I think one reason the whole "cleaner" discourse has touched a nerve is that it reflects a broader erasure of socialist/left feminism from mainstream political discourse. Some may say this is unsurprising. Perhaps it is, but my god it is depressing. 1/6

Ditum and friends try - and with some success - to cast feminism as "against" the left, such that feminism becomes discursively anchored to a politics which is centrist, or even centre-right in, e.g. its whiteness, hostility to trans people, opposition to mild redistribution. 2/6

Meanwhile, "the left" gets cast as an undifferentiated mass of "brocialists", "Bernie bros" etc. This kind of claim basically co-opts a longstanding but ignored socialist feminist politics that was "in and against" the left, and reduces it to being simply "against" the left. 3/6

Thus, the nuance of left, anti-racist and socialist feminist analyses of the intersections of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, and the variable and contradictory gender dynamics of different kinds of left spaces, gets lost. 4/6

Instead, the highly problematic gender politics of the neoliberal centre (in, say, its Blairite or Clintonite iterations), and the gendered structural violence of the neoliberal state, get overlooked amidst a preoccupation with left-wing "bros" on twitter. 5/6

And it has all kinds of perverse consequences: left-wing women critiquing this kind of narrative get literally ignored, while insufferable centrist dudes get to cast themselves as heroically feminist because they think Bernie and JC are communists. Morbid symptoms indeed. 6/6