Exploration of her thoughts on gender and radical feminism and intersections with your human need to create and abide by social norms.
Radfems also understand the limits of choice and consent, and that many women will choose to self-harm in various culturally approved ways. They understand that against the combined forces of economic incentive and societal encouragement, people will go along with things that are bad for them. And they also tend to be concerned with problems affecting ordinary women, focusing on typical or worst-case situations rather than unusually good ones. Their motivation is not protecting the income of the occasional happy hooker, rich porn star, or cheerfully altruistic surrogate, but with financially desperate women pushed into prostitution or into selling their babies. Radfems know that taking money for what your sex organs can provide to others is not a day’s work like any other.
This is all great stuff as far as I’m concerned, and there is much else to admire besides. At the same time though, many radfems simultaneously pursue a goal which undercuts a lot of this. They want to “abolish gender”. I think this is barking. Allow me to explain.
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No matter how officially scathing about social norms they are in theory, in practice the opponents of women’s interests certainly know how to wield them to get the results they want. Male-dominated movements of every political and religious persuasion have never hesitated to lay down the kind of social law for women that suits them: be chaste, have lots of babies, be silent, be docile, be up for BDSM, don’t criticise prostitution, accept males as “women”, or whatever. It’s always about the attempted production of shame…To repeat my first point: women can’t get rid of sex-specific social norms. All they can do is fight to get the sex-specific norms that work for them.
kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender?s=r