Hey, You Guys, It Is Now ‘Anti-Feminist’ to Say Feminists Are ‘Not All Lesbians’

Posted on | December 28, 2015 | 53 Comments

Carmen Rios (@carmenriosss) has described how she “became a women’s studies major and a raging lesbian feminist in college.” She is communications coordinator at the Feminist Majority Foundation. She speaks on behalf of the movement, and Carmen Rios is tired of hearing heterosexual women say the wrong thing:

3 Things ‘We’re Not All Lesbians’ Is
Really Saying (And Why It’s Anti-Feminist)
I came out and of age in the feminist movement, which means that I have done a lot of work alongside straight women – a lot of which has centered around bringing people into the movement, educating folks about what feminism is, dispelling myths about what it isn’t, and doing modern-day consciousness raising to get more people involved on a global level.
And it’s in those feminist recruitment spaces that I find that many well-intentioned, totally awesome, usually straight colleagues pull out an old and tired line we’re all familiar with: “We’re not all lesbians!”
Unfortunately, many of the myths about feminism that scare people away are more concerned with who feminists are than what we do or believe in.
People are worried we’re all bra-burning, man-hating, witchcraft-practicing lesbians who refuse to shave and don’t give a damn about looking good.
To which I say: So what if we are?
If all feminists were queer women with unshaved legs who embraced their bodies regardless of what they looked like and gathered in the woods to cast spells, I wouldn’t give a damn. Because none of that matters! . . .
Feminism is a movement that’s based in breaking norms.
It’s often perceived as being, first and foremost, about breaking gender norms. . . . Feminism rejects a gender binary that pits women against men, and then renders them subordinate. And feminism rejects the idea that there is any part of our genders or sexualities that should be dictated by other people’s expectations. . . .
No, we’re not all lesbians. But some of us are. That’s one of the things that makes up the fabric of the modern-day feminist movement and shapes its direction. And that’s why proudly telling people “we’re not all lesbians” isn’t okay.
When we apologize for the things that make feminism radical or the aspects of our community and movement that smash normative ideas, we misrepresent what we’re all about.

You can read the rest, but my question is, if feminists are “not all lesbians,” why not? Or, to express the same idea differently: How could a feminist be heterosexual? As Carmen Rios says, feminists are against “gender norms” and believe that the “gender binary . . renders [women] subordinate.” She herself feels complete revulsion toward males. A “raging lesbian feminist” like Carmen Rios would consider it an insult if anyone so much as implied that she might ever be romantically interested in a male. Her feminism is at least logically coherent.

What is mystifying is when Carmen Rios says she has “done a lot of work alongside straight women.” Who are these women? How does feminist heterosexuality happen without reinforcing the “gender binary”? And what about the males who are (allegedly) involved with these (allegedly) heterosexual feminists? Exactly what purpose do these males serve in the lives of feminist women? Because feminism denies that males have any distinct social role or function, it is logically impossible that a feminist would ever actually need a man. Why, then, would a man wish to associate with a woman who considers him useless?

If a woman actually likes men, why is she a feminist? Why does she support a movement that condemns men for their “privilege” and tells women that relationships with males are oppressive?

When we talk about the norm, we’re talking about a series of hurtful and oppressive social structures that maintain imbalances of power.
The norm is patriarchy, white supremacy, classism, heterosexism, cissexism, and a slew of other systems of privilege all wrapped up into one tiny phrase. . . .
It’s societal norms that tell us women should do all they can to please and attract men, and then define themselves in relation to those men. . . .
And it’s societal norms that define queer women — and lesbians in particular — as unattractive, broken people who failed to fit into that rigid set of expectations.

Carmen Rios wrote that, and we can be certain she believes it is acceptable for lesbians to “do all they can to please and attract” women, “and then define themselves in relation to those” women. Feminists enthusiastically approve of lesbian relationships. It is only heterosexual relationships that feminists criticize, denouncing them as expressions of “patriarchy,” “heterosexism” and “systems of privilege.” It is only heterosexual relationships that feminists condemn as “hurtful and oppressive social structures that maintain imbalances of power.”

Feminists do not believe any woman should ever do anything “to please and attract men.” Feminists believe women should “smash normative ideas” by rejecting all “societal norms.” Because feminism is an anti-male movement, it is also necessarily an anti-heterosexual movement.

Carmen Rios understands this, which is why she is correct to say it is “anti-feminist” to say feminists are “not all lesbians.”

And aren’t we all glad she said it?

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

53 Responses to “Hey, You Guys, It Is Now ‘Anti-Feminist’ to Say Feminists Are ‘Not All Lesbians’”

Al_the_Fish
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:51 am

Shorter Carmen Rios, not all feminists are lesbian, but I wish they were.
Julie Pascal
December 28th, 2015 @ 2:16 am

The gender binary is science. It’s simple biology. It’s evolution and genetic recombination. That men tend to be larger and spread their genetic material (or have the ability to do so) quickly and easily and women tend to be smaller and invest a year of gestation and several years of nursing on a single successful reproductive event does not pit women against men and… what if it does?

It doesn’t pit anyone against anyone just because this happens to be how humans are designed to pass on their genetics… but what if it does? Looking at the truth and saying, “but I don’t like that much, I’m simply going to pretend that something else is true,” is called being insane.

Not liking that something is true doesn’t make it not true. And IF the way humans reproduce pits us against each other (instead of, say, encouraging us to form cooperative units) then being upset about that is a bit like being upset that one can’t breathe underwater and deciding that because breathing air is unacceptable for philosophical reasons that what we’ve really got is gills… when we don’t.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
December 28th, 2015 @ 3:19 am

Misogyny!
CrustyB
December 28th, 2015 @ 8:48 am

“100% of women do not equal three-quarters of one percent of people who are weird sexual deviants with short hair, straight-cut jeans and lumberjack shirts and can’t naturally reproduce with their mates.”
Only a liberal would interpret a simple statement of fact as an “ism” of some kind.
RS
December 28th, 2015 @ 8:57 am

If, as feminist posit, relationships between men and women are zero-sum and inevitably lead to an imbalance of power, then why should relationships between women alone be any different? Indeed, the entire Progressive/Leftist agenda is predicated upon such zero-sum thinking. The relationships do not have to be sexual. Rather, for the Progressive/Left, all human interaction is zero-sum and it is the drive to reverse the imbalances of power–not eliminate them–which animates their movement. It is never about equality, because for the Leftist, equality can never exist, as all the ranting about various “privileges” indicates.
McGehee
December 28th, 2015 @ 9:08 am

“…but I wish ~~they were~~ the ones that aren’t would shut up.”

FTFY. 😉
McGehee
December 28th, 2015 @ 9:10 am

“Gender” is a linguistic term, and is rarely binary as most languages that have gender rules also have a neuter gender.

What’s binary, according to science, is sex.

Come on people, it’s not a bad word. It doesn’t even have four letters.
robertstacymccain
December 28th, 2015 @ 9:28 am

What strikes me is the way feminists assume as their premise that women cannot possibly benefit from voluntary cooperation with men in the context of normal heterosexual relationships. No, all such relationships — boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, mother and father — are pre-emptively condemned by feminist theory as “hurtful and oppressive social structures that maintain imbalances of power.” This characteristic feminist assumption, that all male-female relationships are essentially coercive, characterized by “male dominance” and “female subordination,” denies the possibility of any natural basis for cooperation between men and women.

Every husband in a happy and enduring marriage with whom I have ever spoken describes his wife as “The Boss.” Whatever work the good husband does outside the home, in his domestic relations his job is to “keep Mama happy, because if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” Or to invoke another common saying, “Happy wife, happy life.”

As I say, this is the attitude of husbands in every successful marriage with which I am familiar. A good wife is a blessing, and a smart husband is grateful for that blessing, gratitude he expresses by attempting to make his wife happy. I say “attempting,” because husbands often express dismay at the difficulty of securing domestic tranquility without constant effort.

When I read feminist accounts of marriage as an institution of “male dominance,” I am sincerely mystified. Who are these women? Where do they get these ideas? My suspicion is that they must be dealing with spoiled “mama’s boys” who, having been over-indulged by their doting mothers, expect women to kowtow to their demands. This is not, however, a problem for which the “patriarchy” is to blame. It’s just bad parenting — a failure to prepare children properly for adult life — and is has its origin in permissive liberal attitudes.
Ilion
December 28th, 2015 @ 9:29 am

Indeed.
AND using the word ‘gender’ when you mean ‘sex’ is surrendering to leftist thought policing.
robertstacymccain
December 28th, 2015 @ 9:30 am

It’s the Competitive Victimhood Derby, in which everyone strives to be the most oppressed.
Hey, You Guys, It Is Now ‘Anti-Feminist’ to Say Feminists Are ‘Not All Lesbians’ | Living in Anglo-America
December 28th, 2015 @ 10:47 am

[…] http://theothermccain.com/2015/12/28/hey-you-guys-it-is-now-anti-feminist-to-say-feminists-are-not-a… […]
NeoWayland
December 28th, 2015 @ 11:34 am

Not all lesbians are feminists.

Not all feminists are lesbians.

Did you really expect me to say anything else?
Fail Burton
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:16 pm

Rios is saying exactly what the useful idiot SJWs in SFF, comics and video gaming are in denial about: their ideology was crafted by lesbians for lesbians. It is not “feminism” in the most agreed upon definition those useful idiots are most familiar with, which is equal legal rights.

This is a perfect example of how hate speech is mainstreamed. At one end you have the hateful supremacist bigots like Rios who maintain this ideology today and who learned it from foundational texts 1970-90 by Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, etc. At the other end are the useful idiots such as John Scalzi in SFF who is clueless about the virus he has helped spread. SJWs in SFF openly laugh at the idea their ideology is lesbian liberation ideology even while another useful SFF SJW author idiot like Chuck Wendig personally lobbied Disney for more gays in his new Star Wars movie tie-in.

These are the male feminist retards who refer to us who push for due process, free speech and equal protection as “shitlords.” Meanwhile Scalzi is famous for his “free speech” “banhammer” the entire cult for their “#JustListen” hashtag in regard to believing what any woman or non-white says about sexual assault or harassment or racism, because the sweet little inhuman darlings never lie.
Steve Skubinna
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:18 pm

So this is the feminist equivalent of “All lives matter… nuh-uh!!! BLACK lives matter!!!”

More incoherent shrieking from frenzied nihilists.
Fail Burton
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:20 pm

Well, I understand what you mean but it’s common practice in their cult and so it is appropriate to use it when trying to unpack their cult. More importantly, their use of gender does in fact have linguistic origins in terms of how “performative” gay feminism works, namely the linguistic theories about the “performative” Judith Butler borrowed from Monique Wittig and also Jacques Derrida and he from J. L. Austin.
Fail Burton
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:24 pm

That derby derives from the concept of “intersectionality” baked into gay feminism from the start but not really heavily promoted until 1988. Lesbians said they were twice as oppressed as straight women, black lesbians claimed another intersection of oppression and the race to the bottom/top was on. I urge you to read the “diverse editors” piece in the lesbian-centric SFF rag Strange Horizons. They trot out and list their intersecting oppressions with pride like a resume, and they include everything from “genderqueer” to hearing loss.
Fail Burton
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:25 pm

Lions oppresses lionesses. Look how they howl and act with food. Just like me.
Fail Burton
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:26 pm

However this is an all-lesbian ideology, and that’s the point.
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December 28th, 2015 @ 1:37 pm

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Fail Burton
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:38 pm

What I love most about Rios’ piece is her own lack of awareness of her obsession. She says “feminism” isn’t just lesbian but then goes on to define “feminism” in ways that derive only from lesbian feminism, which is what I’ve been saying they do all along, especially the useful idiot males further down the line. Even some of the practitioners of this cult think the idea of cishet male oppressors is natural, not an ideology, and as simple an observation as looking at a river. That’s why morons like SFF author John Scalzi said straight white male privilege is as “obvious” as “gravity” when he was SFWA president. It’s as “obvious” as trees and rivers to these dimwits.
Ilion
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:38 pm

It’s my general policy to *stop* reading a comment (or article) when the author uses “she” where English grammar demands “he”. My rationale is: this guy is either a leftist … or a pussy (by which I mean he is more concerned with getting a pat on the head from the people who would just as soon he die in a wet ditch than he is in speaking the truth honestly).

With that explained — on some more philosophically inclined blogs I frequent, some of the commenters, whom I would otherwise bother to read, use this foul language. A few times, I’ve tried to explain that far from *honoring* women or the feminine, this usage denigrates them … and that it’s just surrendering the leftist thought policing. They always have excuses to hand-wave away my onjection to their conscious assault on the finest language humanity has ever built, generally involving being in academe and that being SOP there.

I wonder, now that “academe” has decided that the historical and correct gendered pronouns are “problematic”, will thise spineless pseudo-conservatives of whom I speak use “xhe” and “xir” in their “gender inclusive” writing?
Evi L. Bloggerlady
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:55 pm

Found on tumblr of course!
Evi L. Bloggerlady
December 28th, 2015 @ 1:56 pm

Cooperation is for suckas!

https://earloftaint.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/bitchwitch-gif1.gif
Fail Burton
December 28th, 2015 @ 3:21 pm

In my opinion, the women who wrote gay feminism’s foundational texts were either insane or lived on the edge of insanity.
robertstacymccain
December 28th, 2015 @ 4:12 pm

When I read things like this, I wonder what kind of background they come from, and also wonder about their lack of observation. Where do you grow up, and under what circumstances, that you can believe this kind of rhetoric. I mean, I look at the actual people I know and they don’t remotely resemble the categories the SJWs describe. The women and gay people and black people and Hispanic people I actually know do not match the “helpless victims of society” category to which SJW rhetoric confines them, and neither are the men and heterosexuals and white people the Evil Oppressors referenced by the “cishet white male” label that SJWs routinely deploy. It is obvious to me that this worldview, dividing people into categories of “oppressed” and “privileged,” is something that has been taught — a political propaganda, whether it is absorbed in school, or through media. Yet you might think that people could open their eyes and look around them and see that the world simply is not organized in this way. How intensely must one be brainwashed, or how sheltered from the real world must one be, to believe what SJWs claim to believe?
The original Mr. X
December 28th, 2015 @ 4:58 pm

My suspicion is that they must be dealing with spoiled “mama’s boys” who, having been over-indulged by their doting mothers, expect women to kowtow to their demands.

That, or they come from broken/dysfunctional homes, and so have never actually seen a successful marriage close-up.
Finrod Felagund
December 28th, 2015 @ 7:23 pm

I take a similar attitude to writing that uses CE and BCE for dates instead of AD and BC. If you want to use the Christian calendar numbering system, then use the Christian names. Otherwise that’s cultural appropriation, dammit.
Finrod Felagund
December 28th, 2015 @ 7:40 pm

My girlfriend ran across this and shared it with me, so I’m sharing it with you:

https://41.media.tumblr.com/0301f8fcd7869d163fbf7e59f6907bc3/tumblr_n82328ZaC11rpr100o1_540.png
RKae
December 28th, 2015 @ 7:58 pm

If a woman actually likes men, why is she a feminist?

Because the lie that “women make .70 for every 1.00 that a man makes” WILL… NOT… DIE.

I try this on people: “I can name an endless stream of companies that pay men and women the same. Can you name ONE that pays unevenly? And if you can, why don’t you expose them to public scrutiny?”

But, no. The “seventy cents on the dollar national average” is just… well, it’s out there, man! It’s everywhere!

“Furthermore, if I can name hundreds of companies that pay equally, then, in order for seventy cents on the dollar to be the national average, you’re going to have to show me some companies that are paying THIRTY-FIVE cents on the dollar. Can you please do that?”
M. Thompson
December 28th, 2015 @ 8:21 pm

Down with Unloved Millenials!
Jaxon12345
December 28th, 2015 @ 8:27 pm

All of those platitudes quoted from those “happy husbands” are just symptomatic of a male beta that bought into the matriarchal dominance promoted by feminism. Those “men” are not really happy, but just suffering trying to be the nice guy hoping to get laid and for validation.
Joe Guelph
December 28th, 2015 @ 8:37 pm

God Hates the Protection of Millennials?
Joe Joe
December 28th, 2015 @ 10:11 pm

The straight women who buy into extreme feminism are often from households with abusive fathers. The feminist movement allows these women to generalize all men as abusers, a feeling that they already have and which feeds the psychological projection that they are already doing.

Abused straight women can sometimes turn to other women for intimacy when they are too afraid or traumatized by past experience to have relationships with men. This feeds directly into the lesbian feminist’s desire to widen the scope of potential partners and add recruits to the hard core feminist movement.

But real victims of abuse are not enough for the movement. If you read Christina Hoff Sommers, you can easily interpret what is being done in wimmens studies classes as the deliberate creation of trauma in otherwise healthy young women. Straight women, who are forced into taking these classes as electives for college credit, are shamed for having boyfriends or husbands and are forced, by class activities, to reinterpret what their partners do as “abuse.” Sommers reports that many young straight women in these classes suffer emotionally, lose sleep, and begin to doubt their own identities.

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Stole-Feminism-Women-Betrayed/dp/0684801566#reader_0684801566

For social justice warriors, it’s not enough to intellectually extend the notion of abuse to all male behavior; trauma must be induced to make it real for the students. Classroom assignments become a “theater of cruelty” or practicing therapy without a license.

This artificially induced trauma, however, answers the real question of why today’s American women, freer and more successful than they have ever been, feel more victimized than their 19th century ancestors. The feelings are real, but the experiences that created those feelings are not.

The same works, by the way, for Black Studies/African American studies. Create artificial trauma in the classroom and turn the freest most successful black middle class that American has ever known into a seething mess of traumatic reactions against tiny words.

These classes work because the students can’t walk out. College students, especially at the Ivies and other prestigious schools, have gotten there by collecting A’s and being obedient in class. The are sitting ducks for college professors who believe that it is their job, through any means necessary, to change their students’ perception of and reaction to the world–even when they have to traumatize them.
Joe Joe
December 28th, 2015 @ 10:19 pm

Also a good read:
“http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/25203/

“…During the interview, Sommers provided insight into her past
experience as a philosophy professor who was asked to teach a course on
feminism. She said when she began reading the textbooks for the course,
she was shocked by what she described as “a series of mutually
reinforcing readings [that taught] a conspiracy theory about the
patriarchy, buttressed by inflated statistics.”

The books were filled with what she called “advocacy statistics” or
“hate statistics … designed to create…anger in women. And they happen
not to be true, but they work very well as propaganda….

….Sommers pointed out that the majority of professors are reasonable, but the unreasonable minority of professors are the loudest.

Sommers said that, to some students, these professors are
“charismatic” and that for years they have been teaching “paranoid views
of the world, and inciting rage against men, gender profiling of men,”
and that these professors “have a following…”
Gringao
December 28th, 2015 @ 11:12 pm

Mr. McCain, I am now a convert. I had some doubts, but they have been swept away. I’ve had an epiphany. I can’t put my finger on what it was that caused it, but it’s there. I’ll be reading religiously from here on out.
Jason Lee
December 29th, 2015 @ 1:26 am

Or perhaps like our venerable host, they’re alphas who can afford to make themselves the butt of a joke once in a while.
Jason Lee
December 29th, 2015 @ 1:36 am

…characterized by “male dominance” and “female subordination”….

Feminists have been very successful in convincing nearly everyone — without evidence — that “male dominance” is necessarily coercive, undesirable and a source of great unhappiness.
Jason Lee
December 29th, 2015 @ 1:50 am

…it is the drive to reverse the imbalances of power–not eliminate them–which animates their movement. It is never about equality…

Yes. They fantasize about “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”, ascribing to themselves the requisite power of omniscience for their license to afflict.
Jason Lee
December 29th, 2015 @ 1:51 am

This is why all the Tumblrinas list their afflictions at the top of their blogs.
concern00
December 29th, 2015 @ 2:02 am

“Feminism rejects a gender binary…”

Nothing more really needs to be said.
Fail Burton
December 29th, 2015 @ 3:19 am

Feminism is the world’s biggest buyers of dildos, a thing they are incapable of creating an industrial base to create let alone children.

Nothing more really needs to be said.

The arrogance and lack of awareness of Rios is overwhelming.
Fail Burton
December 29th, 2015 @ 3:22 am

If companies could increase their profits by simply by hiring women they would. Earnings are not wages. I am unaware of any union which allows different wages for men and women in a union shop. I am aware of women who choose not to work as much as men or in jobs that are as financially rewarding because the jobs are ball-breakers.
Fail Burton
December 29th, 2015 @ 3:38 am

It is absolutely taught and absorbed by what are essentially shut-ins. How stupid do you have to be to promote an ideology which denies our commonalities and emphasizes our differences and portray that as “social justice” or “humanitarianism”? Supremacist ideologues do that shit, not humanitarians. Can you imagine Ray Bradbury writing such trash?

Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first published (as an entire novel) in Playboy in 1954. That means a cishet patriarchal soft-porn mag from the ’50s had more self-awareness than intersectional lesbian feminist Scalzi, the then president of the SFWA who features a cartoon of himself with his censorious “banhammer,” a thing 451 opposes in principle.
Fail Burton
December 29th, 2015 @ 3:45 am

If you ever want to read a piece of creepy propaganda, try David Stannard’s American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. That dude is slick, and any young person reading that book will be unprepared to understand what it is.
Fail Burton
December 29th, 2015 @ 3:48 am

Exactly. It is an Orwellian cult of madness which calls us all mad.
Ilion
December 29th, 2015 @ 11:26 am

That, too!
If you’re not willing to call it “the year of Our Lord”, then use some other numbering scheme that isn’t based on the Incarnation of Our Lord.
Ilion
December 29th, 2015 @ 11:29 am

If first name — “Blame white abortion”
If last name — “Blame white marijuana”
Ilion
December 29th, 2015 @ 11:35 am

Besides which —

If a woman receives more for paid labor than her man does — and assuming she contributes her earnings to the family pot (for not all women do) as the man is expected to do — almost every one of those women will become dissatisfied because “he’s not doing his share”.

The point is that even aside from generally choosing less time- or committment-consuming jobs than men tend to go into — which such jobs generally pay less — women *don’t like it* when they contribute more money to the family upkeep than the man does.
DrGreatCham
December 29th, 2015 @ 5:23 pm

“If you’re not a black homosexual working class woman, you are an oppressor pig and deserve to die!”

-National Lampoon “Lemmings” 1973
Joe Joe
December 29th, 2015 @ 8:02 pm

Thanks for the head’s up.