feminist issues

Original post: http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/251497.html

The more I read feminist blogs instead of feminists's blogs, the more I run into a fairly pernicious meme. It goes something like "You are free to make any choice you want, so long as it is my choice." Unfortunately it isn't on the surface of the discussion, it becomes a foundational meme that no one is pulling out and looking at. Or at least no one who gets listened to. (When it has been pulled out, no one replies to those posts.)
I'm also seeing a fair amount of factual inaccuracy being written off as unimportant because the issue in question deserves condemnation. Fuck that shit. This is the fucking base tactic of the misogynistic assholes that make up the core of the neocon-religious right alloy in our country. I am all in favor of using the tactics of the bad guys against them, but not at the expense of becoming them. I'm seeing a lot of decent friendly third wave feminists retreating to the memespace that Andre Dworkin and the like helped create that facilitated the black hats' efforts to vilify the word feminist. (As a side note, I keep wanting to use the word "villainize" in these situations. I may start doing that just for the fun of it.)

To make matters worse, most of the feminists who blog (as opposed to feminist blogs) who I read have gone very quiet as late, so I'm getting more and more burnt out due to the lack of stabilizing influence from folks who, even if I disagree with them, I trust to have solid reason to back them up. The willingness to be convinced that their position doesn't encompass the entirety of a situation is nice too.

Also? The willingness/eagerness to write off other's experiences reflects very poorly on these communities. The immediate assumption that everyone, or even all of the driving factors behind something they dislike are male *cough malkin and coulter cough cough* and disparaging comments about people's sexual experience and history disturb me a lot.

The worst part is that this is less than 15% of the posts and threads on my main example, but it makes me wonder if in the other 85 to 90% of cases, I'm just not seeing that I'm taking part in these activities. (Well, actually let's call it 30 percent. Most of the posts and threads on Feministing aren't negative, so if there are memetic sins they will be different ones.)

Come back Tamora Pierce, Annie, and Elizabeth Bear! (I've got to find feminist bloggers who aren't professional writers or other absolute time sink jobs.)

(EB posts a lot, but mostly on different sorts of things than when I started reading her.)