Okay so lots of thoughts as I’ve had this convo with some mutuals on here already. https://twitter.com/tramaracts/status/1390325996423888897

Moreso the conversation about the different types of trajectories women that occupied certain spaces in the digital realm are taking.

You’re witnessing the evolution of women whose feminism was never really grounded in a sound politic.

More specifically women who never really did the [psycho-emotional]work that grounds you (re: black feminist tradition)

The person being referred to in the OTs are like many of the younger BW *on here*. They were drawn to feminism as they were seeing people naming a hurt for issues they were silenced about as girls/ women.

The 2010s saw a feminist boom that I liken to the feminist boom of the 70s.

Except this was not happening on the ground w physical spaces & activities that kept you in an intimate community w people gathering to center issues.

People were coming into feminist thought in passing. No community to hold em accountable or create rituals around [self]educating/advocating ect.

These were women picking up scraps of all kinds of feminisms in memes/short posts/blogs/ vids.

Now there are those of us whose feminism was cultivated in similarl spaces to the folk in the 70s (ie. College/activist work ect ) but attending higher Ed is a privilege & not everyone is invoked in social justice work.

As we’ve seen with the time folk dragged me for asking someone if they took the time to know what sex positivity was before embracing it as a politic and then making decisions that they thought were informed by the politic lol

As we’ve seen people were picking up scraps of this and that. Piece piece. Body positivity, sex positivity, queer/ alternative understandings of planning your life ect and not really looking into what those things really meant or why they were relevant.

They just knew they wanted to live more freely than the shackles of patriarchy had allowed them to.

They had unprocessed emotions about their traumas.

They latched on to certain kinds of BW as avatars who expressed unfiltered rage the ways they’d wish they could (think misandrists) or they latched to BW as “carefree/liberated” avatars with no real investment in the lived realities being shared (think SWs)

So going back to OT where the first stage is labeled. “Die hard black feminist” lol.

Let’s call a thing a thing.

Y’all mainly refer to the feminists who make no room for coddling men the die hards/radicals (hi)

That first stage was the thing that was popular a few years ago. It was popular to parrot women who real life hated sexism AND men as a collective enacting sexist violence & didn’t have an incentive to make much concessions for them.

Again, hi.

But I want to remind y’all that being that type of person was not always cool lmaoooo

Prior to that I and other tweeters similar were called everything but a child of god by other BW! Even other black feminists.

People could not fathom how we could dare condemn all men. How it why we had the audacity to say that even their beloved man things were indicted.

We were called bitter bitches (verbatim) by other women who thought they were progressive about gender lol

And then one morning we woke up and suddenly every body was a misandrist.

Everybody was yelling “men are trash!”. Everybody was making fin domme esquires comments. It eventually became cool to hate men out loud.....

Except...

Lololol

There’s only so long that you can parade yourself as a misandrist if you aren’t truly one because y’all wake up one morning, realize you still want a man to be a major part of your life and well...

Let’s also be honest.... being an actual misandrist is not as profitable in this world of social media. The excitement of “‘men disgust me” posts wear off fast unless you go into domme-ing.

People get boyfriends and start subtweeting you “well, I get that most men are bad but y’all really act like it’s not possible to find a decent partner”, “y’all expect women to not want love!”

No, girl. Nobody told you to do misandry cosplay.

As we the “hard core” feminists have been saying forever, a lot of women don’t want liberation from patriarchy. They just wasn’t men to be nicer. And that’s the majority. So if you are going to appeal to the majority you have to change the narrative.

Next phase. Capitalist barbie.

The dating coaches, the femininity propaganda girls, the girls who sell the glamour of SW (sugaring, stripping) ect,

You still want to maintain that there’s a disgust for men overall but you have to make it seem like you can escape lack of decency from men through capitalist/individual means.

“Leveling up”. Using erotic currency. Raising your standards ect.

More marketable than “men are disgusting. We should organize to build lives where they are decentered communally. “.

And y’all know how I feel about this corner of the internet. One of main qualms is that they teach you to internalize the capitalist/ individual(ist)approach as opposed to discussing it from the perspective of a survivalist performance.

Insert all this “high value” talk but on the women’s side.

The narrative being that this is how to be the best you & that women who either reject that performance/are excluded by the nature of the politic itself are beneath them.

Even though they don’t say it explicitly, it is presented as a liberatory politic. Still cloaked in a lot of the pro-woman sentiment, discussing & leveraging the vulnerability BW have about being mistreated.

But here’s the thing...

You cannot escape the violence of patriarchy, yt supremacy ect

No matter how good you become at navigating.

And for the ones who learn that from having really bad experiences... that’s where the next stage become the hotep/spiritualist phase.

Ok. Back after a good sleep lol

To be c,eat. I’m pro using erotic currency. & pro-SW.

I’m talking about women who used the narratives as SW adjacent who try to distance themselves from actual SW. https://twitter.com/soualiganamazon/status/1390414347499933699

And also, there were women who took the non-respectability route and went into SW but again, they went into it without having listened to the SW feminists who shared about their specific issues with misogyny/ whorephobia in the work & intimate setting.

Which is what I meant by the glamour tweet. They did it attaching the decision to a shallow understanding of sex positivity & were not grounded in any SW inclusive politic (ie. anti-capitalist SW feminism)

SW is one of those fields where you discover just how truly depraved and misogynistic men are. Any performance of decency that some men might reserve for non-SWs goes out the window when they interact with SWs.

Even SW women who have a sound politic as an anchor struggle with the traumas of men’s abuse on the job (& when it comes to their intimate lives) if you don’t have an anchor, it can rock you to the core.

And a lot of women internalize it.

& his why some turn to the spiritualist/ hotep phase.

I truly believe the spiritualist & hotep stuff has become what black church used to be for BW. It’s the same victim blaming, prosperity pimp BS minus the jesus.

Obviously I’m not referring to those trulyyyyyy doing the real work of teaching/ practicing indigenous AF spiritualities.

I’m talking about what I see in these spaces on here. The popular folk who get tweeted about every other week.

I think it was jouelzy who recently did a vid about how BW internalize that they always need to be doing stuff to fix themselves when the problem is the system we’re born into.
It’s profitable &even though the method may very the root sentiment is the same.

&that’s why I encourage folk to actually ground themselves in a feminist politic. Ground yourself and pick a feminism that accounts for every aspect of black women’s lives. All black women’s lives. You’re gonna need that anchor when things go askew.

“Tweeting men are trash next to my man in bed”: https://twitter.com/inpoco/status/1390577013027741697

I’m so happy some of y’all have left the misandrist cosplay behind.

You did a number on our corner of the internet because most of y’all love man and now it takes a minute for men to truly believe that we the delegation of misandrists actually hate them.