Respecting Grown-Ass Women
Authoritarianism is what abuse looks like in public. Especially when it dresses up as ‘kindness.’ It is a feature of patriarchy, not a bug.
A thing Medusa Rising will never do is treat you like you don’t know who you are or what you want. We will, probably, make you mad at us from time to time because we know who we are and what we want – and we are pretty sure that some strategies get us more of what we want than others. We won't tell you what you think, but we will tell you what we think.
Because the Left in Global North is so ideologically captured (for now) by some extreme and mostly vibes-based political positions (the term of art for this is “affect politics”) and the money that comes with those vibes (more on that in other posts), it’s become kind of useless to groups that still need to secure and make use of our legal/constitutional rights – like women, all kinds of women.
We want to be clear that we don’t think politics can solve cultural issues like the belief that women are ‘cis women’ who like living according to the restraints of patriarchal femininity. Culture is solved by cultural work. Using politics to make laws about cultural expressions is called: authoritarianism. It’s what we see for example in Iran, Afghanistan, and soon to be the hot new trend in the US.
We also see it in the trans rights movement’s attempts to redefine ‘sex’ in US civil rights law to include ‘gender identity.’ How people do gender is a matter of cultural and personal expression, not bound by our sex but bound by cultural traditions in support of male power. Gender is a complex set of social traditions designed to uphold male domination. Having laws that men who say magic words are allowed to take our scholarships and prize money, OR to wander about dick-a-swing in the women’s section in the traditionally nude Korean style spa — this is also authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism is what abuse looks like in public. Especially when it dresses up as ‘kindness' or 'saving babies' for example. It is a feature of patriarchy, not a bug. It can be mitigated or intensified (as we will soon see in the shift from a Democratic to a MAGA dominated politics in the US), but it cannot be eliminated in patriarchy.
It’s the opposite of justice and love. The only counter-measure to authoritarianism is solidarity: the belief and actions on the belief that others deserve as much freedom/thriving as we do. It's not friendship, or sisterhood, or agreement — solidarity is much, much more fundamental than that. It is a practiced commitment to each other's human dignity.
Jim Crow laws were authoritarian. The ghettoizing of Jews in Europe was authoritarian. Refusing women the ability to read or speak or vote or own property are authoritarian. Treating all trans people as if they are the worst of their demographic is authoritarian. Scapegoating immigrants is authoritarain. Treating women’s bodies like they are state property by denying us necessary reproducitve health care is authoritarian. Telling women we identify with our oppression if we don’t announce a special ‘gender’ is authoritarian. Denying lesbian and homosexual their civil rights is … you get the picture.
All authoritarianism is a domination system — has been since the extensively detailed legal codes of ancient Sumeria.* And one thing these extensive codes tell me is that Sumeria was nervous of people stepping out of line. The punishments for infractions were severe. We’ve heard of the Code of Hammurabi punishing theft with the severing of a hand. But we know less about the code of Akkad which included prohibition of abortion. It was a crime against both husband and state, akin to treason, and punished by public impalement and exposure of the corpse rather than burial. The violence and humiliation were part of the spectacle, the message to others not to fuck around because this is what you find out. Men were punished as well for infractions around gender codes, though never as severely as women. A man who failed to report a slave-woman for wearing a veil in public (presenting as a free woman) would be stripped and flogged, but his ear or nose would not be cut off, as the slave-woman's would be. What all this tells me is that people were not easily or comfortably loyal to this system.
This is why the strategy radical materialist feminism (radmatfem) suggests for addressing both rights and cultural expressions Does Not Include working closely with the Right.
We do suggest working with conservative women where your concerns overlap, say in the area of maternal health and maternity care, or local community organizing, &c. By work, we mean actually take steps to create improvement in real conditions. We do not mean join political campaigns with. Work across the aisle, but make them reach in our direction, and don't take money from right wing organizations — that money always comes with terms that limit a feminist scope of wowork. That way lies the fall of Roe. That way lies Project 2025.
In the age of 'intersectional idenities,' financial support from left wing organizations can come with different, equally restrictive terms.
On the Left, again taking the US for our example, it's now clear that publishing the ratified Equal Rights Amendment into the Constitution will never happen. President Biden promised it, and reneged. Vice President Harris never even mentioned it in her campaign. So. Women’s rights remain a matter of the moody placement Overton's Window for the long foreseeable future. All the laws that support women's rights and lives can be superseded by new law, or simply left forgotten and unenforced like laws about where one can and not tie a horse on the thoroughfare. Fair pay protections. Access to education. Outlawing of marital rape. No fault divorce. Funding and protections regarding violence against women and girls. All of it. All the laws except for the right to vote, and the Right has some sneaky plans for getting around that too. Clearly, US feminsits will need a new approach.
The problem for radical materialist feminists is that both the Right and Left will use women to get whatever they want that does not advantage us. [The despot will 'protect us whether we want it or not.'] The Right will roll back rights hard clawed out of the rock of history, and the Left will share those rights to the point of meaninglessness. The deeper problem for #RadMatFem of the Global North is that the Left pretty well needs to be rebuilt from the ground up to shake it free of the twin influences of neoliberal economic policy and vibes-based politics. We know our position is “way over there” on the chart – but Medusa Rising is a platform for world building women, and world building doesn’t happen by staying on known ground.
It behooves women to stop trying to adjust the patriarchy to suit us better and to begin building elsewhere: supporting each other across our differences culturally, psychologically, and economically.
Medusa Rising will sometimes have to name names – both organizations and individuals – in order to discuss the differences in strategy between our political position and those others take, both feminist and anti-feminist alike. We want to say that such brute political discussion will not dominate our work, only be part of it. We want to say clearly here that we do not do this out of any personal feeling for people or organizations. We do not do this to shame anyone. We assume good faith until shown otherwise. When we discuss these differences in political philosophy or strategy, we do so to encourage careful work for women that preserves or expands our rights and dignity without surrendering even a skosh of either one.
Medusa Rising wants to practice a kind of opportunistic, strategic intersectionality — one that sees most intersections as inflection points where different kinds of women might find ways to benefit all women by working together across their differences. It also means working separately where your differences do not intersect, and possibly not working together at all if our principles and goals are too far apart. It's an approach to coalition and alliance that we'll elaborate over time. Radical Materialist Feminism is a point of view, a set of principles, and an ethics for practice. As a RadMatFem project, Medusa Rising operates according to those principles. We expect other women to have principles too, and to refuse to compromise them. We expect you to be a grown as we are. We are, at the same time, also certain that by cooperating deliberately where we can, we can strengthen and deepen feminist movement everywhere.
* On this, see most of the chapters of Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy. Find it in The Radical Feminist Library.
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