Enemy Feminisms

by Sophie Lewis

“women are horrible” and “women are not horrible” are really two sides of the same coin, and both are bad reasons to do feminism.

To have or mention (let alone reinvent) a gender identity is for TERFs a form of individualism that holds “ordinary” women in contempt.

The cry of censorship distracts from what is, in reality, simply a refusal to engage with unwelcome lessons.

Of course it’s not necessarily “anti-woman” to explore how European feminists were active in colonial governance—for instance, in the policing of gender via eugenic education, or in sexual hygiene policy and missionary work.

How many of us have had our liberal feminism sparked, early in life, by a collision with a matrophobic (anti-mother) or femmephobic narrative that unintentionally misfired, eliciting the “wrong”

They say that “to understand all is to forgive all.” But if this is true, then a commitment to “impurity” in politics (a commitment I think of as key to anti-fascism) must walk hand in hand with the courage to draw lines and fight people if necessary. Even kin.

In other words, feminists who, like me, are committed anti-fascists—or anti-fascists who are also feminists, as they must be—need to know the difference between forgiving enemies and giving up the fight against them. This has to be crystal clear.

Contrariwise, many of us on the radical left are glad that so many of us are a problem for the survival of the present state of things. We dream, in fact, of being bigger—much, much bigger—problems.

All of us deserve the freedom and safety to be foolish. I am fond of the 1909 illustration of the “zero” card in tarot—the “Fool” card that comes before all other cards—for this reason, with its lackadaisical and unsuspecting wanderer gaily gathering flowers with her little dog on a cliff edge.

Every child deserves access to what is currently white upper-class childhood. That is, the right not to pay for ignorance with their life, and space to safely fall off cliffs. However, there is another, very different sense of the word “fool.” It’s one I almost used in the title of this book, which at one point was going to be The Feminism of Fools.

antisemitism is the socialism of fools.

It is sometimes forgotten that fascists understand themselves as an emancipatory anti-elite revolt against politics.

Do we even know when “real feminism” began? It turns out that the word itself was likely coined a few years after Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was published—a treatise itself preceded by the French revolutionary Olympe de Gouge’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791).

“growing army of shameless women.”

awesome