The revolutionaries
I find it hard to believe this isn’t satire, but people tell me it’s not. Ok then – meet The five young revolutionary feminists you need to listen to.
“Just because you lop off your dick doesn’t make you a fucking woman”
This is just one regressive comment recently shit out by Germaine Greer – Australian second-wave “feminist”, writer and author of The Female Eunuch.
Her shitty statements have incited a rally of essays rightfully calling out her attempt to pitch transgender women as imposters, claiming they don’t “look like, sound like or behave like women.”
Essentially, her violent comments attempt to erase, undermine and deny the identity of transgender people, many of whom fall victim to hate crime, abuse and murder for choosing to be who they are. More widely, her comments insist on a very narrow genital-centric idea of gender, a disturbing notion that is laughable against the libratory spaces and discussions facilitating varied modes of existing in the world.
It’s easy to say Greer’s views are dated; it’s more accurate to note that she’s just plain wrong. As such, we’ve listed five young revolutionary feminists that you should be listening to instead. The voices below champion and embrace the complexities surrounding gender, race, identity, beauty and sexuality with a sharpness and intelligence that puts the Aussie author to shame.
Sharper and more intelligent than Germaine Greer, eh? And revolutionary besides! Exciting.
Beauty afficianado and Tumblr-don, Sicardi captivates readers on the daily with her comments on power, beauty, cyborgs, fashion and gender. Feminist discussion is interspersed with perfume analysis, self-care reminders, selfies and cultural critique. Her writing intelligently picks at debates around queerness and beauty that go untouched (see: “I thought I was ill because I was queer” and “Feminine beauty transwomen experience”) but there’s also something inspiring and seductive about the way she celebrates herself, her talents and her dope peers (see: Fariha Roisin…Sarah Nicole Prickett).
I took a look. She doesn’t strike me as sharper and more intelligent than Germaine Greer.
Sosa is an Argentinian and black-Brazilian artist who makes videos and teaches classes on the liberalizing and healing qualities of twerking. Her practice may sound weird to those used to appropriative media demonising twerking and the bodies of women of colour in the same breath, but it’s this oppressive climate that Sosa is out to dismantle. Her work sifts through the complex history of twerking, it’s eroticism and the self-pleasure it can afford, giving the act a cultural and academic platform (her PhD is even called Twerk and torque: new strategies for subjectivity decolonization in the web 2.0 times) that’s both timely and important.
That’s why I have a really hard time believing this isn’t satire.
Anyway. See you after the twerking revolution.
Sosa has a tweet about “pleasurable mxnstruation” and another about “orgasmic birth.” I don’t know what the fuck she’s on about.
But isn’t beauty tips, selfies, and twerking what modern feminism is all about?
Oh, I guess I’m just an old hag who doesn’t understand that today’s women are doing these things *solely* as an act of self-celebration and not at all to get social validation for following the normative expectations of the Patriarchy demanding women present themselves as sex objects.
Is it really for serious? It’s really not satire?
I’m not at all sure. Not at all sure it is, either. We live in strange times.
Poe’s Law has taken over Nth Wave Feminism.
Reading the Laurie Penny piece you had a few days back made me think that Penny is about the same age as Greer was when she wrote The Female Eunuch which was shocking, inspiring and yes, life-changing for many women who read it (me too). Not just young women but older ones too. Before then Greer had led what was then a fairly shocking, raunchy life as in her articles show in The Mad Woman’s Underclothes. Penny isn’t shocking – though she thinks she is. Others went through danger & outrage so she can present herself as daring and outrageous while she’s as safe as houses. She’s a prig who is in lock-step with her peers, and a lot of her writing is mutual grooming among a fairly large coterie. Confessionalism and victimhood are the fashion and Penny is nothing if not fashionable.
Greer is a scholar who can write books like Slipshod Sibyls and not mention herself once. Penny is a slightly better educated life-style columnist whose starting point is always herself.
Greer has written and said terrible things, especially about FGM. She is erratic, infuriating and often brilliant.
Gold star comment. Top class.
Good article here about Greer, and reminding the young ‘uns to have some respect. They wouldn’t be here where they are now without her:-
Germaine Greer wasn’t right or wrong but both, and better: she was a productively destructive force, intent on razing male dominance. She embodied the profound contradictions of her time. Unlike some more cautious, prudent, and arguably effective second-wave feminists, she didn’t have a single cause and her actions and opinions often clashed. It has become fashionable to discredit Greer as the crazy aunt of women’s liberation, but this is not her due. The early 1970s needed a blunt, unapologetic radical unafraid to jolt the movement alive. (It was a time, let’s remember, in which women could not get a mortgage without a male cosigner.) Talbot, again writing in The New Yorker, confessed to missing “Greer’s swagger.” Coupled with her intelligence, it was, perhaps, the source of her potency.
While Greer is undeniably at odds with the goals and rhetoric of today’s complex and often convoluted feminism, women’s liberation as we know it would not exist without her daring in the first place. As Helen Lewis wrote in tribute, “a softer, sweeter, more accommodating woman wouldn’t have written The Female Eunuch. Today’s feminists shouldn’t airbrush her legacy into something we find more palatable—particularly when the movement still so often demands that its pioneers also be saints.” We should resist discrediting Greer, who would have been unsuccessful if she hadn’t been defiant, flawed, abrasive, and, to use Lewis’s word, “un-sisterly.” Selena Gomez, take note. Greer was the catalyst. Let’s remember that as we rightfully tell her to get out of the way.
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/57/winant.php
“Greer was the catalyst. Let’s remember that as we rightfully tell her to get out of the way.”
No, I won’t tell her to “get out of the way”. That isn’t “right”. What a horrible message to end on. She is not “wrong” about most things…. just somewhat undiplomatic. Some 3rd wave feminists act as if that is what older feminists should do… get out of the way. Well, I, for one, will not. I’m still very much alive, I’m still effected by our patriarchal society, probably worse than ever, i have the wisdom of decades of experience, of education and am intelligent, and have to deal with a new feminism that hates their elders and does not take the interests of older women to heart…. in fact wants us to just die. And that’s the only time I’ll get out of the way… when I’m dead.
If this isn’t satire, then god help u all. A PHD in twerking and torque?
She wants to give twerking a cultural and academic platform?
She want this all the while depriving Greer of her platform?
@#6 A lot of men read it a well. Reading it was a roller coaster ride for many.
Look, lets be blunt here: I haven’t liked Germaine Greer ever since Julia Gillard was PM of Australia.
When Gillard was the Australian PM, in the midst of a storm of sexism, Greer said she wore an ugly jacket and had a fat ass.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/greer-defends-fat-arse-pm-comment-20120827-24x5i.html
Even aside the issue with trans individuals – I can well see why the younger generation may well see her as being in the way. Greer has made some very important contributions to feminism, but the fact of the matter is that she has also said some really, really stupid crap too.
But here is the important thing: if we were to no-platform everybody who has some stupid crap, we’d end up with an empty platform.
Everybody has something relevant and important to impart, with some bullshit mixed in.
Everybody can think for their own damn selves. We don’t need some jumped up thought police telling us how people shouldn’t be heard simply because they’re objectionable, we need thought.
And not in that nasty “Nobody expects the more-liberal-than-thou inquisition” kind of a way we have been seeing lately.
Greer could no more get out of the way of the revolution than you could side step an avalanche. Everybody’s ideas will get swept up at some point – better that Greer communicate them herself, at least she knows what she means.
“The 15-year-old artist, doer and thinker” … this has got to be satire.
I disagree with Greer on a lot of points, but sharper and more intelligent than her is not easy to find. What I really admire in her that she has always been a woman who stands up for what she believes in (right or wrong), who is not conciliatory, and who will not shut up to please anyone. She has done a lot for women, and we owe her and her kind a debt of gratitude, even if she is egregiously wrong about some things.
However uncomfortable and annoying they may sometimes be, when the Greers of this world die out, we’ll be in trouble. Unfortunately, it looks like that may be quite soon.
The problem is that too many people think sharp and intelligent means “agrees with me”. They never actually check the meaning of those words in the dictionary, or if they do, they find that the meaning suits their usage, because if someone was sharp and intelligent, well, of course they’d always agree with me, right?
I have met many people I disagreed with that I felt were at least as sharp and intelligent as me, and many that I felt were more so, even though I was convinced they were deluded about some things. Intelligent people need to be given permission to be wrong sometimes, and still retain their intelligence.
I think these people are often afraid that if they admit these people are sharp and intelligent, they might feel they have to engage their ideas at some level. Well, if that’s the case, then I say great. I have engaged with many ideas I found odious; I did not adopt them, but I at least examined my own assumptions to see if perhaps what I thought was wrong. And I feel like I almost always come out the better for it, especially if it makes me a little less certain I am right.
Oh, I guess I’m just an old hag who doesn’t understand that today’s women are doing these things *solely* as an act of self-celebration and not at all to get social validation for following the normative expectations
Except twerkers often get denigration rather than validation. Doing anything that strikes people as even slightly sexy attracts contempt, so women who twerk as a dance form are called insulting words for sex workers.
Katha Pollitt wrote a good essay on Germaine Greer, I think it’s in Reasonable Creatures. If “sharper and more intelligent” than Greer is not easy to find …. there’s always Lib Gen.