kink-critical is 12,000% radfem koolaid and that’s just the facts.
Like I hate speaking about this publicly in any capacity for a lot of reasons but this is like the 4th example of this misunderstanding I’ve seen this week and it needs to be addressed because I feel like people are starting to lose the thread of radical feminism and its pervasive toxicity by boiling the entire ideology down to only the TERF [and occasionally SWERF] archetypes so I guess I gotta bring this discussion down on my own damn head.
So here’s the deal: the foundational tenets of radical feminism result in many wide-reaching beliefs About The World, and men, and women, and people of other genders, and the way they interact–and they have a great deal of interest in classifying those systems of interaction in ways that reinforce the foundational tenets. One of those beliefs is that men are abusers and women victims, unilaterally. They believe also that women are brainwashed by patriarchy to accept, normalize, or overlook violence done against them by men. This is tied in directly with beliefs about BDSM being a system which allows men to abuse women, and which encourages women to believe they want it when in fact they are being conditioned to accept violence. If you’re seeing some kernels of swerf n’ terf ideology in that portrayal, good–you’re getting the point. BDSM [or a straw man of it, anyway] is usually the big bad in this system of beliefs, but the formation of the argument allows it to reach well into other kinks and sexual practices, reclassifying them into some form that denies the agency of everyone involved, paints at least one party as an abuser exploiting a power system, and positions radical feminists as the noble crusaders defending Good Misled Women from Bad Exploitative Men–tying the whole thing back into the core ideas they have about the shape of the world, and also tying them into their other beliefs–what kind of people are men, for example, or what kind of behaviours women are A. not allowed to do and B. are too ignorant to realise they shouldn’t be doing [in their belief system].
Because that’s the thing about radical feminism at the end of the day. All of the beliefs are interconnected and products of the same twisted logic, usually reinforced with just enough grains of truth or plausibility to make them appealing–and to make them likely to be picked up, embraced, and circulated by people who may not recognize their origins. This is deliberate. Recruitment is a major game for radfems, and rather than hit a potentially open-minded, reasonable person over the head with “trans women are men” right out of the gate, they seed these other, tangential beliefs first. They package them in conspicuously TERF-free wrapping. They sprinkle them into communities where they’ll be taken at that face value. They market them to vulnerable people looking for a way to explain, understand, and heal from bad things that have happened to them. And then, when you’ve swallowed that key piece of their logic, they bring you into the fold by giving you more and more of the big picture, each step leading naturally and by design from the one you’ve already accepted.
And I know this, because that’s how they got me. They found a young, scared, confused, hurt person–someone who had had their interest in kink used by unscrupulous people to rape and abuse them, and someone who had been alienated from mainstream feminism due to complicated trauma reactions around those same events. It wasn’t my fault, they assured me. Of course Other Feminists weren’t equipped to understand me. They could help me heal. They could help me understand. They knew what I’d been through and they had the answers. They got me hook line and fucking sinker by using their kink-critical ideologies to exploit my trauma and vulnerability and position themselves as the answer to my pain. And then they fed me more, and more, and more beliefs that all seemed like such a natural extension of that first one, the one I was the most receptive to. It took me years to figure out what had happened and disentangle myself, and I’m still deprogramming a lot of it.
So, yeah. Kink-critical is radfem ideology down to the bones. And because I know it’s gonna come up–you’re allowed to not like kink in general. You’re allowed to be squicked or triggered by specific kinks, or even the whole affair. Complicated or even outright negative reactions to those things are well within the range of normal. But “kink-critical” as a whole, and as an unexamined belief including refusing to question where it came from, who it benefits, and what it leads to, is pure radfem bullshit.
