CONTENT WARNING: descriptions of sexual harassment (Paragraphs 1 - 2); descriptions eugenics and violence towards women (P 17 - 19); mentions of rape (P 21 + P 28); mentions of trans antagonism (P 28). I will leave links at the end of this post with help hotlines and other resources for survivors.
At 15, he knew me as an aspiring artist and client. At 16, he knew me as his intern, and at 17, his co-worker. He would flirt with me through banter—this is still my natural habitat. He would offer to give me shoulder massages while we were working, to which I accepted. It is possible that when you are seventeen, you do not automatically recognize a thirty-something-year-old man's behaviour as predatory for hitting on you. It is possible that at seventeen, you do not always consider what it means if an adult asks to touch you in the workplace.
I did not find myself reflecting on what I had experienced until much later, on an occasion when he privately messaged me over Instagram. He had seen me out in public and apparently tried to get my attention; of course, I informed him that I tend to ignore passing cars that honk at me, for reasons anyone else who has been catcalled will understand. The banter began, meaning nothing out of the ordinary. But then he insinuated that he knew how I liked to be spoken to, and that he knew how to discipline me. Hopped up on Advil from a sunburn I was nursing on the backs of my legs, I remember laughing hysterically, sending screenshots to my friends, and writing over the pit in my stomach with responses to him that confuse me now. I was 19 and no longer his co-worker.
Some more time passed and he contacted me again. In the voice note he sent me, I was promptly greeted on the insistence that he knew me better than to be a truly “all-encompassing feminist” -- a response to my Instagram bio which, at the time, identified me as an intersectional feminist. He proposed the following questions for reflection:
"What's up Intersectional Feminist! But just exactly where does your feminism intersect anyway? What disciplines, what fields, what specialties? [laughs] 'Cause I know you're not an all-encompassing feminist. I know you better than that, Sarah."
He then went on to ask me: how was I doing? How long would I be in town for? This was his office's new location, and I should come by, say hi to him and the rest of the team. Apparently it would have been nice to see me. Me, the not-all-encompassing feminist.
In return, I asked him what he meant by calling my feminism "not all-encompassing". I asked him what made him the expert.
"Tell me what you mean by intersectional feminist and I'll tell you what I mean by an all-encompassing feminist. And what makes me an expert? Well . . . I'm an expert on women." There was a groan in here, somewhere. Try to see if you can find it.
I took my time answering him. I went to my Notes app, spent twenty minutes writing a paragraph that made it clear I was not interested in his interpretation of feminism, copied it, pasted it, and sent it. I told him not to contact me again, ever. He left me on "Seen", and has miraculously not been stupid enough to try contacting me since. I was 20 years old.
The end.
What bothered me most about that invitation and his unsolicited criticism was the assumption that a man who had only ever demonstrated an ignorance toward equity and justice for women believed he knew what kind of woman I was. He believed he was in a position to question the validity of my morals and politics, and that he could question my feminism. And yet, despite the disturbing circumstances in which my story must present itself, to question one's feminism is not a wrong question to ask. Really, I should be asking myself: where does my feminism intersect?
This question is necessary about the feminist, historically, has indeed been a woman we should fear. Feminism has not always been definitively intersectional. It arguably is still not definitively intersectional today. This is why.
white feminism
Are you a feminist like Lena Dunham? Are you a feminist like Taylor Swift? Are you a feminist like Scarlett Johansson? If you are not sure what kind of feminist they are, ask Google.
The shorter answer to the problematic feminist archetypes list above is that their feminism is singular. It is a feminism without diversity, particularly in categories of race, and often willfully so. This is why you will hear me (and others) refer to this as “white feminism”.
We may want travel back to one the earliest successful feminist movements in the Western world, otherwise known as feminism’s first wave. Truthfully, this wave terminology is actually not always regarded as productive because a wave (imagine: the ocean) has a peak, and very soon, it falls. Meaning: to categorize feminist movements in waves can assume that each stage is monolithic. Maybe we should start referring to different stages as ripples; perhaps we ought to think of feminism as one big ring with many smaller rings inside, growing bigger and bigger, intersecting with another ring, within a ring, inside another ring. I am not the expert of appropriate metaphors, however, so I will leave that for someone else to decide.
But back to this first wave: its peak is saturated with white women. Not in reality, for Black abolitionist suffragists like Sojourner Truth were essential to the early successes of feminism. It is our teachings of feminist history, though, and ultimately who this first-wave immediately benefited that structures the “birth” of the Western feminist movement as white. Our education of early feminism has become iconography of white women protesting for property rights, or the right to open a bank account. This is the water you drink and wake up praising Susan B. Anthony to, like the woman wasn’t a goddamn Eugenist (but more on that later).
You could consider today's equivalent being when a white woman protests the gender wage-gap, and conveniently leaves out how the gender wage-gap affects Black, Latinx, Indigenous, or Asian women very differently from her. Ultimately, white feminism is white women refusing to acknowledge how they benefit from the same patriarchal society they claim to be dismantling. And so, when we are talking about white feminism, we are talking about the feminisms of privilege and exclusion. You are likely to see a pattern as you continue reading.
eugenics
Once again: this is a PSA. Please stop talking about Susan B. Anthony as your lord and feminist saviour. She was a Eugenist. I cannot scream this via text any louder.
Of course, it is my job to assume that you may not know what eugenics are. According to Canada's Eugenics Archive, early-twentieth-century eugenics was concerned with ”better breeding”. What makes for “better breeding”, you ask? Apparently, it was the sterilization of Black, Indigenous, and disabled people. Yes. That is what largely characterized this movement: with women being the vehicle for such change (already a misogynistic, cis-sexist homework assignment), it fell on the shoulders of white women to encourage “birth control” for other(ed) women. I use the term “birth control” loosely here, because this was hardly a voluntary act.
I imagine you may have never tried getting pregnant only to discover that at some point, with neither your knowledge nor permission, you were given an irreversible surgery that made you infertile. That is exactly what happened in 1955 to Leilani Muir, a Canadian woman who was sent to a corrective school for the “mentally defective” as a child by her mother, and was wrongly diagnosed as a “moron” (Eugenics Archive). I imagine you may have not considered that as recently as 2019, Indigenous Canadian women were still being forcibly sterilized. And a little over a decade later, what happened to Muir at ten happened to Elaine Riddick, a young Black girl from North Carolina who was pregnant at 14 after being raped. After labour, she was taken to the operating room. Years later, when she was ready to start a family, Riddick learnt her Fallopian tubes had been burnt and that she needed a hysterectomy.
What is key to the Eugenics movement is the disturbing removal of choice for these women and girls who were sterilized. Eugenic feminism is, undoubtedly, a product of white feminism’s looming umbrella, and it revels the power it has over the othered women’s bodies. This was their sole mission as feminists.
universalism
This is the moment at which Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw arrives in the conversation, who coined "intersectionality" in '89 to address the lack of antiracism in feminist scholarship. (Read her paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex…” here.)
Crenshaw’s work was written in response to white feminists who had previously insisted that gender was the most important factor. No matter their multitude of personal characteristics, women collectively shared the same lived experience on account of their womanhood alone, they argued.
The problem with this kind of universalism, however, is that it dangerously ignores other feminisms (and feminists) by presuming experiences of womanhood are identical. Universalist feminist thought insinuates that a white, upper-class, able-bodied, cisgender, straight woman understands womanhood as a Black, working-class, mentally disabled, straight trans woman does, or as an Indigenous, middle-class, physically disabled, queer, cis woman does. Understandably, none of these women described will have same experience of womanhood.
It is crucial to understand that universalism is purposeful. It is a tactic of silencing marginalized women from addressing the inequities they face as women and as BIPOC, queer, non-binary, disabled, or working-class persons. It is a big, fuzzy blanket thrown over the problem that says: "Shh! It's okay. We're all in this together."
Obviously, we are not.
SWERFS + TERFS
Progress is not linear (by now, that should be fairly clear). There are feminisms that still operate in these exclusive sanctions today: namely, as SWERFs (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists) and TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists). These feminisms are active. They have entered your subReddits and your Tumblr timelines. Most importantly: these feminisms have named themselves as occupationally against intersectionality; as willfully exclusive to those they have othered.
SWERFs may have been named recently in response to Crenshaw’s movement for intersectionality during the third wave, but their ideology is sustained from second-wavers. Some feminists believed that pornography was sexist because of its focus on the male gaze—an argument worth getting into—and that the act of penetration in intercourse was domination of the woman’s body and inherently rape—and argument I have very little time for. (You may look to our friends Catharine MacKinnon or Kathleen Barry for that barrel of laughs.) Todays SWERFs fixate on the falsehood that all sex work is involuntary, abusive, or linked to human trafficking. Unfortunately for SWERFs, many women do choose sex work voluntarily, and like any job it has its perks and its failings. Sex workers are extremely vulnerable to exploitation, because they are often not protected by laws or labour unions, but SWERFs are not worried about protecting sex workers; they are concerned with shaming women who eroticize their own bodies for profit. That is all.
Now, we do not have to fall down the J K Rowling rabbit hole, but suppose we did. The conversations which she routinely sets herself up for are perfect for the conversation you and I are having right now; because what makes the TERF dangerous is not only the language that insinuates womanhood is explicitly linked to female genitalia, which is Rowling’s move. It is that like any radical group, TERFs recruit their members. Most pressingly, as NO TERFS NO SWERFS explains it, their methods are to doxx (release personal information online), bait (engage in conversations to provoke and identify trans people), and dogpile (harassing a person from multiple accounts/platforms) trans people. This is what drives their feminism.
what kind of feminist are you
Asking yourself what kind of feminist you are is a deeply important question for anyone that strives for social equity. The man I have used as an anecdote, of course, was not concerned with asking this question about feminism. He was concerned with what my feminism could do for him, a man. He happens to be a man that is not completely privileged, this is true. Still, he is a man that believes men are disenfranchised as an overly-criticized population, and as a direct result of the empowerment of women. He believes he deserves a medal for not being a terrible, awful person.
Except this is about more than one petty, problematic man’s attempt to rile me up, or the clap-back speech I wrote for him that may or may not have included “thank you, next” as the final blow. (It felt good at the time, Ariana had just released the song.) This is about the kind of activist that you are, or have been, or should be.
So, the question still remains: what kind of feminist are you?
further learning
Rachel Elizabeth Cargle: "When Feminism is White Supremacy in Heels"
Jane Coastan: “The Intersectionality Wars”
Theresa Jordan: “OnlyFans and Sex Work”
for help
Cayman Islands
Cayman Crisis Center 345-943-2422
Canada
Toronto Rape Crisis Centre 416-597-8808
Canada Mental Health Association 416 535-8501
Black Creek Community Health Centre 416-249-8000 / 416-246-2388
U.S.
Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network 800-656-4673
The Trevor Project 866-488-7386
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