaluated. These marks are: Masculine, the mark to denote the group "men"; Feminine, the mark to denote the group "women"; Androgyne, the mark to denote something as "undecided" or "confusing", usually in a pejorative way or for denoting a third group in a patriarchal societies , to treat some people outside of the caste system, so to speak. These marks, we will call gender marks from now on also existed in non patriarchal societies to varying relevance, but patriarchy differs that they are used to create a hierarchial organization. Femininity serves as a mark of inferiority and subservience to masculinity, conversely masculinity serves as a mark of superiority and dominance. By marking people as such, gender is constructed.

What is gender?

Group of people who are constructed by and forced to accept ,embrace or reject marks of "feminine","masculine" and "androgyne" in various degrees. In a patriarchal society these marks are not voluntarily given or taken, they are assigned pre-determinately to genders of "men" and "women" in a strict binary way and strictly related to their sex and any violation is repressed, punished and ostracized.

What is sex?

Assignment of reproductive organs to genders by gender-marking them. This was the start of gender construction in human societies, though humanity quickly realized sex and gender groups were inadequate or could be assigned separately for some people. Patriarchy rejects such variances and strictly equalizes sex and gender in the same binary way, enforces that sex is the "natural essence" of the gender; which means "Penis makes you a man and vagina makes you a woman."

Patriarchal oppression and Gender Marks

Patriarchy is a opressive organization in two ways.
1) It holds gender marks before identity, which means anyone doesn't live accordingly to their gender marks or try to define themself  independently  the will be forced to obey by isolation, dehumanization, and physical violence. These persons form the oppressed group of patriarchy. Similarly people who are good at showing their appropriate gender marks well or actively and passively enforce them to others in their lives form  the beneficiary group of patriarchy.
2) As we have said before patriarchy puts femininity as inferior and with this way constructs a disdain towards femininity. Femininity can only be tolerated when is subservient to masculinity. Actively embracing it in a way that defies that is the worst sin of patriarchy. Based on that alone, feminine marked people and objects is treated lesser than masculine marked counterparts economically, socially and culturally. Here the beneficiary group is masculine marked group and oppressed group is feminine marked group.
These two different axis of oppression exists together which puts most people beneficiary or oppressed relative to others. This is not on a linear scale and depends heavily on personal circumstances. This is where the idea of intersectionality comes in; to tackle different sides of opression together. But it doesn't take things far enough. Not only they are intersected with each other, disdain towards femininity is the core of patriarchy and primary function of gender marks is maintaining it, thus everything can be used as gender mark is a fundamental issue which needs to tackle by feminism. In other words, patriarchy  is directly and inseparably related to sexual orientation, trans genderness, non binary, gender non conformity, race, ethnicity and disabilities, thus any meaningful feminism cannot be conceived separately from them. This is also important because patriarchy sometimes tries to mold certain parts of identity in order to make them assimilate and non damaging to patriarchy. We will now look at the relationship between patriarchy and certain parts of identity.

Patriarchy and Sexual Orientation

Orientations other than heterosexuality defies patriarchy by people of such orientation's rejection of their gender-marked reproductive roles and getting "inappropriate" ones. This happen in such specific ways:
1) Homosexuality: Under patriarchy sex is thought as one way relationship with man as the active and woman as the passive one. Thus, having sex with a man is perceived as feminine act. For lesbians, it gets doubly worse because not only having sex with a woman is perceived as masculine but femininity becomes independent of masculinity.
With the increase in gay acceptance, there is a shift of rhetoric from homomisic people: "I am not anything against gays, they should be just not so visible and flamboyant." This makes it clear the root of homomisia is the disdain of femininity, rather than the existence of men who rubs their flesh to each other. In fact many cultures which were otherwise highly patriarchal has been open to male gay relationships, as long as you are not "feminine about it". The current homomisic rhetoric wants a similar type of assimilation.
2) Bisexuality and pansexuality: Bi/pan people extra hated because on top of oppression they cannot ever be assimilated in the same way. Bi/pans cannot be isolated like gay relationships without any harm to "real relationships", even when bi/pan people happened to be only have relationship with one gender only. Their flexibility break the straight/gay relationship dichotomy, to fix this they are demanded to deny themselves and "pick one". It's important that this not only comes from straight people but also gays and bi/pans themselves. When gays invalidate bi/pans for not being "truly queer" and "straight passing", they just turn around the patriarchy's rhetoric, even sometimes wanting to be a beneficiary group towards them. Bi/pans can also do same thing to themselves; policing whether people are not "true bi" or "true pan", demanding certain rules how they live their relationships as if still try to fit them somewhere in straight/gay relationship dichotomy.
3) Asexuality and greysexuality: Not partaking in reproduction or pursuit of relationships at all defies patriarchy, after all gender is constructed primarily around that. While often not as visceral or large-scale as hatred of other orientations, nevertheless oppression of the ace-spectrum is real and gay,bi,pan people can be just as guilty about it as straight people. Denial of identity, various attempts at "correction" and living in a sex-obssesed culture are important as other problems, after all that would be like claiming homomisia is over when mass murdering and detention of gay people is no longer present.
Patriarchy and Trans genderness, Non-Binary identities, Gender Nonconformity
In general, having non-conforming identities and lifestyles are oppressed proportional to how little they conform, but being non conforming towards femininity will be punished more heavily because it also makes femininity independent.
1)Trans masculine identity: Trans-masc people are invalidated for not being enough masculine marks, such as having a penis or not being tall. They are also often shamed for not wanting to be masc. enough when they don't present in a certain way. They are claimed to be wanting to be a man solely for male privileges, often by trans misic feminists. Over visibility of trans femmes makes them harder to voice their issues. They risk embracing toxic ways of masculinity when they conflate their aversion and dysporia towards femininity with the disdain of femininity in patriarchy.
2)Trans feminine identity: For most transmisic people being trans is "a man in the women clothes" and the primary thing they take offense of is that. It's inconceivable to patriarchy that an AMAB person would "give up" the men identity to embrace feminine marks as a whole. It is called a fetish(autogynephlia), someone one does to trick people, infiltrate women's spaces, for winning sports, attention, fame, something would be done in the name of comedy and absurdity...There is hardly anything in universe that makes disdain of femininity so crystal clear. Trans fem. hatred gets a special name, trans-misogyny, to highlight this. Trans fem. are shamed when they are not feminine enough and shamed when are "too" feminine. They are called "trap" because cis man cannot accept being attracted to trans women. Trans women are so overly visible because actively living and sowing an independent femininity is so revolting to the patriarchal world. This, along side with uncritical anti-masculine rhetoric can lead to the exclusion of trans masc people. Even though masculinity is very harmful to a lot of us both personal and toxic social ways we shouldn't forget our enemy is disdain of femininity.
3)Non-binary, androgynous identity and intersex people: While some patriarchal cultures have maintained a third gender alongside a strict binary system, for a lot of cultures and today's non-binary identities, being outside of binary means breaking gender binary completely, asserting your own identity before gender marks and freely embracing or abandoning them simply make patriarchy collapse, thus it's response is to complete denial and the full repression of the identity. Patriarchy assimilates some trans people to do this as well, trans people who think they have become the authority on trans people or putting strict rules on being trans and streamlining transness to make it digestible to patriarchy.
Androgynous presentation, bodies and intersex people are oppressed fo not being able to mark them easily, when taken to the extreme but common end this results in mutilation of intersex kids to "properly" gender-mark them.
4)Gender non conformity among cis people: While it's not the level of trans/nb people, being highly non conforming cis person in daily life can be troublesome, especially when being non conforming male and in some places, once again for it celebrates femininity. Patriarchy assimilates this by assigning them specific importance and meaning, often as a fetish or comedy, creating special constructs such as cross dressing and drag culture. They can be toxic when they are equated with trans genderness.
Female non conformity is not being seen revolting as the male one, thanks to main focus in first wave and second wave feminism being "women being able to the things men do". While being highly important to liberation of femininity, patriarchy nevertheless found a way to assimilate it as well. Not only "women empowerment" has been absorbed to making it all about substance rather than anything revolutionary(more women prison guards for example), it became a tool against femininity. Most mainstream feminists didn't count that a rigorous push for being able to more masculine or gender-neutral without inspection would just oppress femininity in a different way, and in more reactionary branches femininty is openly shamed and treated as something to escape from all together.

Patriarchy and Race

A non-white feminine marked person, for example a black woman, not experiences racism and sexism together but also finds their race gender-marked as well. While different ethnicities had different ideas of what femininity and masculinity is, due to colonialism and globalization white patriarchal ideas has spread everywhere like a virus and they are effective everywhere.
1)Black people: Physical attributes and behaviour of black people overall are heavily masculine-marked. This results for black women to a opression that is called misogynoir, they are found "big, fat, hairy and loud" and not having "true beauty" of white women. Black trans women find even a harder time to "pass" well. In contrast black men are found masculine in the wrong ways, "too brutish and savage", in contrast to white man's intellectually superior and elegant masculinity, but it too can be fetishized in the form of "cucking porn" for example
It's important to note that white women are often beneficiary relative to both black men and women in patriarchy, benefitting black women's efforts in radical movements without crediting them and carrying a special status of protection against black men which reactionary women often use in earning fame and attention in racist movements.
2)Asian people: Orientalism results in gender marking Asians as feminine, an insulting attribute for the men and a fetishizing attribute fo the women. Agency of Asian women is discarded to idealized them as perfect submissive, house women.
3)"Exotic" people: Latinx women and women of other "exotic" races, sometimes black women included, can be seen as "exoticly hot", "untouched","wild","natural". Their men are usually get treated as "dirty", "loud" or fetishized as "exotic womanizers".

Patriarchy and Disabilities, Fatness, Defects, Neurodivergence

People often experience ableism and sexism together and in distinct ways. But nevertheless disabilities and having unusual bodies can amplify patriarchal oppression.
1)Problems about reproduction: Since gender is constructed around reproductive systems, not having functional reproduction systems can be oppressive to a lot of people. Cis men are pressured to prove things like being good at sex and having children. Trans men may be denied to breed children as fathers. Women's worth is measured by being able to breed children and their womanhood heavily invalidated when they can't do so, and their sexuality is heavily controlled, in extreme cases banning abortions and female genetic mutilations, Trans women are not considering women because they can't breed it all. Some feminists once again are swallowing patriarchal rhetoric by defining themselves around reproductive organs o assert their independence, for example "pussy hat", calling trans women lucky because "they don't have to bleed and deal with pain" while in reality this triggers heavy dysporia fo a lot of them and going full reactionary by saying trans women lacking vagina or XX chromosomes makes them unable to not have "biological" woman experiences, even though most sexual characteristics of the body comes from puberty, which is what HRT essentially does to body.
2)Fatness and "ugly" bodies: While fat and "ugly" men have to deal with a lot of problems too, women have much worse in general, with culture obsession over perfect female body, tying women's beauty to their whole worth, entire industries to exploit this which often results in trauma and even death for young women, even more strict gate keeping for trans women, having close to no representation in culture.
3)Mental illnesses: They are often seen as trivial or easily exploitable. They are usually harder for men because seeking help and emotional outlets besides anger are marked as feminine. But some mental illnesses, especially related to lose of rational thought such as hysteria and paranoia are feminine marked. Mental ilnesses are also used as a tool against attacking non-straight people, trans people and non gender conforming people in general.
4)Autism: Autism and Asperger's are commonly masculine-marked, with the usual stereotypes about being "socially inept but super intelligent" is seen as masculine traits, pseudoscience over autistic people having more "male brain", virtually no representation of feminine marked autistic people in media.

Reactionary Feminism

Reactionary feminism is the type that while being interested on abolition of patriarchy on paper but either their methods only end up reinforcing the disdain of femininity or earning male privileges for a certain group of woman the exclusion of other feminine marked people. Different groups of reactionary feminism can easily and often do blend together.
1)White feminism: At best, white feminism undermines POC women's achievements and make them even less visible; at worst, it's integrated into white supremacist ideals to earn privileges from white men at the expense of POC women.
2)Trans exclusionary feminism: TERFs, or "gender critical" as they like to call themselves , claim gender is a opressive structure and we should just pretend only sex exist, women are obsessed by their biology alone. At it's best it has no materialistic substance, social constructs, especially a strong and deeply rooted one like gender, doesn't vanish by wishing them away and the whole premise is faulty because sex doesn't exist outside of gender. When asked for a plan they call for gender-neutralization of culture, but they can't offer anything other than reverting to default masculine states. Because they have nothing material to offer and looking at oppression from a essentialist way is self-paralyzing their ideas as a whole hold little relevance. To make up for it they make an imaginary enemy in trans women with various conspiracy thoughts and lots of pseudo-science, primarily claiming people are being free in getting their own identity somehow "enforce" gender more, while patriarchy is deeply geared to enforce a strict binary instead.
TERFs themselves aren't very dangerous overall, they are a loud minority. Their real threat comes by 1) Presenting their more palatable but still deeply essentialist arguments via more respectable mainstream channels along with a veneer of skepticism and scientific pursuits. 2) This opens an umbrella for people who are not actually feminists at all spread anti trans rhetoric easier.
3)Sex worker exclusionary/Anti-sex feminism: By conflating sex trafficking with sex work itself and by equating porn industry with porn itself, SWERFs reach to the conclusion the best way to liberate women who are working in these women is completely banning them all. Alongside the fact that making an industry illegal never actually stops people profiting from them and just makes everything worse for the workers, there is no real basis that selling your body for sex is not inherently more exploitative than ,say, selling your body for coal mines unless you think sex is a uniquely degrading thing, which most SWERFs accept and even asserts women being open about their sexuality at all is oppressive. This is yet another example of self-destructive essantialist thinking ending up reflecting patriarchical ideals.
4)Misandrist feminism: While nowhere near as mainstream as anti-feminist claim and there is no systemic misandry from woman, there is a small group of feminists who says masculinity and men are being inherently bad and reverse the relation of oppression. These arguments do nothing for liberation of femininity, only end up amplifying already existing misandry in the patriarchy, especially when more mainstream channels repeat ideas like "Men cannot be targets of abuse and rape", "Certain men are indeed virgin losers!" Because of its essentialism it's usually heavily transmisic too, usually claiming if you have a certain type of meat your behaviours will be fixed in some ways. It's held by women who wants to be special and privileged by assigning themselves some sort of "inner goodness" and "purity"
5)Liberal feminism: By liberal feminism, we mean feminism that supposes its goals can be accomplished within capitalism. At best, it will betray its own radicalism by not being able to help worker women that much and at worst it will be content by having more capitalist and rich women on the shoulders of worker women. Most feminists accept that economy plays a huge role in maintaining patriarchy, then destroying old economic relations completely is the only logical solution to abolition of patriarchy.
That being said, this doesn't mean feminist struggle is worthless in capitalism at all. To the contrary patriarchy is such a deeply rooted oppression, it needs to be fought at every opportunity, including socialist spaces, and for important short-term goals liberal feminists can even be allies, provided they don't hold other toxic ideas.

Revolutionary Feminism

What should a revolutionary type of feminism aim to?
1) We need to exalt gender identity independent of gender marks and enforce them as personal. Good thing is trans and NB people do this by merely living openly, we need to support them wholeheartedly in this non-exhuastive ways:

• Normalize the prefix "cis" and personal pronoun usage including unusual ones
• Sincerely accept even the "weirdest" genders
• Support all trans people's transitioning by providing healthcare they want, no conditions with full informed consent
• Don't question people's transness, at all. Accept them on your word. Yes, they can change their opinion. Act like you have always know them with their gender and current name, especially in a public space. Don't misgender them knowingly and put some effort so you won't do so
• Stop caring about people's "biological" sex unless they are your patient. You cannot personalize gender with accepting one of the heaviest gender marks as a constant. This means some women have penises, some men have uteri. Besides sexual characteristics, even the shape of brain do change with transition anyway.
• Bigotry isn't a super evil thing. Everyone can be problematic. When people tell you are being so, listen and re-evaluate yourself.
• Don't put yourself before trans/NB people. Amplify their voices, even if you are trans, don't assume singular trans experience
• More space for trans creators and trans representation.
• When specifying gender isn't necessary, use a gender-neutral variant. Actively resist genderization everywhere as much as possible, especially when raising children. Avoid gender marking of racially coded things and things related to health. Don't fall into the trap of pushing femininity away and don't tell trans people they are being stereotypical.
• Full support of people presenting and expressing their gender in the ways they want.

2) Celebrate, encourage and support femininity! We stressed the disdain of femininity as the core element of oppression in patriarchy. Abolition of patriarchy truly hinges on making femininity free, personal , equal to and harmonious with masculinity and androgynity and something which exist not to control you but connect with yourself. How to do this? First, we need a revolutionary definition of gender marks. Normally gender marks are pre-determined by society. But in our definition, femininity can be:

• Everything a person of feminine gender does, has and identifies with to express themselves
• Everything a person of non fem. gender does in order to connect with femininity

Similarly masculinity is:

• Everything a person of masculine gender does, has and identifies with to express themselves
• Everything a person of non masc. gender does in order to connect with masculinity

And androgynity is:

• Everything a person of androgyne gender does, has and identifies with to express themselves
• Everything a person of non androgyne. gender does in order to connect with androgynity.

Here are three examples:

• A trans woman can have a penis, which is a feminine penis. She can wear pink clothes to feel more feminine. She can also wear suits and still perfectly feminine. But she might want to connect with masculinity and prefer shorter hair for herself.
• A cis man can have an intersex sexual organ, which is masculine regardless how it looks. He can closely look after his kids and can interpret it as masculine behavior. He can also want to be more feminine for a while and try out heels.
• An agender person might accept "they" only to stress their gender neutrality, might wear make up to express androgyny, but want to build some muscles to look more masculine.

In essence what we are doing here is making gender marks, less about social perception and more about one's personal satisfaction with themselves. For us, this is what "smashing gender norms" is all about, total freedom of defining and expressing yourself in a way that is comfortable with you, without any interference from society. Of course current social norms can't just be ignored away, this is why allowing people to connect their gender is important, it allows the transformation of the social identity into a personal one, eventually neutralize its gender for everyone.
This is easier to do with masculine norms, with its being the dominant force and  most masculine norms are being neutralized to certain degree. But under patriarchy this rarely happens to feminine norms, obviously. This is why our cultural revolution is to personalize gender norms and make femininity to hold equal worth as masculinity, the more this is accepted, the less masculinity can be toxic, as toxic masculinity too exists due to disdain of femininity, eventually perhaps one day we will completely change the patriarchal relation into a true egalitarian one.
So once again, support femininity and challenge everything that does otherwise. Some examples:

• Small daily things: For example, allowing women to be assertive is great! But perhaps a more radical idea is to challenge the idea you need to be perceived masculine to be taken seriously;which means people can speak softly and be still taken seriously!
• Representation: Why should be heroism associated with male behavior. Allow highly feminine people to save stuff while being highly feminine
• Education and role models: Teaching children emotions, occupations, clothing, appearance, behavior and objects as gender neutral as possible and for boys should be not scared out of being gender non conforming. More nonconforming people, especially men who are not afraid of their feminine side as role models will help a lot.

3) Support all sexual orientations, including "weird" ones and once again respecting individual choice is the rule!
4) Support full positive consent regarding to all things related to the body. A type of consent that is aware of power relations, which means children cannot consent to sex. And don't allow policing of women's bodies of any kind, including reactionary feminists.
5) Be actively anti racist and anti-ableist, how to do those is the topic of other texts,  perhaps written by people who know more than this writer.
6)Fight for socialism!