I guarantee you, anyone with “x critical” wording in their blog description is either a radfem or unwittingly drinking radfem koolaid
not to be that dude but what about kink critical or people who are critical of the media they consume (like su critical). i dont think they’re drinkin the koolaid, i think its just unfortunate that radfems ruined ___ critical. (which im confused anyway because I’ve literally only seen radfems use gender critical)
Swerfs often consider themselves kink critical so that’s been ruined for me, too. That might not be the case for other people but it is for a fair amount of people.
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.
There’s a big old difference between “I’m not comfortable with kink stuff/I don’t like BDSM” and “kink-critical”. Because, just like with “gender-critical”, it’s a euphemism meant to hide that these people absolutely think they have not only the right, but the ~moral obligation~ to step in and save people from themselves, if they’re daring to do a thing that the radfem in question dislikes. “It’s just being critical of a thing! Critical thinking is good! I’m not trying to tell anyone how to live their life…I mean, I am, but I still want the plausible deniability of hiding behind this pseudo-academic/pseudo-analytical term.”
And just as “gender-critical” means not “I am criticizing the structures of binary gender” but “I am going to criticize your gender, specifically, and your expression of it as well, and I’m going to be very nasty and very violent about it and still think I’m justified and standing on the moral high ground”, “kink-critical” doesn’t mean “I am looking critically at the ways which kink may interact with social structures like race, gender, etc.” but instead means “I’m going to reach into your sex life and criticize your kinks, specifically, and accuse you of supporting violence against women, and still think I’m justified and standing on the moral high ground.”
Honestly, if you don’t want to be taken for a radfem and don’t want to unwittingly help further spread their cancerous tentacles, ban the “[thing]-critical” construction from your vocabulary entirely. Purge it. Put words in a different order, use other phrases and words to convey “I choose to think critically about [thing] and am aware of the ways it may be problematic even though I engage with it for my own reasons”, but just keep “[thing]-critical” off your blog and out of your mouth. I’m sorry, I’m sure that’s inconvenient, but sadly radfems have ruined it to such an extent that I don’t think it can be reclaimed, at least not in this space - if you use it, that acts as a signal both to radfems and to those of us who’ve had to deal with them that you are either a radfem already, or a ripe candidate for recruitment. So if that’s not what you want to convey yourself as, don’t use that phrase, ever, at all, about anything, but ESPECIALLY not kink-critical or gender-critical.
Linking in the interview with an ex-radfem here, because it’s an incredibly relevant read.
And to add on the old Fandom Discourse like a complete fucking fool: I would even say “SU-critical” is likely to have some kernals of radfem ideology in it, too. There are plenty of reasons to have beef with Steven Universe, and I personally do not give a shit about that- being critical of the show is not the issue.
But I was around for that first wave of “SUcrit” stuff. The people calling themselves “SU critical” were the same people who later ended up being aphobes and exclusionists, the same people who were “kink-critical”, etc., and that’s not a coincidence.
Ace exclusionism was explicitly started by TERFs and radfems, because that type of “who are the real [marginalized group]” discourse is exactly what they need normalized in order to persuade more people down the rabbithole, just as the same goes for “kink-critical”. (See that interview for more context, and @exradfem, who’s since spoken on the topic in more depth.)
The original reason people started calling themselves “SU-critical” was because someone dug up fanart depicting unseemly kinks that Rebecca Sugar, the showrunner, had put out years and years prior to ever working on the show. This is not a defense of that fanart; but the subsequent rise of “this show is secretly evil” takes was deeply, deeply rooted in “kink-critical” ideas: i.e. someone who engages in Kink is inherently dangerous, and all of their actions, ideas, and creations are similarly evil. (And this is just conjecture, but I wouldn’t be super shocked to find out TERFs were behind the push to “cancel” the first animated kid’s show to depict transgender/nonbinary characters.)
“SUcrit” discourse had people fully and genuinely theorizing that Rebecca Sugar, a nonbinary Jewish person, was secretly a fascist Nazi sympathizer. They didn’t directly tie every claim back to that original “icky kink” issue, but something tells me those theories wouldn’t have existed if not for the initial push founded on “kink-critical” ideas.
Not to mention “SU-critical” never really meant “I am thinking critically about the ways in which systems of power have interacted with this show and it’s messaging”, it meant “I am critical of you, personally, for liking Steven Universe even though I have deemed it Morally Reprehensible, and I am going to bully and harass you into either agreeing with me, or becoming too afraid to talk about the show at all anymore.” (At least, at the height of the discourse.)