the truth is there is a vast, vast, vast range of gendered violence that cannot be solved by getting individual men to pay women individually.

getting a man to pay for your bills doesn't do shit re: neoliberal & late capitalism's gutting of resources that ends in domestic violence shelters being shuttered, in welfare programs being dismantled, in the increase in citizenships bring revoked, in the growing wage gap.......

all things that hit women and LGBT folks hardest. bc that's how patriarchy and capitalism work.
that's why it's important to understand and name them, and to help women and queer folks understand how they work to make our lives a living hell.

yes, a lot of folks don't understand how their oppression works too oppress them, and yes you most meet folks where they are, if you want them to learn.

but there is a difference between "meeting folks where they are" and "meeting folks where they are and refusing to educate them further bc then they'll get hip to your grift"

theslumflower and others are making a false dichotomy between "feminism lite™" and a nebulously defined "academic feminism" which basically means "feminism that is nuanced and rigorous"
bc a lot of the feminist work they're calling "academic" was written outside of the academy.

and said Black feminists gave they blood sweat and tears and sometimes lives to create it.
refusing to name or cite genealogies of Black feminist thought is not radical, revolutionary, or feminist.

in fact, it's just another form of the white cishet patriarchy these women claim to be fighting.

the brass tacks of it all is that theslumflower and other similar personality driven, social media-based "activists" profit off of the inequality they claim to be fighting. that's why they're so resistant to structural analysis & citing folks. issa hustle

and like. they're not just hustling men. they're hustling women primarily, into turning away from more truly radical actions against patriarchy and capitalism, and away from already existing Black feminist work.

again, somehow building naturally supportive networks of care with women/queer folks in the face of crushing patriarchy is never an option, according to their brand of feminism. neither is forming reading groups to read Black feminist work.

instead we get this performance of being against "academic feminism," *while* they make part of their living speaking at colleges.

and we get this disdain for Black folks & working class folks capability to understand complex concepts and nuanced thought, posing as anti-elitist activism.

if you think regular degular Black women can't understand multi-syllabic words? that says more about you than it does about so-called "academic feminism."

just, like. Assata Shakur wrote her autobiography from exile in Cuba after escaping prison. Elaine Brown's book was about her time in the Black Panther Party, not academia. there are online oral histories of formerly enslaved women, Civil Rights workers, 2nd & 3rd wavers........

none of these were written by it from within academia. there's so much work that has been done to collect/study/understand the many lives of Black women and the oppressions we face, to not cite it/to discuss it bc it inconveniences your hustle is.........vile, honestly.