Thoughts on Tribalism in Feminism

There’s no other way to start this off than to begin it bluntly: Tribalism is tearing feminism apart. There’s a lot of ways we could illustrate this topic, but I’m only really going to focus on the aspects that grind my gears. Throughout history, women have never had complete control over what kind of shame was placed in their heads about their bodies, their thoughts, or their actions, and these days the power over women is wrestled between two bosses who are pretty much the same—men, or “Mother.”

What do I mean about “Mother?” Capital “M” Mother is the entity that exerts control over women when men are not present or capable to do so. It is what keeps women, especially strange or bizarre women, in line. Mother is what makes the Barbie movie into something of a horror film if you dig your teeth into it hard enough to taste blood—the isolation and rejection of the “weird” and the incredible and invisible pressure placed on every Barbie to hold the weight of perfection on her shoulders and remain unquestioning of their role in Barbieland. Barbie as a horror film in this manner is not unexplored as a topic in blogs and articles, but it does well to illustrate the shift of control that can and does occur in spaces where patriarchy simply does not exist. Though there are some woman-led cultures that can manage to resist the creation of Mother and subsist in harmony, there are also examples of co-ed cultures that can exist without patriarchy, so it’s less a natural creation and more a product of authoritarian paradigms lurking within our specific “advanced” societies.

Feminism, that is the militant kind of the 60s and 70s, did not have the time nor the patience for things like “kink” and still doesn’t if you take the “backlash” over Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend album into account. There are a certain number of feminists who are considered “SWERFs” and “TERFs” meaning Sex Worker Exclusive Radical Feminists and Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists respectively, both of which manage to openly disenfranchise the women who don’t fall in line with their particular and often denigrating viewpoints as to what a woman’s comportment or appearance should include. This seems counter-productive to feminism if you haven’t yet realized that the goal of feminism isn’t to liberate women…but to subjugate them.

Now I know what you’re thinking. JD, aren’t you a feminist? Well, I don’t know, am I? Is there a term for what I am?

As time has moved on, the schism has widened the gap between the “old” feminism and the “new” feminism. The prior is of a sex-negative Mother who threw her prostitute daughters to the wolves and forced every woman to compare herself to her sisters in order to fall into the perfect well-heeled goose-stepping matriarch. The latter is of the wild savage daughters who’ve thrown off the yolk of Mother (or so they think) to run naked through the woods and howl at the moon. The second is definitely more up to speed with the millennial generation, as we’ve seen a meteoric rise in erotic fiction written by female authors featuring all kinds of fun, kinky stuff that would’ve been scandalous only a decade prior despite the seemingly simultaneous un-sexification of television and film (not including anything directed by Robert Eggers, thank god for that man). These two styles of feminism often consider each other a detriment to women and, shockingly, they’re both right…in a way. The original Mother of the Matriarchy believes that womanhood is divine and must be protected and gatekept even at the expense of the women it purports to defend (acceptable losses include women who are assaulted entering public restrooms because they do not conform to the perfect appearance of womanhood or sex workers who end up dead or missing due to archaic prohibition on legal sex work). The Savage Daughter believes that womanhood is so sacred that it must be shared and certain subsets of these (TIRFs or Trans Inclusive Radical Feminists) believe that to transition out of womanhood is to betray. Fortunately I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole. Maybe later. The most important-for-this-blog part of our Savage Daughters is in their misinterpretation of feminism as something utterly liberating at the expense of the happiness of those who choose (as is their right) to live outside of it.

“If you choose to live your life un-liberated, you are wrong and worthy of derision” is a common thought process among those who consider themselves the ultimate arbiters of feminism in spaces dedicated to militant “savagery.” This makes a false conflation of certain items that make little sense. Much as how under Mother, flannel and bull dyke fashion is brow-raising, under the Daughter (Mother 2.0) we find that certain harmless choices that women make are similarly derided. A woman chooses to take on a traditional role and marry a traditional man and have 2.5 kids and a picket fence and all of a sudden her choices are less valid or less feminist. It’s interesting as an observer to find that Mother 2.0 often conflates kink for liberation and yet fails to recognize certain kinks right under her nose. After all…tradwifery is quite clearly a kink. Just as some folks out there do their BDSM on a 24/7 basis: so do the tradwives, but in this case they’re not sleeping in a dog cage under the bed so it’s not obvious enough to embrace.

Naturally, there are women who don’t choose this life for themselves and have been raised and conditioned under Patriarchy and an abusive community social system—but not all of them and increasingly less and less as we progress as a society under feminism. Unfortunately, no matter what new boss you manage to find, they always seem to be somewhat the same as the old boss…and it’s getting frustrating. This tribalism, this pitting women against each other under different “waves” of feminism, is counterintuitive. We are not in a position to be picking and choosing our allies under the new Regime—we must come together. We must admit at some point that all choices a woman can make are worthy of respect and that all women/people (yes, transmen and transwomen!!!) have, at some point, been cut by the blade of exclusionary feminism: something unacceptable if we are to move forward beyond the petty squabbles of “you’re doing feminism wrong.” In this day and age, feminism should be less about telling women what they’re allowed to do but encouraging her to do what makes her happiest and minding our own business when she does it. If it doesn’t hurt you in a measurable way, for god’s sake just leave it be!