What the????

[M0stlyBowlingHedgehog]

Washington Post article: 2it's time to drop the vagina as a protest symbol."

To the author of this piece: honey, you live in a country which has just elected a president and vice president who want to revoke Roe vs. Wade, who (first weekend in the job) signed the global gag clause withdrawing family planning as part of aid programmes that mentioned - mentioned, not carried out - abortions, who are removing the requirement for health insurers to provide family planning - and you think vaginas are passe and no longer need to be discussed within feminism.

Are you really that stupid? Do you really want a starring role in your own real-life version of the Handmaid's Tale?

(Bangs head on wall in a despairing sort of way at the state of liberal feminism).

Darling don't you know vaginas are so passe, all the really important women now have shenises

She clearly doesn't consider neovaginas as real vaginas. Will this transphobia ever stop.

"Women are a caste within society, not the owners of a particular body part". This bit struck me as particularly worth thinking about. The author doesn't go on to think about why women are a caste within society. Why is it that women are treated differently to men? Might it have something to do with that pesky biology?

Nah, it's just arbitrary, innit, Assassinated? Could've happened to anyone - people with blue eyes, people with red hair, just happened to be people with vaginas. Not!

LOL.

Oh, my God. I must be the only woman on the planet to have missed the shape of those hats. I just thought they were cool pink hats that symbolized strong women. I didn't realize that they were intentionally shaped like a hoo-ha. I don't want to be defined by my genitalia, but rather by my strengths and accomplishments. That's what I marched for.

What really unites all women is the presumption of incompetence.

Gosh never a truer word was spoken, as millions undergo rape, assault, stoning, FGM, and die in childbirth!

Though in fairness, I do remember being that daft back in my early twenties. I think the mistake I made was that good old philsophical error of conflating "is" and "ought". I think this sort of liberal feminism is terrified because they think admitting that biology plays a part in explaining inequality is the same as admitting that the resulting inequality is justified.

So they think that an explanation of how sex-based oppression came about, namely that controlling women's reproductive capacity gave the motivation and our biologically smaller, weaker physiques provided the means - that good 'ole Agatha Christie pairing of motive and opportunity - is somehow an admission that such oppression is inevitable.

As I get older, I think this is the central problem of liberal feminism - that they are terrified of biology, because they think that to recognise the role biology plays is a short step away from embracing biological determinism.

But..pussy hats were shaped to have cat ears. They looked nothing like vaginas. Or vulvas. And.....Oh good grief, it's pointless to even try when the author is a grown adult who calls the vagina a "hoo ha".

Hey, now it's not sexist to ban abortion, because after all, it's a men's issue, too! Same thing with firing "pregnant people." Or denying chestfeeders access to a room to pump in. All a-okay, because people of either gender would be treated the same!

In the US the word 'pussy' is almost never used to mean cat. They use 'kitty' for that. It is almost 100% associated with being an offensively rude term for vulva. It's like saying cunt.

I've had conversations with people who are reasonably open minded but shudder when someone else says it, and say they hope they never hear anyone in their family use the word.

Still - the hats are clearly mean to have cat ears. The knitting pattern is very clear about that. So the writer is being more than a bit disingenuous.