You may remember how, in reaction to a radical feminist’s anti-heterosexual rant — “PIV is always rape, OK?” — Twitter user @conkc2 asked, “Was she maybe dropped on her head?” In recent weeks, the radfem has been on an extended rant about “intersectionality,” the most recent installment being the fifth in the series:
Intersectionality, part V: additional notes
on amnesia and springing from Outercourse
When we can’t see men as the oppressors, men’s violence is suppressed in the unconscious realm (or in the “subliminal sea”) and what remains visible and conscious to us in the foreground is the betrayal by puppeted women orchestrated/remote-controlled by the invisible male lords/puppeteers. . . .
She actually includes two footnotes in the first paragraph to define “background” and “foreground” according to Mary Daly, a recently deceased feminist (see “‘Snools Rule’: Mary Daly and the Radical Feminist School of Atrocious Writing“). Anybody who reads much Mary Daly might start babbling like they had been dropped on their head, and our favorite radfem has read a lot of Mary Daly.
The title of the radfem’s post invokes Daly’s 1992 book, Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage, which contains 477 pages of the most deranged gibberish ever published by a tenured professor. Daly invokes “amnesia” in the first chapter of Outercourse:
When I went back to teaching in the fall of 1969 I had already begun to change drastically. I had begun to see through the particularities of my experience with Boston College to the universal condition of women in all universities and in all institutions of patriarchy. I had experienced my first explicit encounters with the demons of assimilation — especially taking the form of tokenism — and won. . . .
By Seeing and Naming the connections that had been largely subliminal in the earlier stage of Voyaging, I Moved into The Second Spiral Galaxy of my Outercourse. This involved Acts of Exorcism of the amnesia inflicted by patriarchal institutions, religion in particular, and by the -ologies which they engender and which . . . serve to legitimate them. Exorcism of amnesia required Acts of Unforgetting — Seeing through the foreground “past” into the Background Past — beyond the androcratic lies about women’s history. I found that Breaking through to knowledge of a Prepatriarchal Pagan Past opened the possibility for Radical Naming. . . .
You see what I mean about “deranged gibberish.” What Daly seems to mean by “amnesia” is that there is an unknown past — “a Prepatriarchal Pagan Past” — which has been forgotten because of myths propagated by “patriarchal institutions.” Daly’s habit of making up words can be witnessed in her coinage of “androcratic,” which means the same thing as “patriarchal,” i.e., dominated by male authority. Daly’s eccentricities of rhetoric reflect her disordered mind. It takes a special kind of crazy to cite Mary Daly in footnotes to a blog post, so let’s have a few more slices of the radfem’s rant:
Failing to see men’s oppression and turning our anger against women is fundamentally based on amnesia: our forgetting of men’s genocide. . . .
Our capacity to feel empathy towards women, to reverse the reversals and to make the connections about men’s violence is deeply and directly connected to our uncovering of the suppressed memories of what men have done to us. When we forget the oppressor, there is no other option than to turn against women, because that’s how patriarchy is configured: there is one oppressor class, men, and one oppressed class, women, and if you’re not against men, then it’s mechanically at the expense of women and of ourselves. There is no in-between, or third outlet: women are the only counterpoint to men’s violence.
To emphasize: “there is one oppressor class, men, and one oppressed class, women.” This is the radfem’s predictable answer to “intersectionality,” which Wikipedia defines as “the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities; specifically, the study of the interactions of multiple systems of oppression or discrimination. The term is particularly prevalent in black feminism, which argues that the experience of being a black female cannot simply be understood in terms of being black, and of being female, considered independently, but must include the interactions, which frequently reinforce each other.”
That is to say, black feminists don’t just want to talk about being victimized by sexism, but also by racism. “Intersectionality” is a fancy intellectual word to describe this idea, which sometimes takes the form of black feminists denouncing the “white privilege” of the majority of academic feminists who are not just whiter than Wonder Bread, but also generally from upper-middle-class backgrounds and ensconced in tenured faculty sinecures with six-figure salaries.
The first time I ever heard of “intersectionality” was in relation to the Hugo Schwyzer meltdown (see, “Sex and the Psychotic Professor“), where #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen became a hashtag pointing out that Schwyzer had dissed a black woman:
The ”retired” self-proclaimed ”male feminist” Hugo Schwyzer used to write for feminist blogs from xoJane to Jezebel, but quit after the years of ”standing up to women’s anger” had ”destroyed his mental health.” Right. . . .
Schwyzer called out a black woman who had criticized him, and no white feminists came to her defense . . .
Shanelle Matthews described the intersectionality connection:
Schwyzer, a self-identified male feminist made his claim to Internet fame by reworking and packaging up modern male feminism and selling it to online publications like The Atlantic and Jezebel, for whom he was a paid contributor, and Feministe, which featured an interview with him. Two of these three are notorious for their insensitivity and, on more than one occasion, outright disregard for the importance of intersectional feminism — that is the focal point where feminism and another powerful system meet, say for instance, race. . . . In matters of the heart, their feminist ideology dematerializes — often at the expense of women of color and other marginalized women.
Far be it from me to defend Schwyzer or feminist editors from the accusation of “insensitivity” toward “women of color and other marginalized women,” however, the Daly-citing radfem sees “intersectionality” as just another male-created deception:
Intersectionality, just as any form of anti-feminism, are part of men’s phallic lies and global brainwashing tactics which generate amnesia and the inward-twisting of rage against ourselves and other women. . . .
Whoa! Intersectionality is a “form of anti-feminism . . . part of men’s phallic lies”? Let’s skip back to Part IV of this rant:
We have to understand that cultural and social racism or insensitivity from part of women is integral to our colonisation by the men who occupy us. Racism, sexism, classism, any kind of condescension — all are one and tied to the same anti-woman package, they are inseparable. It’s male-identification.
‘Racist feminism’ or ‘classist feminism’ is an oxymoron, in other words. This means we cannot be feminist without wanting to exorcise all forms of male domination and subordination, without seeing them as interlinked and mutually supportive of women’s oppression. We discover empathy and searing rage for the plight of all our sisters and that in spite of differences, we are all subjected to variations of male rapism. We see patriarchy as universal. By identifying ourselves as women we identify to all women as women, embrace each other as our people and reject male blocking of our movement/convergence. . . .
When I look at intersectional articles, who are they directed against? Women, women, women, women, women, women and women. All of them. It is the primary distinguishing factor of intersectionality. But if women are so oppressive to us, what’s the point of being feminist, may I ask. Either we perceive men to be our oppressors and we’re feminist, or we hate these women who oppress us so much — and we’re misogynist. . . .
In other words, because “intersectionality” leads to one group of feminist women attacking another group of feminist women, it is objectively “misogynist,” obscuring the reality of “male domination,” the result of a failure to “perceive men to be our oppressors.”
All of this proves one point: Feminism is a form of mental illness. Instead of sending crazy women to lunatic asylums, nowadays we send them to university Women’s Studies departments. This does not cure their insanity, but it does train them to blog about rape and abortion and other bizarre obsessions common to crazy women.
Women must ask themselves: “Am I crazy enough to be a feminist?”
