i know it’s totally unrelated to your post (which is great! but i got not much to say about it ^^), but i was wondering if you knew any nonwhite, or poor, or etc, Woman who had wrote books, or blogs or else, and who would share a similar anti-intersectional analysis than yours. i’ve researched a lot, and very frustratingly never found anything at all! 😦

obviously yours is on the whole quite extensive and excellent already, but i guess that an insider viewpoint on “oppressed” men’s activist groups, or more generally a personal account from the other side would be a plus.

anyhow, i love your politics! i’m new to all of it but on the whole i follow you quite far (not entierly, but it’s not the place to discuss it 😉 ), and i think you are indisputably a downright brilliant radical feminist theorist/analyst.

wish you the best.

sparklz

Also, I wonder how much of the (second wave) feminism had to do with middle class women having more time together to discuss things, etc. All these women who were housewives who got together all the time and began to notice things.

Lots to think about here.

Appointment-Friendships is really the model we see everywhere for women; in fact it seems that even women who have the time and material means for longer and/or deeper connections with other women can’t reach past it.

When I recall my teenage years, and the discussions I had with my best friend at that time it feels more like I was spending time than connecting, and actually spending time “next to her” rather than “with her”. We already both had a lot of self hate thanks to patriarchal conditioning and we were so disconnected from other women, from the simple reality that we were also young women…The friendships and relationships men shared in every media were shown as much more complex an meaningful than anything women could share, but of course we were not like other women…

Ultimately though my friend had to face the fact that we were, and replaced me with male “best friends” she kept idealizing until they became her boyfriends and/or betrayed her. Weirdly enough I didn’t feel bad as our friendship died before my eyes. I could see it and feel it but watching her drown in feminity, painting her submissivness as transgressive as she pushed me away like an old memory from the time she was a “loser” did not really hurt me. It seemed nothing valuable was lost, since there was nothing valuable to begin with.
I’m only 26 and yet this friendship feels like a fuzzy memory from a very distant past.

I was also particularly strucked by one of my family member, who regularly travel around the world with her female friends, brings back incredible stories and thousands of pictures from each travel, can drive for several days in the desert and dive around shark whales and yet fails to connect on a deeper level with women.
She sees nothing remotely valuable in a woman-only group or activity and informed me several times of her boredom with her friends, (whose self hating-hetero-grooming is as successfull as hers btw), and insinuated her travels would be more interesting if some dude-“friends”(?) were with her. She clearly stated to me that a group of women without a male felt “lesser”, that something was missing, like some sort of patriarchal yin yang balance bullshit lol.
The funny thing is that she actually travelled with males, in fact one of them happened to be the boyfriend of one of her female friends and he was a fucking asshole who nearly ruined everything; she had to separate with both of them…of course. The other disaster she had during a travel, which cost her a friendship was also due to some guy’s shit. No surprise.

Also segregated spaces, yes. It’s glaringly obvious how important and vital these are, especially seeing how trans rage over them. The classic “it’s conservative!” cry from the Left is also 100% fallacious and only here to gaslight women into thinking mixed spaces are neutral and/or progressive by default when they are actually hetero-spaces. ( I don’t have the book to confirm but I think Janice raymond talked about the “hetero relational world” in “A passion for friend”- also I’m not 100% sure but one of the reason japan supposedly closed some of its girl schools was fear of encouraging lesbianism? I don’t exactly remember where I read this, maybe the comments Cherryblossmlife’s old blog; that said I would not be surprised if this was a real concern since from the accounts of students themselves lesbianism seems more accepted in girl schools generally).

My mother actually feels an overwhelming nostalgia for the few months she spent in an all-girl pensionary in her teens. She told me about the friendships she formed, the laughs, the jokes. Of course considering our conditionning as females born and raised in patriarchy, an all girl/all women group is not guarantee of great connections, like I said earlier; but it seems she really found something unique in that place. Whenever she talks to me about it, her tired eyes light up and energy seems to flow back to her body.
Yet she lost contact with her pensionary friends and only found two of them again thirty years later, whith whom she practice the art of Appointment-Friendship around a restaurant table one time a year, talking about children, grandchildren, husbands..

Sometimes I wonder if some of those girls in that pensionary managed to stay in close contact through the years, nourish a deeper friendship and/ eventually fall in love.

The loss of female friendships is really hurtful. I noticed a long time ago that the strength of men in our culture has a lot to do with how they stick together, and how we are to follow them around, prioritizing them (literally and geographically). Women dont stick together, but it’s because the western worlds designed to keep us apart, not because women inherantly dont bond.

When hetero, It’s so common for your friend to basically disappear when she gets a BF/married, that’s its expected. If her husbands job moves, they all move. And while these days, you might move for a womens job, this isn’t the norm at all. Even if it was, it’s damaging, because every move means severed friendships. Capitalism and patriarchy LOVE this destruction of relationship and communities, it benefits both.

All this movement, and (hetero) women hitching themselves to their men, means no real friends. And the ones you DO get to make are often unavailable to you when their men are around. I found this the major down side to the stay at home mom club- you (may) get a group of women to be friends with, but if their man or kids need something, you are a distant consideration. I get the idea of “family first”, but if we cant have peiority, ever, how good offriends can you be.

Alsi, if their husbands job moves, her kid switches schools, or your kids don’t get along, well, you won’t see her anymore. Unless she is determined to see you, which is rare but exists.

I know. I recently thought I had a great friend; we shared chores, kids, time, etc. We saw each other everyday, even though the instant her husband came home, it was over. Then she got a job, put her kid in preschool, and it’s like I never knew her. Literally, she may as well be on Mars for as often as I even get a text.
And this is constant in today’s USA. Female friendships are so low priority they only exist when nothing else is there to take the time up.

I think that the that had good friends growing up, and were able to stay in that area, have it somewhat better. But women here never have what men do. A stable group of friends that’s put first.

This has a dehumanising impact. I think this unintentional impact intersects with male socialisation to deter female homorelationality and throw suspicion and derision on female-driven activities and projects. To redirect female energies towards caring for males. Which is also reinforced by the capitalist structural need for basic welfare to be provided as cheaply and privately as possible. Those things work well together as the de facto agreement is that women do this work.

[Thanks for this piece by the way witchwind.]