I know someone who calls herself a feminist, puts her pronouns in her work email signature, donates money to women’s empowerment funds, and thinks we should deport more refugees. I also know someone who calls people ‘pussies’ when he plays video games, who doesn’t know what a pronoun is, and, for his defence of low-wage women workers in a highly-exploited industry, is a better, more strident defender of the rights of working-class women than almost anyone else I know. Of these two people, I know who is on my team, and who I want on my team, yet the standard liberal feminist calculation would have me chose the woman who loves a little deportation over the man who is occasionally uncouth, solely because the woman knows to keep her language civil, and the man doesn’t. Liberal feminists get incredibly caught up in the politics of language, because language is all they have. They don’t have a revolutionary programme for overthrowing patriarchy, so they’re forced to tinker around the edges of it, quibbling over word choice and jargon instead of building the coalitions necessary for destroying patriarchy.
— We Should Not All Be Feminists by Frances Wright
(via sluttysuperheroes)
